General Atomics Joins the Race to Solve Cold-Fusion Mystery
At the edge of Torrey Pines Mesa, surrounded by 2-foot-thick concrete walls and stacks of distilled water bottles, sits a beaker poised to provide San Diego’s answer to the physics question of the day: Is the idea of cold fusion too good to be true?
“It looks like there’s something there now, but until a lot of hard evidence comes in you can’t say that there is something there,” said Alan Hyatt, a physicist at General Atomics in La Jolla and leader of the team that began searching for that evidence this week.
Trying to Duplicate Results
Already a leader in conventional research to release energy through fusion, General Atomics began its experiment Tuesday to try to duplicate the results announced March 23 at the University of Utah that stunned physicists worldwide. Researchers there said they believed they had fused atoms together by running an electrical current through cold water using electrodes made of palladium and platinum.
Could Produce Clean Energy
Nuclear fusion is the process that powers stars. In cold fusion, it is thought, atoms of a heavy form of hydrogen--deuterium--fuse together in the presence of an electrical current to release a large amount of energy. If proven, perfected and industrialized, cold fusion could give the world clean energy from water.
But the simplicity of the process lends an air of the absurd to endeavors to duplicate the experiment and figure out why it works.
At General Atomics, banks of high-tech monitors are stacked inside the control room for the experiment. Dozens of wires and cables link the machines to the inside of a neighboring 30-by-50-foot room where the experimental apparatus resides.
A sign warns against passing through the door in the 2-foot-thick concrete walls without a radiation dosimeter, just in case the elusive neutron radiation from cold fusion is found. (The experiment--theoretically, at least--could produce a trillion neutrons per second, or enough to kill a person in 40 minutes, Hyatt said.)
But, inside, the scientists pick their way past the flotsam of long-forgotten research projects.
In the far corner is a 3-foot stack of boxes containing distilled water. In the center of the stack is a little beaker filled with a small amount of liquid. Wires and tubes stick out of it, electrodes are stuck inside it, and a video camera is nestled beside it. None of it inspires much awe.
“Looks aren’t as important as the results,” Dan. R. Baker, manager of the company’s fusion division, said with a laugh.
And why the 100 or so gallons of bottled water?
Everything has a purpose, the scientists explain. The water is meant to slow down the highly energetic neutrons that cold fusion is expected to produce, so they can be captured by a low-energy neutron detector buried next to the beaker.
If they succeed, the General Atomics team will have helped explain away one of the uncertainties of earlier versions of the experiment. Elsewhere, the low or nonexistent levels of neutron emission have puzzled physicists.
Perhaps more importantly, Hyatt said, the General Atomics experiment will monitor the results in much more complete and minute detail than has been done elsewhere. Earlier this week, for instance, two research groups announced results indicating cold fusion but each had failed to monitor one key area.
Experiment Is Different
The company’s experiment differs from others also because of the extra safety precautions taken, from the neutron shielding to a gas-relief system for the beaker to prevent hydrogen gas from building up inside and exploding.
The Utah researchers have warned others about the danger of explosion, and the physics rumor mill is rife with reports of fusion-fueled explosions at laboratories around the country, the scientists said.
“We’re taking water and breaking it apart into a hydrogen-like gas and oxygen, and that’s an explosive mixture,” Hyatt said.
The evidence for cold fusion was particularly shocking to physicists who had placed their faith in the U.S. government’s $500-million-a-year effort to try to accomplish the same task with massive machines and at temperatures of a few hundred-million degrees Celsius. General Atomics receives about $30 million a year for such research, Baker said.
By comparison, the company has spent a relatively minuscule amount, which Baker estimates at $10,000, to assemble the raw materials for their own try at duplicating the Utah experiment.
The General Atomics scientists plan to test a new electrode in their experiment today. If it works, it could produce evidence for the cold fusion process virtually immediately, Hyatt said. But, because the main sources of information on how to do the experiments have been newspapers and “rumor physics,” results also could take longer, Hyatt said.
