TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050889/05088900.008

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                ⌠S                                                            SCIENCE, Page 72

COVER STORY: Fusion Illusion?


Two obscure chemists stir up a fascinating controversy in the
lab, but new tests challenge their hopes of creating limitless
energy

By Michael D. Lemonick


    Little more than a month ago, they were just two chemists,
toiling in virtual anonymity. But B. Stanley Pons and Martin
Fleischmann came last week to Washington as heroes, visionaries
and scientific superstars. With a mob of reporters following
along, the thermodynamic duo marched onto Capitol Hill to tell
Congress how their simple tabletop experiment had generated
fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun. Displaying
slides filled with complex equations, wielding electronic
pointers and pulling a mockup of their apparatus from a plastic
shopping bag, the bespectacled researchers mesmerized the
members of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology
with an account of how their device produced more energy, in the
form of heat, than it consumed. The politicians may have been
baffled by the chemistry, but they had no trouble grasping the
implications. It seemed that Pons, a professor at the University
of Utah, and Fleischmann, of Britain's University of
Southampton, might have pulled off a trick that has eluded some
of the best minds in physics for nearly four decades. More
important, they might have found a way to solve the world's
energy problems for all time.

    What would it take, they were asked, to make that dream a
reality? Money from Congress, of course. University of Utah
President Chase Peterson, who was right there at the
scientists' side, suggested that $25 million would be a nice sum
to help his school set up a fusion research center. Some of the
Congressmen appeared eager to oblige. "Today," rhapsodized
Robert Roe, a New Jersey Democrat, "we may be poised on the
threshold of a new era. It is possible that we may be witnessing
the cold-fusion revolution."

    But Congress had better wait a while before it starts
pouring taxpayers' money into Utah's test tubes. Even as Pons
and Fleischmann stirred excitement on Capitol Hill, evidence
was mounting that their form of fusion is probably an illusion.
More and more scientists were openly scoffing at the chemists'
claim that they had caused deuterium ions, which are commonly
found in seawater, to fuse to form helium, liberating large
amounts of heat. Physicists have never been able to achieve such
a sustained reaction, even briefly, without subjecting deuterium
to the kind of extreme temperature and pressure found inside the
sun.

    While no one has proved conclusively that Pons and
Fleischmann are wrong, it seems likely that they jumped to a
hasty conclusion based on incomplete research. Scientists in
Japan and Switzerland announced that their own tests had
convinced them the original work was flawed. An attempt by the
Harwell Laboratory in Britain to confirm the discovery has also
produced nothing, even though Fleischmann himself checked the
experiments.

    None of the major national laboratories in the U.S. have
obtained positive results either. This week data from one of
the most comprehensive sets of experiments to date -- a
collaboration between Brookhaven National Laboratory and Yale
University -- will be presented at the spring meeting of the
American Physical Society in Baltimore. The Brookhaven-Yale
tests found no evidence of what Pons and Fleischmann saw.
Brookhaven physicist Kelvin Lynn speculates that the heat
produced may possibly be the result of some more conventional,
though unexpected, chemical reaction. "It's quite interesting,"
he says, "to wonder how nature may have conspired to make them
believe they had fusion."

    Most damning of all is the editorial that appears in the
current issue of the prestigious British journal Nature. The
Pons-Fleischmann claim, writes editor John Maddox, "is
literally unsupported by the evidence, could be an artifact ((a
spurious result unrelated to the phenomenon under
investigation)) and, given its improbability, is most likely to
be one." Maddox noted that the team announced its results before
performing even the most basic control experiments to verify the
findings. That was an "astonishing oversight," wrote Maddox, "a
glaring lapse from accepted practice."

    Those are strong words, but Pons and Fleischmann are
hanging tough behind their claim. Pons, in fact, says the
experiments in his Utah lab have begun to produce increasing
amounts of heat. And he has picked up a determined band of
supporters. Robert Huggins, a respected materials scientist at
Stanford, contends that he has also obtained excess heat in a
series of similar experiments. Says Huggins: "The magnitudes of
our observed effects are comparable to those reported earlier
by Fleischmann and Pons, and lend strong support to the validity
of their results."

    Whether or not they turn out to be right, Pons and
Fleischmann have pushed the entire scientific world into a
frenzy. After the March 23 press conference in which the two
chemists went public with their discovery, researchers around
the globe immediately came down with fusion fever. Its symptoms
were hyperactivity, insomnia and delusions of grandeur. Gleaning
what meager information they could from murky faxes of an
unpublished Pons-Fleischmann paper and from TV pictures of the
apparatus, chemists and physicists dropped whatever else they
were doing in attempts to verify or shoot down the concept of
cold fusion.

