COLD SHOULDER: SCORNED NOW, FUSION MAY ANSWER OUR ENERGY PROBLEMS

The announcement on March 23, 1989, of the observation of cold fusion, at a
press conference in Salt Lake City, electrified the civilized world.
Electrochemists B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Martin Fleischmann
of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom claimed they had observed
a nuclear fusion reaction (large amounts of heat produced by the fusion of two
deuterium nuclei) as a result of passing an electric current through heavy
water.

This would be a sensational discovery because the reaction was thought to be
occurring at socalled room temperature. Conventional nuclear science suggests
that to create this kind of heat, the deuterium nuclei need the kinetic energy
created only when the temperature of the nuclei is raised to millions of
degrees.

Nuclear fusion of deuterium should produce helium 3, tritium, and neutrons or
protons. Pons and Fleischmann claimed to observe neutrons. Neutrons were also
seen by physicist Steven E. Jones at neighboring Brigham Young University in
Provo, Utah. Many nuclear scientists, however, doubt the validity of these
observations. The level of neutron emission seen was a billion times lower than
would correspond to the amount of heat energy that should have occurred, had the
energy been due to nuclear fusion mechanisms. Yet the Utah announcement of
"cold" fusion provoked visions, among sc ientists and nonscientists, of a more
immediate and less complex approach to nuclear fusion than "hot nuclear fusion,"
eventually leading to a practical and unlimited supply of electric power.

On April 13, 1989, the day following a symposium on nuclear fusion and
electrochemistry at the semiannual meeting of the American Chemical Society,
Robert 0. Hunter, Jr., director of the Department of Energy's Office of Energy
Research, requested I come to Washington, DC, to brief President George Bush and
his staff on cold fusion. At the White House I described the Utah experiments
and suggested that this discovery must be viewed with skepticism but
dispassionately and, thus, probed thoroughly.

At my suggestion, a panel was appointed under the auspices of the Energy
Research Advisory Board of the Department of Energy to explore the cold fusion
claim. Scores of laboratories around the world entered the fray to prove and
produce cold fusion at room temperature, posing a formidable task for the panel.
Though the contest is now dying out, Pons and Fleischmann as well as other
scientists are still stoutly defending the original premise of substantial cold
fusion. The preponderance of negative evidence, however, led the panel to
conclude in their final report that cold fusion does not hold promise as a
practical source of energy, and there is no convincing evidence to associate the
reported anomalous heat with a nuclear process. Whether there are conditions
where a type of cold fusion can lead to the production of neutrons-a billionfold
below a level corresponding to practical energy production-may still be an open
question.

After careful evaluation, I do not foresee cold fusion as a practical source of
energy at any time in the future. However, there would be a fantastic payoff
for such an improbable source of energy, and in the spirit of scientific
inquiry, the whole process should be better understood. Therefore I agree with
the recommendation of the cold fusion panel that modest support should be given
for cold fusion research.

The attainment of a practical and economical source of electrical energy through
the conventional "hot fusion" process is a formidable task, yet probably an
attainable goal. Means must be found, however, to provide, sustain, and confine
the reactants at extraordinarily high temperatures and to deal with
neutron-induced radioactivity.

In view of the difficulties with this conventional path toward nuclear fusion,
some attention is being directed to an imaginative and potentially simpler
approach: colliding beams of deuterium and helium 3, leading to the products
hydrogen and helium 4 (aneutronic fusion). Because the energy is released in
the form of charged particles, it can be converted into electricity with high
efficiency.

Nearly a half century of research has been devoted to trying to produce fusion
energy in a self-sustaining manner. And it may be another half century before
"hot fusion" will be developed as an economical source of electric power. But
when this goal is accomplished, the world's oceans will become a source of
unlimited energy.