Physicist Works on 2 Ways to Obtain Fusion in a Flask

Steven Jones and his colleagues have been investigating two different techniques to carry out nuclear fusion in a flask. The first is similar to the approach developed at the University of Utah. Jones uses two electrodes, one platinum and one composed of titanium and palladium, immersed in heavy water.

The University of Utah researchers add only a little bit of lithium deuteroxide to the heavy water so that it conducts electricity. But Jones adds a large concatenation of salts, which he calls “Mother Earth soup.” He developed the recipe for the soup based on his conviction that cold fusion is occurring in the Earth’s interior, where any liquid water would contain a large amount of salts.

When Jones applies an electric current to the electrodes, he begins to see small quantities of neutrons emitted after about an hour. Often, the neutrons come in “bursts” of 100 to 200 within a few microseconds.

The second approach was originally developed by scientists at the Frascati Energy Research Center in Italy, and has now been repeated by Jones, other Italian researchers and Howard Menlove of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In l’efusion fredda, shavings of titanium or a mixture of titanium and palladium are placed in a glass vessel, which is then filled with deuterium gas under high pressure.

The vessel is cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen and allowed to warm to room temperature. During the warming process, the vessel emits bursts of neutrons. The process can be repeated over and over.

These bursts of neutrons are the most convincing evidence that cold fusion actually occurs, according to Nobel laureate Robert Schrieffer of UC Santa Barbara. “Something quite special is apparently going on,” he said.

No significant amount of energy is produced by either approach, and neither is seen as a potential commercial source of energy.