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On 23 March 1989, two chemists working at the University of Utah, Stanley
Pons and Martin Fleischmann, stunned the world with their claim to have
harnessed nuclear fusion – the process that powers the Sun – in a test tube
of water at room temperature. Pons and Fleischmann asserted that passing
a current through heavy water – water containing deuterium, a heavy isotope
of hydrogen – between palladium electrodes produced a huge amount of heat.
They concluded that this excess energy could not have come from any electrochemical
process but must have resulted from the fusion of deuterium nuclei.

Nuclear fusion holds the elusive promise of cheap, abundant and pollution-free
energy. Sea water contains an effectively limitless supply of deuterium.
So, coming within hours of the Exxon Valdez oil disaster, and with the nuclear
catastrophe of Chernobyl still fresh in people’s minds, the sudden possibility
of ‘cold fusion’ captured everyone’s attention. Overnight, governments and
scientists around the world redirected their research programmes in attempts
to repeat and develop the extraordinary experiment for themselves. In a
single week in April, anecdotal claims by small teams of one or two researchers
of having achieved cold fusion flooded the media. This was despite the fact
that major research laboratories, which had large teams of scientists with
wide ranging expertise and far superior equipment, were seeing nothing and
saying nothing.

Meanwhile, the state of Utah voted $5 million for research into cold
fusion, established a National Cold Fusion Institute (NCFI) in Salt Lake
City, and then in nationally televised proceedings, lobbied the US Congress
for $25 million of federal funds. By this stage, enough suspicion about
some of the claims had surfaced for Congress to reject the request. Today,
most mainstream scientists have dismissed the episode and returned to their
more regular research.

Yet there remain isolated groups of fervent believers who insist that
cold fusion is a real phenomenon, that it is being developed in Japan and
that we in the West are in danger of being left behind. Meanwhile a committee
acting for the State of Utah has been questioning how the NCFI has used
the $5 million it received.

The bizarre behaviour surrounding the cold fusion episode is more akin
to that found in cloak-and-dagger novels than in scientific circles. ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵs
have accused each other of pirating ideas. Pon’s attorney has made threats
against a research group in the physics department of the University of
Utah whose results discredited the phenomenon. There have been persistent
rumours that scientific data were altered. The University senate passed
a vote of no confidence on the president of the University of Utah, particularly
in connection with the NCFI. There were reports that Pons had put his house
up for sale and left the country in November as the work at the NCFI was
about to be evaluated. And people have slowly become aware that several
claims coming out of Utah misrepresent reality.

Added to this, my own researches during the past 18 months show that
some of the so-called evidence for fusion was not obtained and presented
to the world in the accepted scientific way. To be concerned is not simply
being pedantic. Society relies on science and makes substantial investment
in it. The general public assumes that when researchers claim to have made
a major discovery it has been thoroughly and carefully researched. Parts
of the test-tube fusion episode failed sadly on this score.

I became involved in cold fusion in 1989 when I was distinguished scientist
at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is operated by the US Department
of Energy (DOE). The DOE had ordered its laboratories to make a concerted
effort to discover if the claims were right, and had given us autumn 1989
as the deadline. The funding of billions of dollars of research into hot
fusion was in the balance; if the claims of cold fusion turned out to be
true, the DOE would have to reallocate funding.

Every Wednesday at noon, all the scientists and engineers involved in
cold fusion experiments at Oak Ridge met resident experts in various fields
of physics, chemistry and metallurgy to share news of progress. From these
meetings a weekly report was prepared for the Secretary for Energy in Washington.

I was consulted as a theoretical physicist. I felt that the claims of
cold fusion ran contrary to the paradigms of physics, indeed, they were
incredible. According to standard theory of nuclear physics, a hypothetical
mass of cold deuterium the size of the Sun would yield only a few fusions
per year, yet some of the claims from Utah required this rate to be many
thousands per second in a beaker of water. This seemed so far-fetched that
first I tried to find out how well the documented reports and claims matched
what had really happened.

The news reports and the experimental paper that Pons and Fleischmann
had published early on were not much help. The paper must have been written
in haste because it contained several obvious errors. The most bizarre was
that the name of a co-researcher, Marvin Hawkins (who, it transpired had
done much of the work but whose existence is still not widely known) had
been omitted from the paper. The normal scientific procedure would now be
to question Pons and Fleischmann in the hope of learning essential details.
But tyring to reach them by phone was like trying to get through to British
Rail enquiries – the phone line was perpetually busy.

Instead, I first spoke to many scientists who were attempting experiments
of their own (with little success). When I talked to people who had earlier
gone on record as having replicated the phenomenon, I learnt that they had
later discovered shortcomings in their experiments and had withdrawn their
original claims. This was something that the media had not widely reported.

