ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

It is extremely unusual for scientists to announce their discoveries
at a televised press conference. In fact, it may never have been done before,
but that was the path taken by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons on 23
March, 1989. They claimed something so breathtaking that most scientists
who heard the announcement, simply suspended disbelief until more was known.

The chemists, from the University of Utah, said that they had achieved
nuclear fusion, not in a gigantic machine that aims to simulate conditions
in the Sun, nor at the end of eight laser guns needing a four-storey building
to hold them. It happened, they said, in a simple electrochemical cell,
the size of a jam jar, costing about $100 and with instruments costing maybe
$5000. They said that the experiment was so simple it could be done by any
secondary school student.

What most scientists who heard the amazing claim of Fleischmann and
Pons did not realise was that there was a valid scientific idea behind it.
The chemists had been extremely surprised to observe that passing a current
through heavy water (containing the hydrogen isotope deuterium) between
palladium electrodes produced a burst of heat great enough to melt the electrodes.
As a competent electrochemist, Fleischmann was sure that the energy produced
could not have come from a chemical reaction. But it was possible to formulate
a mechanism whereby the high electric field at the electrodes, combined
with the rapacious appetite of palladium for taking hydrogen and its isotopes,
could bring about conditions for nuclear fusion. At high enough current
densities, the deuterium nuclei would be forced into the palladium crystal
lattice and could be compressed to as much as 10 ²⁴ atmospheres.
This could provide enough energy to overcome the repulsive electrical force
between deuterium nuclei and allow fusion to take place.

Unfortunately, this idea can readily be appreciated only by those who
have a detailed knowledge of elctrode kinetics and surface chemistry.

Physicists were not familiar with these concepts, but they knew that
they had been presented with an absurdly simple apparatus and a claim that
fusion took place inside a metal in the cold. For them, there was no way
to see any connection with reality. They had adopted their traditional approach
to calculating the probability of nuclear fusion. This was to use equations
that apply to simple collisions between deuterium ions, and assuming that
the distance between deuterium nuclei in palladium was the same as that
of dissolved deuterium in palladium at normal temperatures and pressure.
Under these conditions, fusion seemed impossible.

Nevertheless, shortly after the announcement, Admiral James Watkins,
the chairman of the Department of Energy, issued a stern order to ll American
national laboratories. They were to find out whether the claims were true.
Within two weeks, hundreds of confused fusion physicists turned away from
their hundred-million-dollar magnetic confinement systems and the four-storey
high giant lasers, and set up the $100 jam-jar cells to do what Watkins
had demanded – to repeat the chemists’ experiments.

Only a few research groups, mainly chemists, could confirm the observations
of Fleischmann and Pons. Most physicists failed. Looking for heat with supersensitive
calorimeters, they obtained only doubtful deviations from zero. But more
important, the physicists could not detect what they regarded as the confirmatory
signature of nuclear fusion – the emission of neutrons.

A few weeks later, there was a massive reaction against the two infuriating
Utah scientists. Publicly, several physicists railed against what they called
the incredible stupidity and manifest ignorance of two ‘unknown chemists’
in not making accurate meausrements of nutrons and gamma rays. Privately,
the inventors were painted as fraudulent hucksters out to pull in risk capital
before their absurd claims were blown to pieces.

There was also confusion in news reports as to who Fleischmann and Pons
were. At this time (April to July of 1989) articles appeared in the New
York Times which told of two ‘unknown chemists’, one British, one American.
This amused those in the large field of electrochemistry where Fleischmann’s
name counted as one of the foremost in the world, with the much younger
Pons often described as ‘the smartest younger one around’. Many defamatory
statements made by Younger American physicists and chemists – particularly
from prestigious universities on the West Coast – are best ignored.

