New Discoveries Bring Confusion

The March 23 announcement of University of Utah scientists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann that they had discovered "cold fusion" triggered a huge scramble among physicists and chemists from Palo Alto to Moscow to verify their results.

There has been a great deal of confusion since the announcement as universities, including the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Texas A&M and the University of Washington at Seattle, have claimed positive results and then withdrawn their claims only days later, usually because of instrumental errors.

The last few days have brought a new set of confusing and seemingly contradictory results from Stanford, Italy and Brazil.

Stanford Professor of Materials Science Robert A. Huggins reported two days ago that he found a "very substantial increase" in heat production after filling several electrochemical cells containing two-millimeter-thick palladium slabs with heavy water.

Huggins says he found much more heat production after two days in the cells with heavy water than in those containing normal water.

He adds, however, that he has found no neutrons.

"The amount of heat we found was very large in comparision to the amount of radiation, which is very nice," says Huggins. "We're just plain dumb lucky--maybe nature's been nice to us."

Huggins offers an explanation for why his experiments have produced energy where so many others have failed: "They're just not doing it right."

Meanwhile, scientists at the National Agency for Nuclear and Alternative Energy in Italy have found neutron emissions up to 100 times the normal background level in a high-pressure apparatus that used no electrical current.

The Italian researchers forced deuterium gas to diffuse into scraps of titanium at high pressure and at several different temperatures, ranging from 73 degrees below zero Centigrade--the temperature of liquid nitrogen--to room temperature. All other experiments have used either heavy water or liquid deuterium.

Despite the high neutron yields, the Italian researchers say they had found no heat.

And researchers at the Institute of Energy and Nuclear Research at Sao Paulo University in Brazil announced at a press conference two days ago that they had measured neutron emission at twice normal background levels, which stands in sharp contrast to the much higher levels reported by the Italian group.