Japan Keeps Working on Cold Fusion : Technology: A senior researcher at NTT now claims to have evidence of the controversial phenomenon.

The scientific establishment has been cool to cold fusion since many scientists have been unable to duplicate the widely reported results three years ago from experiments at the University of Utah. However, Japanese scientists--often with government backing--have quietly continued their research.

Last week, they invited scientists from around the world to a conference in Nagoya to discuss their latest research results. One of the most dramatic claims came from one of Japan’s most respected research institutions--Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp.

“We now have evidence of the reality of cold fusion,” Eiichi Yamaguchi, a senior NTT researcher, said at a press conference.

In cold fusion, atoms are fused at much lower temperatures than in normal fusion reactions but release the same enormous amount of energy. The process is seen as a way of creating virtually unlimited supplies of cheap, clean energy.

Yamaguchi said that when he placed a palladium rod soaked in deuterium gas in a vacuum chamber, passed a current through it and then heated it to 100 degrees centigrade, the combination began to heat up even more and highly sensitive instruments in the chamber detected the presence of a newly created element--helium-4.

“Only nuclear fusion could have created the helium atoms,” says Yamaguchi, who said he reproduced the experiment five times over a five-week period beginning in early August, each time with the same results.

The 37-year-old Yamaguchi, who said he drew from his experience in semiconductor research to design the experiment, is excited about the potential for cold fusion. “I believe we can use this for real energy generation,” he says.

Tatsuya Kimura, executive director of NTT’s basic research laboratories, says it is premature to talk of energy generation. Yamaguchi’s instruments did not measure large amounts of new energy being created--as might be expected if a nuclear reaction had taken place. “Before we go into development work on energy extraction, we need to know more about the energy production,” Kimura says.

Yamaguchi suggests that the energy may have been released in other forms, such as X-rays. His research results were released at the conference Saturday. During the four-day conference, scientists from the United States, Italy, India and Russia also presented the results of new nuclear fusion experiments.

Among those attending were chemists B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, who in March, 1989, became the first scientists to maintain that they had achieved cold fusion. Pons, then chairman of the chemistry department at the University of Utah, resigned his teaching position to work full time on cold fusion. Fleischmann, Pons’ former professor, is a teacher of electrochemistry at the University of Southampton, England.

Akito Takahashi, a nuclear engineer at Osaka University who also spoke at the Nagoya conference, had previously reported that his experiments produced 70% more energy than they consumed, an indication that a nuclear reaction might be taking place.

Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry, encouraged by such experiments, has said that it plans to spend up to $25 million over four years to study the phenomenon. The Ministry of Education is supporting a group of 20 academic research teams around the country engaged in a coordinated series of experiments on cold fusion.

American scientists remain skeptical, arguing that there may be some unknown chemical reaction creating the new energy rather than actual fusion. “I’ll change my tune when I see some good data,” says John Huizenga, a nuclear physicist who led a U.S. government panel debunking the cold fusion claims of three years ago. “The fact that people are getting different results is very disquieting.”