New Shot at Fusion Meets Some Success

A tabletop experiment created nuclear fusion -- long seen as a possible clean energy solution -- under lab conditions, scientists reported today.

But the amount of energy produced was too little to be seen as a breakthrough in solving the world’s energy needs.

For years, scientists have sought to harness controllable nuclear fusion, the same power that lights the sun and stars.

The latest experiment relied on a tiny crystal to generate a strong electric field. While falling short as a way to produce energy, the method could have potential uses in the oil drilling industry and in domestic security, said Seth Putterman, one of the physicists who did the experiment at UCLA.

The experiment’s results appear in today’s issue of the journal Nature.

Previous claims of tabletop fusion have been met with skepticism and even derision by physicists.

In 1989, Dr. B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Martin Fleischmann of Southampton University in England shocked the world when they announced that they had achieved so-called cold fusion at room temperature. Their work was discredited.

Experts said the UCLA experiment was credible because, unlike the 1989 work, it didn’t violate basic principles of physics.