80% Energy Gain in Fusion Test Reported : Texas Research Only Deepens Mystery

Scientists at Texas A&M; University said Monday they are getting up to 80% more energy out of a nuclear fusion experiment than they are putting in, exciting fusion researchers but deepening a scientific mystery that has bedeviled experts around the world for more than two weeks.

The Texas researchers stopped short of claiming they have achieved energy through fusion and they said they do not understand why they are producing more energy than they they are consuming. But scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology announced just hours later that they were getting strong evidence of fusion from similar experiments.

The back-to-back announcements were the best news yet for two scientists who claimed last month to have achieved fusion at room temperature with a simple table-top apparatus.

Expresses Great ‘Relief’

B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah expressed great “relief” when the Texas scientists told him of their results, the Texas team said during a press conference here. Pons and Milton Fleischmann of the University of Southhampton, England, have had little encouragement from the scientific community since announcing that their simple device could help end the world’s energy woes because it promises a virtually inexhaustible source of fuel, which would come from ordinary seawater.

Most experts greeted the Salt Lake City announcement on March 23 with profound skepticism, an attitude that persists today. But dozens of laboratories around the world set out immediately to try to duplicate the experiment. No one, however, has so far has been able to both produce excess energy and detect the signature of a fusion reaction, although there have been scattered claims of success with the latter.

Charles R. Martin, an electrochemist with Texas A&M;, told reporters Monday that “we have confirmed” that more energy is produced by a simple “electrochemical cell than is put into the cell.

“This is in agreement with the findings of Pons and Fleischmann,” he added. “We have run the experiment using four different amounts of electric current and have found that excess energy varies between 60% and 80%.”

Martin said the experiment began running at 1 a.m. Saturday and it has been producing energy ever since.

Asked if he believes the energy is produced by fusion, he said:

“I would have more confidence if we could detect other symptoms of fusion.” Additional efforts to determine whether fusion is causing the energy are continuing at the university, Martin said.

‘Still Unclear’

“If it is nuclear, it is still unclear to us,” added his colleague, Kenneth Marsh, a thermodynamicist whose expertise is in studying and measuring the flow of heat, which is the form of energy detected by Pons and Fleischmann. The other member of the Texas team is Bruce Gammon, also a thermodynamicist.

While the Texas researchers have not pinpointed the cause of the excess heat, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology claimed Monday to have detected neutrons and tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, from a similar experiment on the Atlanta campus.

“One of the signatures of fusion is production of neutrons, so we felt that if we could detect neutrons coming from this apparatus, that would confirm fusion,” said James Mahaffey, who led the five-member Georgia Tech team. “Our data convinced me that we are making neutrons in that vessel. There is no way to get neutrons unless something nuclear is going on.”

The Georgia team, however, did not attempt to measure heat.

Particularly puzzling in the Texas A&M; work is the fact that researchers there found a net increase in energy almost immediately, despite the fact that Pons has said it takes many days for the apparatus to begin producing heat.

“We were stunned” when their experiment began producing excess heat almost immediately, Marsh said. Martin said later the electrode they are using is very small, and he said it probably takes less time for a smaller unit to begin producing energy than a larger one.

After they first measured the excess heat, the three men spent the next 30 hours in the laboratory trying to analyze the surprising result.

By late Sunday afternoon, even though they still were at a loss for an explanation, they decided to call a press conference and reveal their finding. Looking fatigued but happy, the three scientists said they are confident their results will hold up under scrutiny because they used a sophisticated system that is less prone to error than that used by the Utah scientists.

The technique, “which eliminates many common errors,” directly and continuously measures any temperature changes, revealing precisely how much energy is going into the apparatus and how much is being produced, Martin said.

The energy output, he said, “is rock steady.”

The apparatus used by the Texas team is almost identical to the one used in Utah. It consists of an electrode with a palladium cylinder one millimeter in diameter and five centimeters long, surrounded by a fine platinum gauze. The electrode is immersed in “heavy water,” which contains a heavy hydrogen ion called deuterium.

Pons and Fleischmann say that when a small electrical charge is applied to the electrode, deuterium crowds into the palladium cylinder so tightly that it is possible for the nuclei to overcome their repulsive electrical charge and fuse, releasing heat.

If that is indeed what is going on, then neutrons and other products should be released in detectable quantities. There have been scattered reports of some success, most notably from a team at Brigham Young University, but in all those cases there are also marked differences with the Pons-Fleischmann experiment. The Brigham Young and Georgia Tech scientists, for example, did not detect any excess heat.

Replication Remains Elusive

“The feedback we are getting is that nobody has succeeded” in fully replicating the Utah experiment, said plasma physicist Keith Thomassen of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. None of the major national laboratories, he added, has reported finding neutrons.

That may be partly because details of the experiment are still not well understood, Thomassen said.

Pons said additional details will be published soon in a major science journal.

“Most labs are like us,” Thomassen said. “They are still feeling not totally informed. We’re getting bits and pieces of info, but not the kind I would have expected after two weeks.

“The questions are not all answered.”

He noted that Pons and Fleischmann worked on their research for more than five years, so presumably they must have made many refinements over the years, and some subtle variations could make a lot of difference.

For example, scientists at Livermore who were working on the experiment thought they had something recently when their neutron counter began registering a significant increase in neutrons, which should be produced by fusion. But it was quite warm in the area because of nearby electronic equipment, so “somebody brought in a fan,” Thomassen said.

Neutron Count Drops

Shortly after the fan was turned on, the neutron count dropped back to normal. The warmth in the room had caused the neutron detectors to drift out of calibration, indicating that far more neutrons were being emitted than was the case.

“It’s easy to be fooled,” Thomassen said.

He added that although the heat detected by the Texas team is “intriguing . . . it leaves us grasping for straws.”

The Texas experts were also grasping a little Monday.

“This is a very unusual result and we have not totally dismissed the possibility of some unusual chemical process which we have not accounted for,” Martin said in the press conference. “We are currently exploring this possibility further.”

Pons has insisted that the heat generated by his experiment could only come from fusion because there is no chemical process that could have generated that much excess energy. At one point, he said earlier, the heat was great enough to vaporize the electrode, so it had to be hotter than 2829 degrees Fahrenheit.

Martin, however, was not willing to make that leap.

“We don’t feel qualified to discuss fusion,” he said.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the entire episode has been the inability of major laboratories to duplicate the experiment in every way. Livermore’s Thomassen noted that it should be easier to repeat the experiment than prove it is not true, since it is difficult to prove a negative.

Unless someone succeeds soon, he said, the process could take months.

“The longer it takes, the more suspicious people are going to get,” he added.

Thomas H. Maugh II reported from College Station and Lee Dye from Los Angeles.