Cold Fusion Studies Continue

A group of scientists are urging their colleagues to continue research on the process of cold fusion, even though the uproar last spring over the announced discovery of cold fusion has long since died down.

Last month about 50 researchers decided at a meeting that they would encourage their peers to study cold fusion, although they said they think such research is unlikely to result in the production of a useful source of cheap energy.

Wolfgang H.E. Rueckner, who conducted an inconclusive cold fusion experiment in the Advanced Physics labs in the Science Center last spring, said he supports the committee's recommendation to continue research, even if it is not likely to have applicable results.

"There are experimental questions that ought to be answered to everyone's satisfaction," Rueckner said yesterday. "People are getting bursts of heat" from their samples when they conduct experiments, he said. "That needs to be explained."

Although Rueckner would not speculate about what actually might be discovered, he said it appears that the kind of fusion energy source that was originally anticipated will not be found.

The meeting was held behind closed doors--the only scientists allowed to attend were those invited by the National Science Foundation (NSF), a federal agency, and the Electric Power Research Institute, a private organization.

The scientists at the meeting assessed the usefulness of research last spring that attempted to duplicate the original experiment of B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and his associate, Martin Fleischmann, who announced on March 23 that they had detected the by-products of room-temperature fusion.

Fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun, was originally thought to occur only at extremely high temperatures and pressures.

But Pons and Fleischmann claimed that their device--in which electricity was sent through a jar of heavy water and a palladium electrode at room temperature--produced additional heat, which could only occur if the heavy hydrogen atoms in the water fused together.

Attempts by other scientists to duplicate the experiment were unsuccessful. However, some of them did show a small amount of excess heat production. None of the other experiments showed production of neutrons or gamma rays, which are sure signs of fusion.

An MIT research team published a report in May that thoroughly examined the Pons-Fleischmann procedure and concluded that it was carelessly performed and that its results were incorrect.

In spite of all the negative feedback, the NSF committee decided that previous experiments were inconclusive and that further research should be conducted to find the answers to the yet unsolved questions.

Rueckner said the closed-door policy of the recent NSF committee meeting was "irksome" because scientific debate should be an open forum, andnot limited to those with a certain view.

"Science should continue the way science isusually done--let people who want to criticize it,criticize it," he said.

Cold fusion experiments are now in progress atthe National Cold Fusion Institute, a nonprofitcorporation founded recently by the University ofUtah, Texas A&M University. Brigham YoungUniversity, Stanford University, the University ofMinnesota and the Los Alamos National Laboratoryin New Mexico