Congress Asked for Fusion Study Funds
The two researchers who touched off fusion fever a month ago asked Congress on Wednesday to chip in $25 million toward a proposed $100-million cold fusion research center at the University of Utah.
Chemists B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Martin Fleischman of the University of Southampton in England also revealed that, in a move to dispel some of the doubts surrounding the credibility of their research, they are beginning a joint experiment with the Los Alamos National Laboratory in which one of their operating fusion cells will be transported to Los Alamos for further study by government scientists.
Certain of Fusion
The pair told the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology that they are certain they have discovered a way to sustain nuclear fusion at room temperature, as they first reported in March. And in a brief, testy session with the news media Wednesday, they said they were not surprised that many other researchers had not yet been able to duplicate their results.
“We’ve worked for five years on this,” Fleischman said. “If people think they go dabble (in their lab) and find our results in a few days, fine, let them do that, but that’s not our style.”
Fusion in a flask has been one of the hottest areas of scientific research since Pons and Fleischman announced that they were able to generate more energy than was consumed in a simple glass cell containing palladium and platinum electrodes immersed in deuterium oxide, or heavy water--an analog of regular water in which each hydrogen atom has an extra neutron in its nucleus.
They said that, when an electrical current is passed through the cell, it forces deuterium ions into the platinum electrode. At the high concentrations of deuterium present in the electrode, they contend, two deuterium ions can fuse into a helium atom, releasing energy in the same process that occurs in the sun.
Their claims were greeted with great skepticism because fusion can normally be achieved only at very high temperatures and pressures in apparatus costing millions of dollars, and such devices have never produced more energy than they consume.
But portions of their results have subsequently been confirmed by researchers in the United States and several foreign countries, and skepticism is waning, at least somewhat.
All 11 research laboratories operated by the U.S. Department of Energy have been studying the cold fusion progress, and Pons hinted Wednesday that some of them had been successful. “But we are not going to reveal their research results,” he said. Another hint of confirmation at the government labs came Monday, when the department told all 11 labs to intensify their research on cold fusion.
Los Alamos also announced this week that it would host an international conference on cold fusion in Santa Fe, N.M., on May 23-25 and had invited more than 2,000 researchers.
And in an already widely circulated paper scheduled for publication today in the British journal Nature, physicist Steven Jones of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, provides details of similar experiments in which he has obtained evidence for fusion but no excess heat production.
Pons and Fleischman had planned to publish their results in Nature simultaneously with Jones but withdrew their paper when referees asked for the results of other experiments, which are only now in progress. They said Wednesday that they are now writing a much more comprehensive and detailed paper that will be submitted to “a prestigious international journal.”
In their testimony in a room packed with press and spectators, Pons and Fleischman reiterated their belief that they have discovered a new fusion process.
The two researchers conceded that it is unprecedented for scientists to be seeking money from Congress based on research that has not yet been widely confirmed. But Fleischman argued that it is imperative that research be started now on commercial applications if the United States is to avoid falling behind its foreign competitors, as it has with high-temperature superconductivity and other technological developments.
“The time is ripe to start immediately on that route,” even while further work is being conducted to broaden the science base, he said.
Fleischman estimated that a scale-up experiment to demonstrate fusion power production would cost about 10 times as much as the $100,000 the two researchers have so far invested from their own funds. A prototype fusion reactor, he said, would cost “ten times as much again,” or about $10 million. Commercialization could occur in less than two decades, he said.
Chase Peterson, president of the University of Utah, noted that the university had already obtained $5 million from the state for a research center and $1.1 million in private and corporate contributions.
Several people testifying introduced the specter of a Japanese takeover of the fledgling fusion phenomenon.
Ira C. Magaziner, president of Telesis, USA Inc., a consultant firm working with the university, said that the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry is already establishing “a plan for a coordinated push into this new industry” and that more than 100 companies are cooperating.
Once the cell is working and chemists from Los Alamos have verified that it is producing excess energy, Pons said, it will be moved to Los Alamos for further studies.