    Thus began one of the strangest months in the history of
science. Hardly a day passed without an announcement from
somewhere -- Texas, Georgia, Hungary, Brazil, India, the Soviet
Union -- that at least some parts of the Pons-Fleischmann
experiment had been replicated. Scientific protocol went out the
window as researchers called press conferences to trumpet the
latest results before verifying them.

    That turned out to be a dangerous course. The Georgia
Institute of Technology, for example, claimed that its team had
detected neutrons, a hallmark of fusion reactions, coming from
a setup similar to the one Pons and Fleischmann had used. But
then the scientists had to retract the assertion, admitting
with embarrassment that they had been misled by a faulty
neutron detector. And chemists at Texas A&M, who initially
reported significant amounts of excess heat generated by their
device, were disappointed when they got less heat in later
experiments.

    This new phenomenon of science by press conference
disturbed many researchers. Said Moshe Gai, a Yale physicist and
a member of the Yale-Brookhaven collaboration: "I am
dissatisfied and somewhat disappointed with some of my fellow
scientists who have done things too much in a hurry." Charles
C. Baker, director of fusion research at Argonne National
Laboratory, was blunter: "Calling press conferences and making
claims of results without having a well-prepared technical
report is not the way for a good, professional scientist to
function."

    Equally offensive to many scientists is the fact that Pons
and Fleischmann have steadfastly refused to disclose important
details of their work that would enable others to duplicate it.
Though they eventually published an account of their experiments
in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry and Interfacial
Electrochemistry, a highly technical Swiss periodical, the paper
was too sketchy to be truly enlightening. Pons has argued
repeatedly that his critics who are getting negative results do
not know how to run the experiment, but he does not show them
precisely what they are doing wrong. Declares Keith Thomassen,
a physicist who heads one of the fusion-research programs at
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: "The hard,
uncompromising way in which we do our business is that when you
make a claim, you present the facts on which you base that
claim."

    Why is Pons being so cagey? Perhaps because the discovery
he and Fleischmann claim to have made could be worth a fortune.
Keeping some of the secrets to themselves could serve to
protect their financial interests and those of the University
of Utah, which has already filed five patent applications, with
more to come. Pons insists, though, that he has reached an
agreement with Los Alamos National Laboratory to help its
scientists replicate his cold-fusion experiments.

    The awesome potential of the alleged discovery explains why
so many people are badgering Pons and Fleischmann for
information, and why they are giving it out so cautiously. A
practical technique for creating useful fusion energy at low
temperatures could change the world forever by providing a
source of virtually limitless power. Moreover, the process would
generate no pollutants -- not even carbon dioxide, which many
scientists fear is warming the globe in a greenhouse effect. A
fusion plant would give off much less radiation than do
conventional nuclear-power generators. And it would essentially
run on seawater. Any scientist who managed to harness fusion
would be guaranteed a Nobel Prize for Physics (and probably
Peace as well), untold riches from licensing the process and a
place in history alongside Einstein and slightly above Edison.
Any scientist who confirmed the claim would get part of the
resulting avalanche of research dollars, and anyone who shot it
down would gain acclaim within the scientific community.

    But the reasons for the fusion furor are more complicated
than just the prospects of riches and fame. Scientists and
university administrators are sometimes driven by the same sort
of base emotions -- like jealousy and paranoia -- that often
motivate less intellectually lofty folks, and the peculiar
circumstances of this discovery helped ignite a number of
long-smoldering resentments. For one thing, fusion and other
subatomic phenomena that are usually studied with giant nuclear
reactors and particle accelerators have long been the private
domain of physicists. Chemists, on the other hand, were more
likely to be studying how to make a better laundry detergent,
or so physicists seem to think. It is no surprise, then, that
the harshest critics of Pons and his dime-store equipment have
been physicists. Retorts Pons: "Chemists are supposed to
discover new chemicals. The physicists don't like it when they
discover new physicals." In fact, many chemists feel -- with
much justification -- that the physicists consider themselves
intellectually superior. Says Cheves Walling, a Utah chemist who
has developed one theory to explain how the cold-fusion
experiment might work: "Chemists resent the fact that
physicists can get money for multimillion-dollar experiments
that could have gone to chemists to do something more useful."

    Still, the cold-fusion combat is not just the physicists
vs. the chemists. There is a sense in Salt Lake City that most
of Pons' critics are what Utah chemist David Grant calls "the
mean bullies from the Eastern establishment." Such snooty folks
should remember, he says, that "science is not the domain of one
set of colleges or one set of people anymore."