The reason why most researchers who first tried the cold fusion experiment
failed was that they were not aware of the essential conditions for recording
the anomalous results. We now have a much better understanding of what these
conditions are. First, you need to carry out the electrolysis at high current
densities (1 amp per square centimetre). Secondly, you have to be patient.
It may take at least four weeks, and sometimes as long as 12 weeks before
anything happens. Then, one may see burst of heat or neutrons, or detect
tritium – the radioactive isotope of hydrogen, which is one of the products
of fusion. It is not surprising that little of the early work revealed the
effects claimed by Fleichmann and Pons.

Physicists did not reject cold fusion only because they could not make
it work straightaway. There is another less attractive reason: the chemists
had undermined the fusion establishment, which had already spent billions
of dollars on research. In certain American government laboratories, there
was a campaign of suppression reminiscent of religious attitudes and conflicts
in the 16th century. One research group described how they had boarded a
plane to go to a national meeting and present some positive results when
they were told by their boss to cancel their presentation.

In another institution, a visiting government commission came to investigate
claims of tritium found in a cold fusion experiment. The commission’s man,
an expert on detecting tritium, said he did not believe any story of tritium
being produced during electrolysis. It would have to be due to contamination.
The researchers brought out their laboratory records, which showed results
taken daily over several weeks. Tritium levels remained at zero most of
the time but then there was a sudden increase, which we now know is typical.
There it was in the notebook – a graph showing tritium levels, increased
to 100 times the background value in a few hours. The visitor was so unnerved
that he pushed the notebook away and said he refused to look at such nonsense.
Visibly angry, he got up and left the room.

There has also been a campaign of attacks launched by the two main research
journals, Nature in Britain and Science in the US. Nature has published
leaders asking other scientists to ridicule work on cold fusion. Science
has done more. It accepted a news article by a journalist who claimed that
some of the reports of tritium being detected were, indeed, fraudulent and
that a graduate student made these claims to try to hasten the award of
his PhD degree. The article, which is full of innuendo, alleges that the
reported appearance of tritium correlated only too well with the visits
of sponsors, and so on.

There is no doubt that the cold fusion experiment of Fleischmann and
Pons has been difficult to reproduce. In one of our laboratories at Texas
A & M University, we carried out 58 experiments to measure tritium,
using several cells running for many weeks. Only 15 yielded tritium at a
level above what would normally be detected when electrolysing heavy water.
We carried out corresponding experiments to measure heat produced but in
fewer cells, about 25. We found excess heat in only five cells.

The positive side

Fleischmann and Pons claim much better reproducibility. But until they
divulge their method and results, kept secret so as not to invalidate patent
applications, and tell the rest of us how to do it, it will remain difficult
to counter the widespread rejection, which is often given to phenomena that
cannot be reproduced at will by independent colleagues.

Nevertheless, work has continued in many countries. There have been
reports from about 100 labs in 12 countries confirming at least one of the
phenomena associated with cold fusion – heat, tritium, gamma rays or helium.
Fritz Will, director at the National Cold fusion Institute in Utah, has
prepared a list of all the reports. But an increasing number have come from
refereed journals. The list includes five of America’s laboratories, but
omits most of the Japanese research groups who have been very active on
the cold fusion front.

When physicists suspect a nuclear reaction is taking place, they usually
look first for neutrons. In the case of the cold fusion experiments, the
numbers of neutrons measured are very low – about 1 to 10 neutrons per second
per square centimetre, above the natural background value. These neutrons
are produced occur in bursts lasting about an hour. At first, it seemed
reasonable to suspect that the bursts could be due to a fault on the neutron
counter or to sudden solar flare activity which can cause bursts of neutrons
in the atmosphere.

But these reservations have been laid decisively to rest. Antonio Bertin
at the University of Bologna in Italy, and more recently Kevin Wolf at Texas
A & M, have taken their apparatus and counters deep underground where
there is sufficient shielding (in a lead mine, for example) to reduce the
background signal considerably. The researchers still see the same burst
of neutrons. What is more, parallel experiments with ordinary water do not
produce any neutrons.

