Science / Medicine : Fusion Claims Debunked?

University of Utah physicists announced last week that they could find no evidence of a nuclear reaction in the room-temperature fusion experiment conducted by Stanley Pons of Utah and Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton in England. Pons and Fleischmann reported in March that they could produce excess energy from fusion in an electrochemical cell involving platinum and palladium electrodes immersed in so-called heavy water.

Michael Salamon and two other Utah physicists spent six weeks in Pons’ “cold fusion” lab measuring gamma rays with extremely sensitive instruments, and Salamon said they “ruled out the normal fusion channels.” Added researcher Haven Bergeson: “The bottom line is we didn’t see anything--anything that can come close to explaining the heat that has been reported. If there are nuclear reactions making that heat, they are a very different kind of thing than anything that’s been seen before.”

Salamon said the Utah physicists did nothing to confirm the claimed excess heat production in the fusion cells, concentrating instead on gamma rays, which would be produced under known nuclear processes. The researchers plan to submit their findings to the journal Nature.