    There is also an intense rivalry between the University of
Utah -- the U, for short -- and Brigham Young University,
located just 50 miles away. Although the U is the
state-supported university, Utah's majority Mormon population
identifies far more strongly with church-run Brigham Young. It
was at least partly because a Brigham Young physicist named
Steven Jones was nearing an announcement on cold fusion too that
Pons and Fleischmann called their surprise press conference.
They had been urged to go public by University of Utah
administrators, who were apparently fearful that archrivals at
Brigham Young would steal the fusion spotlight. The U has had
chronic money troubles recently, and an influx of
fusion-research grants, not to mention international glory,
could go a long way toward remedying the situation.

    Any serious prospect of practical fusion will attract
federal research funding. For decades the Government has spent
billions of dollars in pursuit of this tantalizing but elusive
goal. The first man-made fusion reactions took the form of
H-bomb explosions in the 1950s. Scientists then set out to bring
that incredible power under control. Their strategy was to
confine deuterium, a heavy form of hydrogen, within a "bottle"
of magnetic force and heat it to tens of millions of degrees.
The nuclei of the atoms, forced close together despite their
mutually repellent positive electric charges, would fuse,
releasing energy. Elaborated and modified, that is the approach
still being taken at such state-of-the-art facilities as
Princeton's Plasma Physics Laboratory. But the lab has achieved
only brief bursts of fusion at enormous cost. A more recent
concept, represented by Livermore's Nova machine, is to take
tiny "marbles" filled with deuterium and concentrate 100
trillion watts of laser light on them for a billionth of a
second. The deuterium should theoretically fuse and produce
energy, but a far more powerful laser would be needed to spark
a useful reaction.

    Although superhot fusion has always been considered the
best way to generate power, physicists have known since the
1950s that the process can take place at room temperature as
well. If the electrons in deuterium are replaced with heavier
particles called muons, the deuterium nuclei can approach each
other more closely and occasionally fuse on their own. This
muon-catalyzed fusion has never produced significant amounts of
energy.

    Yet the thought that cold fusion was possible at all
continued to intrigue some scientists, including Pons and
Fleischmann. When Pons got his Ph.D. at Southampton in 1978,
Fleischmann was his department head. They became close friends
and collaborators after Pons graduated, and remained so when he
settled at Utah. One day in 1984 Pons and Fleischmann had a
sudden idea for a new way to achieve cold fusion. The brainstorm
came, Pons says, during a hike up Millcreek Canyon, near his
home in Salt Lake City. He and Fleischmann were puzzling over
the peculiar properties of certain metals, like palladium, that
are known to absorb huge quantities of hydrogen gas. In the
presence of an electric field, the chemists had noticed,
deuterium nuclei appeared to be unusually free to move around
within palladium's latticework of atoms. They speculated that
the nuclei might even come close enough together to make nuclear
fusion more likely.

    "We came down from the hike," recalls Pons, "and then we
stood around the table in my kitchen, had a couple of Jack
Daniel's and started drawing pictures." Their experiments
resembled nothing more than the simple electrochemical cells
often entered in high school science fairs: two metal electrodes
immersed in a bath of water laced with mineral salts and
connected to a power supply. The only differences were that one
of the electrodes was made of palladium and the water was heavy
water, or deuterium oxide (chemical formula D2O), rather than
ordinary H2O.

    The first experiments did not do much. But one night in
1985, an electrochemical cell being used by the two scientists
melted down. "That," says Pons, "told us we had much more energy
than could be attributed to a chemical reaction." After the
accident, Pons called Fleischmann, who had returned to England.
Fleischmann responded to the momentous news with an admonition:
"We'd better not talk on the phone." Pons says they ultimately
spent about $100,000 of their own money to pursue what they were
convinced was fusion.

    Neither Pons nor Fleischmann would have ranked high on
anyone's list of scientists likely to revolutionize physics,
although both are respected researchers in the field of
electrochemistry, the study of how chemical reactions behave in
the presence of an electric field. In retrospect, though, their
backgrounds were quirky enough to suggest that almost anything
was possible. Pons, in particular, had an unorthodox
professional history. A native North Carolinian, Pons, 46,
dropped out of graduate school at the University of Michigan in
1967, just a few months shy of getting a Ph.D. in chemistry.
"Jobs for Ph.D. chemists were paying $3,500 a year at the time,"
he explains. "My daddy offered me $20,000." He joined the family
textile business, then went on to manage a family-owned
restaurant in North Palm Beach, Fla. But after nearly a decade
away from science, Pons decided to go back and complete his
degree. To do so at Michigan, though, he would have had to
repeat most of the courses he had already taken. So he went to
Southampton, where his credits would still count.