Franco Scaramuzzi’s group at Frascati in Italy, and other groups, have
carried out complementary experiments underground by cooling palladium or
titanium electrodes to about -100 °C. At this temperature, much more
deuterium dissolves in the metal than at room temperature. The temperature
is then raised so that the metal becomes supersaturated with the gas. In
some of this kind of experiment, extraordinary phenomena show up – there
are ‘mega-bursts’ of neutrons, about a million times larger than the usual
bursts. Recently, Eiichi Nishioka and Takahashi Yamaguchi at the Nippon
Telegraph Company have seen such bursts. No one obtains a steady emission
of neutrons. The bursts continue, but with decreased activity.

When it comes to measuring levels of tritium, most physicists blame
the contamination, such as from other laboratories through ventilation systems.
Some of the scientists who have found excess tritium in their experiments
do, however, work in laboratories where measuring tritium levels is routine.
This applies particularly to the gigantic effort made at the Bhabha Atomic
Research Centre in Bombay, India, where 11 separate groups worked for about
nine months on cold fusion. Eight groups reported finding copious amounts
of tritium after about one week when a palladium was electrolysed in heavy
water. Tritium has been a particular subject of study there for 25 years
to it is difficult to believe that gross errors would be made by so many
groups.

In the same way, groups at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US,
led by Edward Storms and Thomas Clayton respectively, have reported finding
tritium after passing a current through palladium which is in contact with
deuterium. Researchers at Los Alamos are experienced in working with tritium
so surely the problem of contamination is minimal.

One of the most impressive things about several of the tritium observations
is that they can be correlated in time with other nuclear events. At Texas
A & M, we observed tritium and excess heat levels suddenly rise simultaneously
and then die down (see Figure 1). Daniello Gozzi at the University of Rome
observed, early on, a huge burst of heat accompanied by the formation of
tritium. At Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, the production of tritium has
been frequently associated with neutron bursts (see Figure 2).

There are, of course, many – perhaps hundreds – of laboratories where
the experiments were tried and ‘nothing happened’. At Texas A & M too,
most of our attempts to find tritium have failed. But it would be foolish
to dismiss the positive results, especially as their characteristics – the
periods between bursts, the way the bursts die away and quantities of tritium
found – are comparable in different laboratories.

Of all the result from Fleischmann and Pons, the ones most disputed
are certainly the heat measurements. It is difficult to understand why this
is so because it is relatively easy, with calorimeters similar to those
used by Fleischmann and Pons, to measure the excess heat. Electrochemical
theory tells us what amount should normally be given out by a cell undergoing
electrolysis. This heat can be measured to an accuracy of about 1 per cent.

Figure 3 shows some results that we obtained. The burst of heat shown
lasted for 32 days, and was an average of about 18 per cent higher than
would be expected from a classical electrochemical reation. On the basis
of these results, I conclude that if you set up 20 cells, you will have
a 90 per cent chance of seeing a burst of excess heat within three months.

There seem to be two types of burst. About 40 laboratories have reported
bursts of 10 to 30 per cent excess heat. They sometimes correlate impressively
with bursts of nuclear phenomena. Fleischmann and Pons originally showed
that, at a certain current density (0.1 amps per square centimetre), the
excess heat turns on and increases with the current density

The evidence for the second kind of burst – an occasional mega-burst
of heat – is far less solid. Fleischmann and Pons have claimed to see bursts
200 to 300 per cent more than would be expected from the normal electrolysis
of heavy water. But recently, Bruce Liebert and B Y Liaw from the University
of Hawaii have made a much more remarkable claim. They carried out experiments
employing a palladium anode in a molten salt containing lithium deuteride
at about 400 Degree C. Under these conditions, deuterium is evolved at the
anode rather than the cathode. The researchers obtained between 600 and
1500 per cent excess heat.

Researchers will find it difficult to accept this claim until other
laboratories reproduce it, but it is interesting to note that the electrodes
used have been analysed for helim-4 (the heavier isotope of helium, and
a possible product of an exotic kind of nuclear reation). The electrodes
contained between 6 and 20 times background levels. If these mega-bursts
were to be confirmed, it would change the outlook for cold fusion, and a
practical fusion heat generator would become a possibility. Theoretical
physicists would also have to take another look at the phenomenon.

