MIT Seeks Patent on Disputed Process : Soviets Claim Success in Duplicating Fusion Test
The effort to produce nuclear fusion in a test tube went global Wednesday when Soviet physicists announced that they had succeeded in duplicating a controversial Utah experiment while the two scientists who started it all defended their work on two continents.
At the same time, a top scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that he had developed a theory explaining how the “cold fusion” process works. Although other MIT scientists said a few days ago that they had given up after failing to duplicate the experiment, the institute announced that it had “filed patent applications in connection with the theoretical analysis” developed by Peter Hagelstein, 34, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science.
Hagelstein, who was not available for comment, was considered one of the brightest scientists working on the Strategic Defense Initiative when he left Lawrence Livermore Laboratory for MIT a year ago. His explanation for how cold fusion might work inspired his institute to apply for a patent for a process that other MIT scientists had concluded was invalid.
Against that backdrop, B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton took center stage Wednesday to defend their work--Pons in Dallas and Fleischmann in Erice, Italy.
In Dallas, about 7,000 chemists attending a meeting of the American Chemical Society nearly filled the Dallas Convention Center’s arena for an address by Pons, who stunned the scientific world three weeks ago when he and Fleischmann announced that they had achieved nuclear fusion in a test tube at room temperature.
But Wednesday’s presentation generated little heat, and less light, because Pons offered virtually no new details about experiments that are still regarded with great skepticism by physicists.
The Dallas meeting was relatively low-key, but at a meeting in Sicily, Fleischmann had to fend off questions from a flood of scientists who have been unable to repeat his experiment.
‘Pie in the Sky’
“Making energy out of water is really pie in the sky at this point,” challenged Matthijs Broer, a nuclear physicist from AT&T;’s Bell Laboratory in New Jersey.
“We just haven’t seen what you’ve seen,” Broer told Fleischmann. “We don’t see the neutrons, or gamma rays. What’s going on here?”
Broer’s comments reflect the frustration of scores of scientists who have tried to repeat the experiment but have not detected neutrons or gamma rays, whose presence would indicate that nuclear fusion is taking place.
At least one scientist attending a meeting at the “Ettore Majorana” Center for Scientific Culture in western Sicily suggested that may be for the better.
Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist from Caltech--a man not noted for making brash statements--told Fleischmann that the Utah experiments may have a dark side, Reuters reported.
“If you can do nuclear fusion in your kitchen then . . . you can undoubtedly make a weapon out of it and then we’re in big trouble,” Koonin said. Fleischmann has denied that the process could be used to make weapons.
Pons and Fleischmann have warned repeatedly that researchers should use extreme caution. At one point in their work, which stretched over five years, their experiment got so hot that a palladium electrode “vaporized,” the scientists said at their Salt Lake City press conference March 23.
The Sicily meeting gave Fleischmann an opportunity to mend a few bridges with another Utah scientist who has also claimed to have achieved fusion in a test tube, but who has disputed the Pons and Fleischmann claim of producing excess energy. Steven Jones, a physicist at Brigham Young University, had complained earlier that the other scientists broke an agreement to publish their work simultaneously with his.
“We want now to work together if this proves practicable,” Fleischmann said.
Some of the hottest news of the day came from Moscow, where scientists said they had repeated the Utah experiment successfully about 20 times.
“When I found out in late March that such experiments had already been conducted at Utah University, I decided to repeat them here,” physicist Runar Kuzmin of Moscow University told the Soviet news agency Tass.
Tass said the researchers observed the gradual heating of the deuterium-enriched water--in which the experiment was placed--to the boiling point. The Soviets also claim to have seen neutrons.
“The experiments were surprisingly simple,” Kuzmin said. That claim may come as a shock to dozens of major laboratories that have been unable to repeat the experiments despite considerable efforts.
Moscow University has now joined Texas A&M; and the Georgia Institute of Technology, both of which claimed Monday to have verified two critical parts of the Utah experiment. The Texas team said it produced heat with an apparatus like the one used in Utah, and Georgia Tech said it detected a low level of neutrons from a similar experiment.
For three hours Wednesday, Pons answered questions about his experiments--first from other chemists who were eager for more details, and then from nearly 150 members of the press corps, most of whom had flown to Dallas for the symposium. Both sessions were more dispassionate than had been expected, and scientists and journalists left with many of their most crucial questions avoided or unanswered--and their minds unchanged.
Chemist Allen J. Bard of the University of Texas at Austin, who also spoke at the session, said that Pons’ work was “clearly a very interesting experiment . . . but the verdict is still out.”
Another speaker was more positive, however. Chemist Ernest Yeager of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland noted that “it is all beginning to add up to a very interesting case.”
Fusion is a nuclear process in which two atoms--typically either deuterium or tritium, both heavy forms of hydrogen--are fused together, releasing energy in the process.
Pons’ and Fleischmann’s results have been highly controversial because their approach was completely unexpected. Whereas most fusion researchers have used extremely high temperatures and powerful magnetic fields in multimillion-dollar devices to fuse the atoms, Pons and Fleischmann used simple palladium and platinum electrodes placed in a small jar of deuterium oxide, so-called heavy water, and connected to a battery.
They reported that this simple device, which could be built in a freshman chemistry lab, yielded much more energy than they put into it and that they detected neutrons and tritium, the radioactive products of a fusion reaction. Physicists objected to their conclusions, however, noting that the amount of fusion necessary to produce the heat they observed would have yielded at least a billion times more tritium and neutrons than they detected.
The recent claims of confirmation from Texas, Georgia and Moscow are making other researchers more confident that Pons and Fleischmann have observed a real effect, “but we can’t think of what the mechanism can be,” Yeager said.
Asked about the difficulties other researchers have had in duplicating his results, Pons noted that “I have said all along that it would take a couple of weeks after people got the details of our experiments. It’s just about two weeks now.”
Several questioners pressed Pons on the need to conduct a “control” reaction in which regular water is used for the process instead of heavy water.
“If that (control) reaction produces energy, we’ll know there is a chemical process going on and not fusion,” said physicist Harold P. Furth, director of the Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory. If no energy is produced in the regular water, he said, then he would be more convinced that fusion is occurring because only the heavy water contains deuterium.
“That is the only thing that will galvanize the great nuclear physicists of the nation to begin working” on the theoretical questions posed by the discovery, Furth said.
Perhaps the best expression of the general view of the audience was voiced by one questioner who asked Pons: “Are you Prometheus, Pandora or Piltdown man?” (Prometheus gave humanity fire, Pandora gave humanity evils, and Piltdown man was an anthropological hoax.)
Pons’ reply: “No comment.”
Thomas H. Maugh II reported from Dallas and Lee Dye from Los Angeles