    After finishing his doctorate, Pons was able to make up for
lost time, becoming chairman of the Utah chemistry department
in 1988. Along the way he earned a reputation for diligence and
creativity. Says Harry Mark, Pons' adviser at Michigan: "Stan
was innovative and controversial even back in grad school. What
he's doing now doesn't surprise me."

    Fleischmann too is known for resourcefulness. Now 62, he
arrived in England in 1939 with his family, Czech refugees from
Hitler's Europe, and soon distinguished himself in school and
college. Ian Fells, who worked with him at the University of
Newcastle, calls him a man of "great ideas," and Roger Parsons,
head of the chemistry department at Southampton, describes
Fleischmann as "excitable in the sense that he gets very
enthusiastic about ideas. He is a man full of ideas across a
wide field and not necessarily connected to his main research."

    By 1988, Pons and Fleischmann were focusing much of their
attention on the quest for cold fusion. But they were not
alone. At Brigham Young, a team headed by physicist Steven Jones
had been working on a similar experiment for at least two years.
Jones had also found evidence of fusion, but did not get the
excess heat production that Pons and Fleischmann were observing.
The two groups were evidently unaware of each other until last
September, when Jones was asked to review a Pons-Fleischmann
grant application. To his surprise, Jones says, he realized that
he and the Utah researchers were following parallel paths. He
made contact with Pons and suggested that the unwitting
competitors should collaborate.

    That eventually led to a showdown meeting on March 6 at
which, according to a Brigham Young document, the scientists and
top administrators from both universities were present. At issue
was the timing of public statements. Pons and Fleischmann said
they would prefer to wait before releasing results. Jones
countered that he had been invited to talk about his work before
the American Physical Society in May and that he intended to do
so. According to Brigham Young, the meeting ended with an
agreement to submit simultaneous papers to Nature on March 24.
When Pons and Fleischmann suddenly announced their
"breakthrough" on March 23, Jones felt he had been sandbagged.

    The race with Jones appears to have forced Pons and
Fleischmann to go public long before they were ready. Their
paper on cold fusion is considered less -- far less -- than
rigorous. "Every great discovery has had plenty of skeptics,"
notes Richard Muller, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley
Laboratory, "but I can't find any great discovery of the past
50 years that was published with a bad paper. If a freshman
physics or chemistry major had done it, they would have
flunked." Says Robert G. Sachs, former director of Argonne
National Laboratory: "It doesn't meet the kind of standards
you'd want to meet for nuclear physics. It doesn't even meet
the standards of testing in inorganic chemistry. It's a shame.
They obviously just got too excited about it to think straight."

    Nature asked for more information from Pons and Fleischmann
before publishing the paper, but according to the journal the
pair said they were too busy. Fleischmann, though, claims they
supplied 19 new pages. In any case, the paper was withdrawn.
Says Fleischmann: "Nature is not the appropriate place to
publish because they don't publish full papers." That peculiar
sentiment might come as a surprise to James Watson and Francis
Crick, whose Nobel-prizewinning discovery of the structure of
DNA was first published in the British journal.

    None of the criticisms leveled at Pons and Fleischmann mean
that they are necessarily wrong. But the burden of proof
remains on them. So far, they have failed to demonstrate
convincingly that they have indeed produced a new sort of
fusion. And if the two chemists cannot think of any way to
explain the excess heat in their experiment without resorting
to nuclear reactions, others can. Chemist Linus Pauling, a Nobel
laureate and himself something of an iconoclast, thinks that
when absorbing high concentrations of deuterium, the palladium
lattice may become unstable and deteriorate, releasing heat.

    Even if Pons and Fleischmann should turn out to be right,
the world's energy problems are not necessarily over. As the
proponents of more conventional fusion research have learned,
transforming a reaction from a laboratory curiosity to a
full-scale energy technology can be incredibly difficult.
Magnetic fusion has yet to achieve break-even, the stage at
which the amount of energy coming out is equal to that going in.
Says Harold Furth, director of Princeton's effort: "We are
essentially within a factor of two of break-even now. Seeing
that it used to be a factor of a million, we feel extremely
optimistic." But it has taken more than 30 years to get there,
and plenty of technical problems remain.

    In short, no matter which scheme proves best, the virtually
limitless power that could eventually result from fusion is a
dream that will not come true anytime soon. The solution to the
world's energy crisis is not likely to be declared in a press
conference. It must be slowly and carefully worked out, step by
painstaking step.


-- David Bjerklie/New York, J. Madeleine Nash/San Francisco and
Dick Thompson/Washington