Fusion Fever Is on the Rise

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

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.

With reporting by Joseph J. Kane/Atlanta and Dick Thompson/Dallas