Scientists Question Cold Fusion

Data from the "cold fusion" experiment performed by University of Utah researchers in March have inconsistencies which raise questions about the validity of the entire experiment, physicists said yesterday at a national convention of the American Physical Society in Baltimore.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physicist Richard D. Petrasso presented a paper compiled by a team of six MIT researchers who verified that the original experiment produced results different from those which fusion would produce.

"I think that there's a tremendous amount of evidence that [the Utah experiment] is a mistake," Petrasso said.

In the Utah fusion experiment, researchers B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann ran a current through a palladium electrode immersed in heavy water. They announced on March 23 that the deuterium nuclei in the water fused together into helium, releasing energy.

Petrasso said a graph Pons and Fleischmann published to describe the energy released in their experiment was erroneous, and he said that gamma rays, a by-product of fusion reactions, were not emitted in the experiment.

"Our results show that they probably never saw any gamma rays at all," Petrasso said.

Another MIT researcher, Stanley Luckhardt, told the convention last night that his team has not produced the same amount of heat that Pons and Fleischmann generated in their experiment, but said they are not giving up.

Fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun, occurs when the nuclei of two small atoms join together to form a larger atom, releasing energy and neutrons. Scientists had believed fusion possible only under great temperatures and pressures until the Utah researchers announced they had produced it at room temperature.

Two Harvard research teams conducting cold fusion experiments said yesterday that their tests will proceed as planned, but noted that the MIT research increases their skepticism of the cold fusion process.

Wolfgang H.E. Rueckner, a staff member of the Advanced Physics Laboratory which is trying to duplicate the Pons-Fleischmann experiment with titanium instead of palladium, called the MIT results disappointing. He added, however, that he will continue his experiment, since his device for detecting neutrons emitted in the reaction is 100 times more efficient than the methods used by the Utah team.

"All the questions which were raised at the conference are pitfalls which we have taken a great deal of care to avoid," he said.

Rueckner said that he would be convinced only when results are announced at the Los Alamos National Lab, which is using an exact duplicate of the apparatus Pons and Fleischmann used.

Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences Isaac F. Silvera, who is also trying to reproduce the Utah results, said that he will continue his experiment because he is using a different method than the one Pons and Fleischmann used.

In his test, Silvera puts palladium in a deuterium solution, which he then squeezes together with a high-pressure apparatus. He said his goal is to make the deuterium nuclei fuse together at a temperature of 120 degrees Kelvin, which corresponds to 245 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

Since the MIT researchers did not disprove completely the fusion process, Silvera said that he will proceed with his experiment, but remains skeptical.

"In science, it's very difficult to prove that someone has not seen something," Silvera said.

Other physicists at the convention supported Petrasso's report. Nathan Lewis, a chemist at the California Institute of Technology, said Monday that his duplications of the original experiment showed no evidence at all of nuclear reactions, even when the parameters of the experiment were changed.

Ronald R. Parker, the director of MIT's Plasma Fusion Center and a member of Petrasso's research team, said at a news conference Monday that no neutrons or gamma rays could have been detected in the Pons-Fleischmann experiment.