'Cold Fusion' Research Dispels Some Doubts
By Jerry E. Bishop
Wall Street Journal

March 2, 1990

The mystery of "cold fusion" hasn't been solved, but a growing number of experiments suggest that the phenomenon can't be written off as a scientific error.

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have detected significant production of tritium, which can be a byproduct of nuclear reactions, in several of their latest cold fusion experiments.

Large amounts of tritium also have been detected in cold fusion experiments at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center near Bombay, India, and at Texas A&M University at College Station. Small amounts of excess tritium in cold fusion experimental "cells" have been reported by scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and at Case-Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Tritium is a triply heavy form of hydrogen that can be produced by the fusion of hydrogen atoms. It was previously thought that such fusion could take place only at extremely high temperatures.

The report of a successful cold fusion experiment last year sparked excitement because the discovery could signal a safe, inexpensive way to produce energy. But early excitement turned to doubt when the results couldn't be duplicated.

The Los Alamos and other cold fusion researchers stop short of claiming fusion is producing the tritium they are finding. For now, their work leaves the erratic and unpredictable production of heat and tritium in the experiments a scientific mystery. But doubts that earlier measurements of heat and tritium were artifacts, or products of scientific error, are fading.

In a forthcoming scientific article, Los Alamos scientists Edmund Storms and Carol Talcott report that they have found excess amounts of tritium in seven of the latest nine cold fusion devices that they have built. In one of their experimental cells, they found the amount of tritium in the apparatus increased 80-fold during several days of operation.

So far, 22 different cold fusion cells have produced excess tritium in various amounts, according to a count by physicist David Worledge of the exploratory research division of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, Calif. EPRI has become the only source of research grants for cold fusion experiments since the Department of Energy quit funding such experiments last fall. The utility-supported institute expects to hand out $1 million to $2 million in cold fusion research grants this year, Mr. Worledge says.

The reports of tritium, excess heat and low levels of neutrons being produced by various experiments are adding up to "an incredibly intriguing" situation, Mr. Worledge says. "It all could be wrong," the physicist cautions, but "the experiments being done in various places are now of very high quality, which wasn't true last spring and summer, and there are a handful that are quite credible."

Many of the latest experiments, he says, are so carefully conducted that most of the earlier criticisms leveled at cold fusion experiments aren't applicable. "Most of the holes have been plugged," he says. "It's beginning to get to where you have to contrive miracles to explain away the results rather than accept them."

Most of the cold fusion experiments are variations of the University of Utah experiments reported last March 23 by electrochemists B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann. Those experiments involved dunking pieces of palladium metal, encircled by a platinum wire, into a flask of "heavy water," in which the hydrogen atoms are the doubly heavy form known as deuterium. An electric current is applied to the apparatus, causing the water molecules to break up into deuterium (hydrogen) and oxygen atoms.

A world-wide scientific furor was triggered when Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann claimed their simple electrolysis-of-water devices began producing several times more energy, in the form of heat, than was being put into the devices electrically. Because they could find no known chemical reaction that could produce such excess heat, the two chemists asserted that the excess energy must be coming from the fusion of deuterium atoms inside the palladium rod. Because the experiments were conducted at room temperature, rather than at sun-like temperatures of millions of degrees where hydrogen fusion is known to take place, the claimed phenomenon was dubbed cold fusion.

Scientists have been waiting almost a year for the results of several different cold fusion experiments at Los Alamos, considered one of the premier U.S. nuclear research laboratories. The new report, one of the first positive findings to come out of Los Alamos, is to be published in the July issue of the Journal of Fusion Technology. It also illustrates the frustrating inability of all the fusion researchers to reproduce positive cold fusion results at will.

In the report, Mr. Storms and Ms. Talcott say they realize "that this work is still incomplete and leaves many questions unanswered. However, the results are supported by such a large and consistent data base that reporting of tritium production is warranted even before a full understanding of the process is available."

The two researchers report they first found large amounts of tritium last June in two of 16 cells in operation and small amounts in two other cells. They took daily measurements of tritium accumulating in the heavy water of the cells beginning about 10 days after the cells were turned on. In one of the cells, the first measurement found 80 times as much tritium in the used heavy water as was in the water when it was fresh. But, mysteriously, there was no increase in tritium content after the first measurement, suggesting that the tritium-making phenomenon had stopped.

The researchers then made modifications in the cells, such as substituting a glass beaker for a plastic one. In the next round of experiments last August and September, none of the 13 modified cells showed indications of tritium production.

A third set of experiments was conducted between September and mid-November with additional modifications of the cells. The deuterium and oxygen gases released by the breakup of the heavy water were piped out of each cell and allowed to recombine into water in a separate plastic bag, for instance. And many of the pieces of palladium were pre-treated with paraffin and hydrogen sulfide, as had been done in some of the first experiments.

Of nine modified cells, seven produced increasing amounts of tritium in the heavy water. The timing of the tritium measurements hinted that it was being produced in bursts of activity inside the cells.

But, the scientists say, "No clear pattern could be found in the cell designs that gives an explanation or a significant probability for reproducing the behavior."

Impressive amounts of tritium production also are being reported from India. EPRI's Mr. Worledge, who has visited the Bhabha Atomic Research Center, says the Indian scientists have worked for 25 years with Canadian-designed atomic reactors that require careful monitoring of tritium levels in the heavy water and in the air surrounding them.

"It's very clear that they are much the experts in handling tritium, and they gave me the most comprehensive answers I've had," about whether their cold fusion cells are making tritium, Mr. Worledge says. The Indians have reported the heavy water in their cells have shown increases of as much as 20,000 times the amount of tritium in fresh heavy water.

More experiments also are reporting excess amounts of heat coming from cold fusion cells. "We feel we have incontrovertible evidence that we've detected excess energy" in the form of heat, says Charles Scott at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where two different groups are running cold fusion experiments. Mr. Scott says he is getting 5% to 10% more energy from his experiments than is being put into the cells.

Both Robert A. Huggins at Stanford University and John O. Bockris at Texas A&M say they continue to measure excess heat from their cold fusion experiments. Mr. Huggins says he will report his latest results at a cold fusion conference at the end of March in Salt Lake City.

Mr. Bockris reiterates his earlier conviction that Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann have discovered an entirely new phenomenon. "There's no doubt about the existence of an effect," he says, adding it is unquestionably a nuclear reaction of some sort. The big problem is that "we still can't reproduce it at will," he adds.

"For instance, we went along from Nov. 2 to Feb. 15 with no heat and no tritium," Mr. Bockris says. Then one of the cells suddenly turned on and over several days produced about 10 megajoules of heat (about 10 British thermal units), enough to raise the temperature of a pound of water by nine or 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Mr. Bockris's heat-producing cells are separate from the tritium-producing cells of a Texas A&M colleague, Kevin Wolf.

Meanwhile, Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann are maintaining their silence about their latest experiments. It is known that they have submitted a voluminous paper -- more than 100 manuscript pages, according to one scientist -- to the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, which published their first report last spring. Both chemists are scheduled to speak at the Salt Lake City conference at the end of this month.

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