Path: santra!kth!mcvax!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!wasatch!donn
From: donn@wasatch.utah.edu (Donn Seeley)
Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
Subject: 'a negative conclusion'
Summary: DOE says no, Utah says yes; money, money, money; LANL again
Message-ID: <2172@wasatch.utah.edu>
Date: 12 Jul 89 08:27:09 GMT
Organization: University of Utah CS Dept
Lines: 123

The Department of Energy committee on cold fusion met today to prepare
for their final report.  The account I heard on the local news tonight
(channel 2) was not encouraging for fusion supporters.  The committee
has pretty much reached a consensus that cold fusion is a myth -- there
is 'no convincing evidence' (said one member) that energy will ever be
produced by cold fusion, and no 'persuasive evidence' that 'cold
fusion' exists at all, even cold fusion of the BYU 'little fusion'
type, although there was some minor disagreement among members about
the latter assertion.  The committee will recommend that no federal
funds be used to support cold fusion research.  I gathered that some
sort of final vote or poll of the committee will be taken tomorrow.

Pons has recently repeated his unfriendly comments about the committee,
perhaps to forestall the certain adverse reaction in the press.  Here's
how he was quoted in this morning's Salt Lake Tribune:

	'I think they were mandated to come forth with a negative
	conclusion,' Dr Pons said Monday.

	'I have maintained from the beginning that I don't understand
	how a panel composed of such people was formed,' he said.
	'There are no positive members.  Certainly there are some
	neutral people who are willing to let the data decide, but
	there are several harmful people on that committee.'

	He agreed with an assessment by Texas A&M chemist John Bockris
	that the panel was a 'killer commission,' and he said he would
	be skeptical of their report even if it was positive.

	'I don't think the panel was constructed in a manner that would
	lead to a fair conclusion,' he said.

	Asked if the DOE panel will keep his research from proceeding,
	Dr Pons said, 'No.  Not hardly.'

As an aside, Pons is not very friendly toward Nature editor John Maddox
these days either, especially after Maddox's editorial calling on
scientists 'to dismiss cold fusion as an illusion'.  From the same Trib
article:

	'John Maddox's problem is he only reads his own newspaper,' Dr
	Pons said, emphasizing that Nature 'is a newspaper, not a
	scientific journal.'

The article goes on to quote David Lindley, Nature's North American
editor for physics, as laying the blame for the hostility on Pons
and Fleischmann, because they announced their discovery with a press
conference (instead of a Nature article?)...

On a brighter note, Pons testified today before a Utah state committee
which was formed to decide when and how to allocate $5 million in state
funds for fusion research.  Remarks from the university in this
afternoon's Deseret News made this initial pot of money seem a bit
trivial:

	University of Utah officials, who have selected a 25,000 square
	foot facility and last weekend recruited the first of many
	prominent researchers to work there, on Tuesday planned to ask
	the state's Fusion/Energy Advisory Council to release state
	money to accelerate the effort.

	The request -- $2.5 million of the $5 million allocated by the
	Legislature -- is part of a five-year master plan.

	University officials said they are hopeful that negotiations
	with corporations and government agencies over the next month
	will produce an additional $20 million for the remaining four
	years.

Given the probable outcome of the DOE committee report, these officials
sure sound wildly optimistic...  Pons's own budget requirements appear
to be more modest:

	Pons, who said he is not going to take a direct role in the
	Fusion Research Center, nevertheless believes 'it's now
	justified that they (the committee) release the money.'

	The electrochemist, who said he presented some of his newest
	data to the committee during a closed session, likely won't be
	the recipient of any state fusion money.

	'I don't anticipate that I will take any of the money myself,'
	he said Monday.  'If the state wants to increase an effort in a
	certain direction by putting people in my laboratory and doing
	some experiments, I'll be more than happy to do that.  But I
	think it's best that be centralized somewhere else.'

	Pons said he will continue to concentrate on experiments he
	should do and wants to do.

	'If people tell me they want me to do this or that -- even
	though those things may be very important -- it dilutes our
	efforts.'

Robert Huggins came up from Stanford to testify in support of the U
before the committee.  As before, he wasn't willing to commit to
calling the effect 'fusion', but he did confirm the claims of excess
power output and said that he 'found very large differences' between
deuterium and ordinary hydrogen when reproducing the effect.

I wasn't paying attention at the time the report came on, but I
gathered from the TV news that the Utah committee had a snap vote today
on whether cold fusion had been confirmed, and the vote was positive,
although some members were annoyed that the vote had come up without
warning.  I suspect that there was pressure to go on record before the
DOE committee took the limelight...

As a last little bit of strangeness -- a box in the Deseret News notes
that the U and LANL have resumed negotiations about collaborative
efforts.  I imagine the LANL tritium reports have, ah, warmed the
relationship.  Texas A&M is said to be involved too.  The mess with
LANL has been blamed on lawyers or bureaucrats, but I saw a panel
discussion on the local public TV station in which the Trib fusion
reporter, Tim Fitzpatrick, basically blamed Pons -- the U was forced
to invent 'the most obtuse answers about why they cancelled that
collaboration'.  (For what it's worth, the other panel member, the
notorious Rod Decker from KUTV, was more charitable, assigning at least
part of the blame to the lawyers.)

Not likely to see $20 million on my own doorstep any time soon,

Donn Seeley    University of Utah CS Dept    donn@cs.utah.edu
40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W    (801) 581-5668    utah-cs!donn