TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/042489/04248900.004

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 99 lines

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.