Path: santra!tut!draken!kth!mcvax!uunet!tank!eecae!shadooby!mailrus!ukma!tek
From: tek@ms.uky.edu (Thomas E. Kunselman)
Newsgroups: alt.fusion
Subject: Fusion Article in The Chronicle of Higher Education
Message-ID: <11584@s.ms.uky.edu>
Date: 24 Apr 89 17:53:44 GMT
Distribution: alt
Organization: U of Ky, Math. Sciences, Lexington KY
Lines: 119


Here is another article to add more skepticism to the mess!


CONFUSION CONTINUES OVER ROOM-TEMPERATURE FUSION
Re-typed without permission from Page A8,
April 26, 1898 The Chronicle of Higher Education
-Kim A. McDonald


Is room-temperature nuclear fusion one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs
of this century?  Or is it an overly publicized mistake, compounded by
erroneous reports of verification?

Nuclear physicists, who plan to put those questions to the test next week in
Baltimore at a meeting of the American Physical Society, are still not sure. 
But mounting evidence from laboratories around the world suggests that an
unknown nuclear process may be responsible for the unusual results of
researchers who claim to have obtained fusion in a flask.

Last week, scientists at Stanford University, the University of Sao Paulo in
Brazil, and the National Agency for Nuclear and Alternative Energy in Italy
joined a growing number of laboratories reporting positive results from
experiments that have sought to duplicate last month's seemingly incredible
report of room-temperature fusion.

PHYSICISTS REMAIN SKEPTICAL

On March 23, two chemists, B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and
Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton in England, announced that
they had sustained a nuclear-fusion reaction in a flask of water containing
deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen, that produced 10 times more energy
than it consumed.

Many physicists remain skeptical about the purported breakthrough, saying that
most of the hundreds of laboratories that have attempted to duplicate the
experiment by sending a small electrical current through a palladium electrode
dipped in deuterium water have seen nothing at all.

But the unusual characteristics of the positive results have piqued the
curiosity of many scientists.

At Stanford, a team of researchers reported that two experiments -- on using
deuterium water and a control, using ordinary water - eliminated the
possibility that the energy release was caused by a chemical reaction, as some
scientists have speculated.

"The effect is real and it is substantial," said Robert A. Huggins, a
professor of materials science who headed the Stanford investigation.  "We're
running excess heat above and beyond any chemical system."

50 PCT. MORE HEAT

The Stanford scientists, who obtained 50 per cent more heat from five
identical experiments using deuterium water than from those using ordinary
water, did not measure the output of neutrons, subatomic particles that are a
by-product of nuclear fusion.

But in Italy, a team of researches headed by Francesco Scaramuzzi, a physicist
at a government nuclear-energy institute, said it had obtained a stream of
neutrons 100 times the background level from one of its experiments.

The Italian group, in a departure from the Pons-Fleischmann experiment,
exposed titanium scraps to a stream of deuterium gas to achieve it's results. 
The group has filed a patent application on its technique and plans to publish
details of its results in the journal, Europhysics Letters.

NEUTRON MEASUREMENTS DIFFICULT

In Brazil, researchers at the Institute of Physics of the University of Sao
Paulo working jointly with the Institute of Nuclear and Energy Research there,
said they had also measured neutrons from an attempt to duplicate the
Pons-Fleischmann experiment.  They said the levels of neutrons obtained were
twice as large as the background level.

Some skeptical physicists, noting that neutron levels are difficult to measure
accurately, said that only careful measurements repeated at a large number of
laboratories would persuade them that some kind of nuclear reaction was
occurring.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology who two weeks ago reported
a more than tenfold increase in neutrons from their attempt to duplicate the
experiment, for instance, discovered later that they were in error because
their neutron counter was sensitive to heat emanating from a bath of water
used in the experiment.

Even if researches establish that the reaction is, indeed, producing neutrons,
skeptics say they are extremely puzzled by the fact that the levels being
reported are a billion times lower than conventional nuclear fusion.  That
process, which requires temperatures of millions of degrees, is the
energy-liberating mechanism that powers the sun and the stars.

"I think physicists are just skeptical of anything that is a radical departure
from what they know about this," said Phillip F. Schewe, a physicist who is a
spokesman for the American Physical Society.  "The attitude is 'Let's make
sure we have it right.'"

PRESS ACCOUNTS CRITICIZED

Robert L. Park, a condensed-matter physicist who heads the Washington office
of the society, said press accounts about the fusion experiments had given a
distorted picture of the overwhelmingly skeptical opinion among scientists,
because the reports had generally focused on positive reports.

"While there are some people who are seeing positive results, there are many
more people who aren't seeing anything at all," he added.  "You don't call a
press conference to say that I didn't find anything."

Mr. Park said the society's meeting next week, which will devote a late-night
session to the failures as well as successes of researchers attempting to
duplicate room-temperature fusion, should produce a lively debate on the
subject.


-- 
Thomas Kunselman                              {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!tek          
Office of Institutional Research       bitnet: tek@ukma.bitnet
Kentucky State University            internet: tek@ms.uky.edu
Frankfort, KY 40601