TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042489/04248900.004

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.7 KB | 110 lines

                :9                                                            SCIENCE, Page 57

Fusion Fever Is on the Rise


A widely hailed experiment gains support, but doubts remain


    Where will it all end?  Fusion fever continued to rage
throughout the scientific world last week, causing many
ordinarily cautious scientists to jabber as though the
revolution they hope for had already occurred. Cold fusion, the
controversial "discovery" announced last month at the
University of Utah, was proclaimed by one researcher to be
"perhaps as significant as the invention of the wheel." Another
said it "may be the most important discovery since fire." Most
scientists are still dubious, especially about claims that the
experiment produced four times the energy it consumed, but the
prospect of virtually limitless energy has generated an
unprecedented level of excitement. Dozens of labs are working
feverishly to re-create the potentially historic experiment --
with confusingly mixed results.

    The uproar transformed last week's meeting of the American
Chemical Society in Dallas into the scientific equivalent of a
championship basketball game. The Dallas conference packed in
some 7,000 chemists hoping for what society executive director
John Crum called "the experience of a lifetime." The crowd was
there to hear chemistry's new superstar, B. Stanley Pons,
describe and defend the experiment that had catapulted him and
British colleague Martin Fleischmann to instant fame only a few
weeks earlier. Pons and Fleischmann claim to have produced
controlled nuclear fusion in a jar at room temperature. If
Pons, a professor at the University of Utah, and Fleischmann,
of the University of Southampton in England, are correct, and
if the process can be harnessed economically on a large scale,
the world's energy problems are over.

    Those are big ifs, as evidenced by the preliminary results
emerging from dozens of labs in the U.S. and abroad. The data
provided new support for the notion that cold fusion is real,
but none of the experiments were complete or totally convincing.
Researchers at Texas A&M University said they too had produced
excess energy in the form of heat, though less than in the
original experiment. Scientists at Georgia Tech, using a similar
device, said they had detected excess neutrons, subatomic
particles that are a normal by-product of fusion -- although
they later announced that their experiment may have been flawed.

    At the University of Washington, two graduate students
reported finding tritium, another fusion waste product, in
their version of the experiment. A scientist in Moscow asserted
that he too had found evidence of cold fusion. And M.I.T. filed
for patents based on a researcher's theoretical model of how
fusion in a jar might work.

    Nonetheless, while the evidence is suggestive, there is
still no clear understanding of what is going on. In their
experiment, Pons and Fleischmann immersed electrodes of
palladium and platinum in a bath of heavy water -- water whose
ordinary hydrogen has been replaced with an isotope called
deuterium. When they passed a current through the electrodes,
the contraption produced heat. They concluded that deuterium
ions had moved into the spaces between palladium atoms and
fused together to form helium, giving off heat in the process.

    That theory, however, is much doubted by many physicists who
have labored for decades to achieve controlled fusion. Says
Robert Conn, director of UCLA's Institute of Plasma and Fusion
Research: "Fusion events should produce radiation (such as
neutrons and gamma rays), and radiation can be measured. If
it's really fusion and there's no radiation, then it's
Nirvana." Considering the amount of heat that Pons and
Fleischmann reported, physicists say, the accompanying radiation
should have killed them. That means either that an unusual sort
of fusion took place -- a theory held by some -- or that the
two scientists have made a big mistake. One possibility is that
they have overlooked some kind of chemical reaction as the
source of the heat.

    Last week's results, while they seemed promising, had a
hurried, slapdash quality to them. The jury-rigged experiments
were based largely on what researchers had seen in the popular
press and copies of the sketchy initial paper by Pons and
Fleischmann, which began circulating by fax machine almost at
once. At Texas A&M, chemists reported they had measured between
60% and 80% more heat energy coming out of the experiment than
had gone in. But they had to try the experiment five times
before it worked. They did not even attempt to detect any
neutrons being given off. And Georgia Tech's effort, patched
together with deuterium from a local chemical outfit and
palladium ordered from a Chicago precious-metals dealer, had a
serious flaw. The neutron counter that indicated fusion was
apparently not working properly. Said team leader James
Mahaffey to the Atlanta Constitution: "I have really been in
agony. The announcement was impetuous. The problem is that this
is like a race." Even Pons' appearance in Dallas was marred,
when some members of the audience sharply questioned his
techniques and thoroughness.

    More exhaustive tests are under way. Among the most
promising is a collaboration between Brookhaven National
Laboratory and Yale University. Says Moshe Gai, a Yale
physicist who is a member of the team: "We've got first-class
chemists and physicists and an array of neutron detectors."
Brookhaven physicist Kelvin Lynn believes they should know very
soon whether last month's announcements represent an
unidentified chemical reaction or an unsuspected form of fusion.
The world can hardly wait for an answer.