Some countries have taken cold fusion more seriously than has the US
and Britain. In particular, the attitude in Japan is utterly different from
that so publicly shown in America. Instead of attempting to stamp it out
like a dreadful contagion, the Japanese have put cold fusion on the list
of natioanl research priorities and devote 2 per cent of the hot fusion
budget to cold fusion research. This implies an investment of about 25 million
dollars a year for government funded groups (about 250 researchers). There
is also cold fusion research going on in Japanese companies, although it
is difficult to estimate how much. Because of the more relaxed, less hostile
attitude in Japan, it may be that the decisive work on reproducibility,
for example, will be done there.

Reproducibility is the key to scientific respectability. ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s
do not accept a phenomenon unless they can demonstrate it at will. It is
good to be able to report, then, that people are beginning to claim that
they can reproduce results in cold fusion. Wolf in our laboratories can
obtain the emission of neutrons from a bank of electrodes more or less on
call. Thomas Claytor, who works at Los Alamos, can make tritium reproducibly
from a 10-layer sandwich of palladium, saturated with deuterium, and alternating
with layers of silicon. At Stanford Research Institute, Michael McKubre
and his colleagues have found two electrodes from which they can produce
excess heat in their cells at will. Glen Schoessow at the University of
Florida claims he also can do it at will.

It seem likely that reproducibility will spread during the coming year,
given suitable funding. The detailed conditions particularly the ratio of
deuterium to palladium, under which the experiments can be made to work
may become clearer.

If the work of Fleischmann and Pons is confirmed, then theoreticians
will have to modify their ideas about fusion physics. Who can say where
this change would lead? Let me remind you of Ernest Rutherford’s researchs.
When he first produced neutrons with James Chadwick in 1919, he told colleauges
that he wasn’t sure that there was any value in the result and that it was
just an academic curiosity. His results led, of course, to nuclear energy.

There is, therefore, a good prcedent for pursuing the ideas of Fleischmann
and Pons. There is already enough evidence to dismiss the widely held view
that the original claims had no value. It seems now established that nuclear
particles are, under some circumstances, produced in bursts at electrodes
in the cold. As to the heat, there is no proof that it originates in a nuclear
process, though when it coincides with nuclear emissions, it is difficult
to think that it doesn’t. No matter what the science journals and what many
physicists say, ‘something is going on’.

John Bockris is a distinguished professor of chemistry at Texas A &
M University.

COLD FUSION 1990 – THE PLUS AND THE MINUS

THE PLUS

1 About 100 laboratories have reported anomalous effects similar to
those claimed in March 1989 by Fleischmann and Pons.

2 Many of those who have tried and failed to replicate the phenomena
have not accounted for the fact that prolonged electrolysis is necessary,
and that even then the phenomena are burst-like.

3 The Japanese have made a cold fusion one of their national priorities.

4 The theoretical side is not so dark as it seems: some theorists believe
they can see a mechanism for cold fusion and one of them is Julian Schwinger,
Nobel Laureate.

5 The famous irreproducibility is not universal. A few examples of reproducible
heat, neutron and tritium measurements are now available.

6 In accounting for the lack of balance between the nuclear particles
and the heat, we must remember that it is difficult to find some of the
particles. For example, if the phenomena occur at or near the surface, most
of the helium-4 will escape with the deuterium and then the analysis of,
say, 10 ⁴ helium atoms per second mixed with 10 ¹⁹
deuterium molecules will be a considerable challenge. But six laboratories
have found helium inside elctrodes.

THE MINUS

1 More than 100 laboratories have failed to reproduce the phenomena

2 Most nuclear physicists (using the theory of dilute high temperature
plasmas) see the reported phenomena as ‘impossible’.

3 The nuclear particles which are reported in bursts do not tie up numerically
with the heat output (discrepancy 100 to 1000 times).

4 Until the anomalous effects can be tuned in at will using instructions
that can be followed by other researchers, cold fusion is not part of established
science.