Excitement and Skepticism : Fusion Claim Sparks Rush to Duplicate Experiment

Claims by two scientists that they have produced fusion at room temperature set off a chain reaction throughout the country Friday, as scientists in dozens of laboratories began preparing to duplicate the experiment.

“A lot of people around the country will be trying to do it,” said nuclear astrophysicist Charles A. Barnes of Caltech.

The flurry of activity followed a dramatic--and highly controversial--announcement Thursday at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. B. Stanley Pons, chairman of the university’s department of chemistry, and Martin Fleischmann, professor of electrochemistry at the University of Southampton, England, claimed to have produced fusion energy from a simple, table-top device.

They also said they had produced more energy than it took to run their apparatus, which would amount to a breakthrough that no one else in the world has been able to do, despite the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars over the last three decades.

The announcement was met with what a spokesman for MIT described as “extreme skepticism,” because the experiment goes against the understanding of the physics of fusion and it has not been verified by other scientists. However, Pons and Fleischmann picked up some early support Friday.

Edward Teller, director emeritus of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and a legendary pioneer in fusion research, said the experiment “sounds extremely promising.”

“Initially, my opinion was that it could never happen,” Teller said. “I’m extremely happy now, because I see a very good chance that I was completely wrong.”

Scientists at the Livermore facility met with Teller Friday to map their strategy for trying to repeat the experiment.

Some other scientists, however, treated the Utah claims with incredulity, partly because the scientists announced their findings through a press conference, instead of publishing their work in a professional journal where it would be subjected to peer review.

“That makes you suspicious,” said Robert G. Sachs, professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Chicago and a former director of the Argonne National Laboratory.

Similar Claims

Sachs recalled similar claims nearly two decades ago from three independent research teams in the United States, the Soviet Union and China. U.S. researchers thought they had achieved fusion at room temperature with a similar technique, but Sachs said it turned out that the apparatus had somehow picked up high voltage from some other nearby experiment, causing some fusion to occur in a very inefficient system.

A couple of years later, he was touring China and was shown a “table-top apparatus,” he said.

“They said they had produced fusion,” he said.

Sachs said he told the Chinese scientists about the earlier U.S. experience, and two weeks later they abandoned their experiment after they realized they were not getting the results they had thought.

Pons and Fleischmann have done their experiment repeatedly over the last five years, sometimes for stretches of 100 hours, and associates say they are not likely to have made that kind of mistake.

“Stan Pons and Martin Fleischmann are both brilliant,” said Charles Martin, an electrochemist at Texas A&M.; “I know them well.”

He described them as highly professional, dedicated scientists who would not have publicized their results had they not been totally satisfied that they are right.

“A lot of people say this doesn’t make a lot of sense, but a lot of science doesn’t make sense initially,” he added.

Asked if he expected to duplicate the experiment, he responded:

“We’re trying it right now.”

Newspaper Accounts

He said it will be several days, at least, before he has any results. Martin and other scientists are expecting to have some difficulty repeating the experiment because--as several scientists said Friday--they have to base their experiments on newspaper accounts, because that has been their only source of information.

Pons and Fleischmann are expected to publish a paper on their work in about a month in the British journal Nature.

Caltech’s Barnes said the results claimed by the Utah team should be fairly easy to check.

“A few thousand dollars will get you a few quarts of heavy water (water enriched in a form of hydrogen called deuterium) and a few hundred dollars will get you the palladium and platinum.”

Pons and Fleischmann wrapped a coil of platinum around a small cylinder of palladium and inserted it into a glass jar filled with heavy water. They said that when they applied a small current to the apparatus, the deuterium in the heavy water concentrated in the palladium tightly enough to produce fusion.

Most fusion research projects are far more elaborate, using reactors that heat the fuel to hundreds of millions of degrees or powerful lasers that cause fuel pellets to implode.

Barnes said the best way to verify the Utah experiment would be to set up a simple apparatus similar to Utah’s and look for neutrons as evidence of the fusion reaction. When deuterium nuclei fuse, neutrons should be released.

‘Fusion Going On’

“If you detect neutrons, that would tell you that you have fusion going on,” he said.

He said scientists at Caltech were “certainly talking” about conducting their own experiments.

Apparently, so were a lot of other people.

Norman Brown, director of technology transfer at the University of Utah, said he had been getting so many calls that he finally went home exhausted and took the phone off the hook. One was from Teller’s office, he said, and two were from Fortune 500 companies interested in the technology.

The University of Utah campus was virtually abandoned Friday, with most of the students and faculty celebrating spring break, but secretaries in the chemistry department said they had been getting calls from all over the world. Many of the callers were scientists interested in more details on the experiment so that they could try to duplicate it.

The skepticism that has swept the nation as fast as the news of the announcement has also surfaced on the Utah campus.

Graduate students took a story about the discovery and pasted it onto the front page of the National Enquirer, along with a story headlined “Baby Born With A Wooden Leg.” Copies were pasted all over the chemistry building.

Initially Skeptical

Ronald J. Pugmire, the university’s associate vice president for research, said he was skeptical himself initially.

“I didn’t believe it, because it defies the physics I knew about,” he said.

Conventional wisdom holds that fuel would have to be heated to temperatures far greater than the core of the sun for fusion to occur. That is because deuterium nuclei have a positive charge and therefore would repel each other. Heat, however, would energize the particles, causing them to travel so fast that they could bang into each other and fuse before they could push each other apart. Some experiments have been conducted in “cold fusion,” but that field was not expected to lead to the creation of fusion power plants.

Pugmire began to overcome his skepticism after he did a lot of reading and asked a lot of questions, he added. Despite his earlier doubts, “the only conclusion one could come to was that fusion was occurring.”

Even many of Pons’ colleagues at the university did not know of the experiments until Thursday’s press conference.

“They’ve been keeping it a pretty good secret,” said chemist Peter Armentrout. “I’ve only heard rumors. But the implications are so significantly extensive that the secrecy may have been warranted.”

Some Hazards

Meanwhile, other scientists warned that attempts to reproduce the experiment are not without some hazards.

John Soures, a fusion researcher at the University of Rochester, said that if the Utah experiment actually produced four watts of power, as claimed by the two scientists, it would have also emitted a dangerous level of radioactive neutron particles.

“It would require some shielding to prevent people in the vicinity from being irradiated,” he said. “You wouldn’t put it out in the open.”

But the process cannot be turned into an explosive device, according to Fleischmann, even though fusion is the process used in the hydrogen bomb.

“I know of no way you could use this to make a bomb,” he said.

Meanwhile, many scientists will be trying their own experiments over the next few months, especially after basic details are published in the professional journal in May.

A U.S. Department of Energy contractor in Idaho, EG&G; Idaho Inc., announced plans Friday to conduct its own tests in May or June.

Dough Holland, manager of EG&G;’s fusion safety program, noted that fusion research has a history of “wild, flaky ideas.”

But, “we can’t dismiss it,” he said.

Lee Dye reported from Los Angeles and Thomas H. Maugh II from Salt Lake City