Joint Cold Fusion Test Effort Dropped by Los Alamos Lab
The Los Alamos National Laboratory has ended its efforts to collaborate with scientists at the University of Utah on cold fusion research, delivering a damning blow to the university’s claim to have achieved fusion in a flask.
The university had sought the collaboration with Los Alamos shortly after electrochemists B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced in March that they had achieved a breakthrough in fusion research that promised “a clean, virtually inexhaustible source of energy.”
In the weeks after that initial request, however, the scientists quarreled with the lab over the composition of the research team and a final agreement was never reached. Citing “continued inaction” on the collaborative attempt by the university, Sig Hecker, director of the laboratory, told the university that the effort was being abandoned.
Continue Its Own Research
Los Alamos will continue its own research into cold fusion, a lab spokesman said. But, like hundreds of other labs around the world, it has found no reason to believe that the extraordinary claims by Pons and Fleischmann are true.
James J. Brophy, the university’s vice president for research, said in a telephone interview Tuesday that he had been informed of the lab’s decision before the announcement, and he blamed the problem on lawyers who are trying to protect the university’s patent rights.
“In science you like to tell everything, but a patent attorney will tell you to say nothing,” Brophy said. “And if this were a private company instead of a university, nothing is what you would be getting.”
Brophy has been one of the prime boosters of the fusion claims. He insisted Tuesday that the university will ultimately be vindicated even though an overwhelming majority of scientists who have tried to replicate the experiment now believe that the claims are unfounded.
Asked if the university is backing away from the experiment in the face of such widespread skepticism, Brophy said: “No way.”
Pons and Fleischmann claim to have used a simple electrode to create fusion in a flask at room temperature, and they further claim that the nuclear reaction produced far more energy in the form of heat than it took to run the experiment.
Brophy insisted that there have been “many confirmations” of parts of the experiment, but when he attempted to back that up with specifics Tuesday, his claim was angrily denounced by a key scientist at one of the nation’s most prestigious laboratories.
“Four teams at Oak Ridge (National Laboratory) are measuring heat output just like the Pons-Fleischmann effect,” Brophy told The Times.
But when that quote was read to the scientist who is in charge of the cold fusion research project at the Tennessee laboratory, it brought an emphatic denial.
“That is absolutely not true,” said Mike Saltmarsh, a physicist who is associate director of the lab’s fusion energy division.
“Nothing we have seen even hints” at confirmation of the Utah claims, he added.
When told later of Saltmarsh’s reaction, Brophy conceded that his information may have been in error. That is the problem, he said, when so much is based on “word of mouth.”
Saltmarsh said Oak Ridge does have four teams trying to confirm the experiment, but he said none has even come close.
“At one time or another, every group has thought they had found something,” he said, but errors have been found in the way the experiment was being conducted, thus explaining the results.
The furor over fusion, now in its third month, began when Pons and Fleischmann announced at a Salt Lake City press conference that they had produced energy through a novel process called cold fusion. The claim was met with profound skepticism by physicists, who believe that temperatures greater than those at the core of the sun must first be reached for fusion to occur.
Thousands of scientists around the world have labored to duplicate the controversial experiment, and although there have been some claims of partial success, no independent laboratory has been able to verify all of the findings of Pons and Fleischmann. However, there have been some tantalizing results that have kept the pot boiling.
Most of the positive results suggest that some kind of reaction is taking place in the electrode, although it is not clear what that reaction is, and all but a few experts have abandoned hope that the experiment constituted a breakthrough in energy research.
Still, the data collected so far is intriguing enough that even labs such as Los Alamos have not given up completely on cold fusion research.
The lab is working with scientists at Texas A & M, Brigham Young and Stanford universities who have reported results that supported some aspect of the Utah claim.
“We’re continuing on our own stuff too,” Los Alamos public affairs officer Jeff Schwartz said Tuesday.
Los Alamos has detected small bursts of neutrons from an electrode like the one used by Pons and Fleischmann, suggesting that some fusion may be taking place, Schwartz said. However, the neutron emissions are “of a very low level,” he added, and even if fusion is occurring it is of no significance in terms of energy production.