The most direct insights into what had really been done in Utah came
when I carefully studied tapes, videos and transcripts of public presentations
by Fleischmann and Pons. They had become such celebrities that every public
utterance was recorded. Gradually, I became aware of a credibility gap.
The tapes showed that Fleischmann and Pons were giving a standard lecture
which said little more than was in their paper. Probing questions from the
audiences, however, began to reveal deviations from normal scientific procedure
and expose inconsistencies. An individual lecture did not always reveal
these problems; it was when I compared the responses to questions asked
at different lectures that discrepancies and even contradictions began to
emerge. Regrettably, I realised that some of the data supporting the claims
of cold fusion could not have been measured in the form that Fleischmann
and Pons had presented in their paper: the data had been mysteriously altered.
What had started as an attempt to understand the scientific basis of the
cold fusion claims became instead an investigation into the true nature
of the evidence, its presentation and the cause of the fiasco.

Nuclear fusion involves joining together atomic nuclei of light elements,
particularly isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium. Potentially, it
is a relatively clean source of energy compared with chemical sources, such
as burning coal, and nuclear power. The technical problems of achieving
fusion are many. This is because all nuclei are positively charged and so
repel each other, making it difficult to force them together – a first step
in achieving fusion. Attempts to overcome this and produce a viable energy
source has already cost billions of dollars. Modern fusion research requires
arrays of magnets as big as houses in order to contain the fuel – plasma
– at temperatures 10 times hotter even than those in the centre of the Sun.
The technology needed to make the plasma dense enough and stable enough
to sustain fusion is formidable. Nuclear physicists and engineers have made
a lot of progress in recent years but thermonuclear fusion as an economic
energy source is still decades away and the research is becoming extremely
expensive.

It is not surprising that researchers were both excited and taken aback
when Pons and Fleischmann claimed to have found an easy way of fusing nuclei.
Chemists are well aware that palladium soaks up deuterium like a sponge
soaks up water. In a cell containing an electrolyte of heavy water and palladium
electrodes, an electric current from a battery transports the deuterium
ions, or nuclei, from the heavy water to the negative cathode and into the
spaces between the palladium atoms. The two chemists believed that once
the deuterium was crammed inside the palladium, the deuterium nuclei would
get close enough to fuse and form new elements such as helium or tritium,
neutrons and heat. If fusion were really taking place, then the chemists
should have been able to detect the products and, from the amount of heat
measured, determine the amount of fusion products produced. In the case
of Pons and Fleischmann’s experiment, the reported heat released indicated
that a staggering thousand billion neutrons and tritium atoms per second
should have been produced.

In fact, many scientists and government departments around the world
were concerned about the potential strategic military implications of a
test-tube-device capable of producing such copious amounts of neutrons and
tritium. These are essential ingredients for preparing thermonuclear devices.
Cold fusion could become available to any tinpot dictator with some heavy
water. I learnt that this was what drove some of the keen interest in India,
where there was a suspicion that the West would classify the work as secret.

Desperately seeking fusion

Fleischmann had the idea of test-tube fusion several years ago and made
some exploratory measurements of the heat. The portrayal in the media of
a concentrated five-year research effort into test-tube fusion which culminated
in the announcement on March 1989 is far from the reality. Between 1985
and 1988, Pons wrote more than 100 papers, 30 jointly with Fleischmann,
none of which had any bearing on the cold fusion research.

The work at the University of Utah moved into the front line only in
1988, becoming urgent towards the end of that year when they learned of
a rival group led by Steve Jones at Brigham Young University (BYU), 50 miles
away in Provo, Utah. Jones thought that the fusion of hydrogen isotopes
under pressure could be the source of the Earth’s heat. He designed a similar
experiment using an electrochemical cell and heavy water. Being a nuclear
physicist, however, Jones was looking for the neutrons as evidence of fusion,
and so his approach was complementary to that of the heat-seeking chemists.

Jones saw, at most, only a few neutrons (and even today there is controversy
as to whether his neutron signal is significant). What made him confident,
however, was that he could measure not just the number of neutrons but also
their energy. His small signal had the energy expected for neutrons coming
from fusion though at an infinitesimal rate compared with that implied by
the claims of Fleischmann and Pons. For Fleischmann and Pons, Jones’s neutrons
were the missing link, complementing their measurement of heat (even though
the heat claimed did not correspond to the number of neutrons detected).
Early in 1989, the chemists thought they had every reason to believe that
they were on the right track. After a meeting with Jones on 23 February
1989, they learnt that he was preparing to publish his results, far sooner
than they could publish theirs. It was from that moment that their problems
began.

The possible commercial benefits of the ‘discovery’ were already apparent
to the University of Utah, as were the dangers. Although Jones’s work was
rather different from that of the chemists – because he was making measurements
of neutrons not heat – there was concern that if Jones even mentioned heat,
he could undermine the university’s patent claims.

Fleischmann and Pons took urgent steps to measure neutrons in order
to obtain the whole evidence for their case and go public without delay,
even though their research was incomplete. They needed to detect neutorns
coming from their own apparatus and to measure the energies of the neutrons.
They hoped to confirm that the neutrons were, indeed, evidence for fusion
and were not produced by background radioactivity or cosmic rays.

The chemists did not have a suitable neutron detector but Fleischmann
knew that the Harwell Laboratory near Oxford did, so he thought of transporting
the ‘fusion cell’ to Britain. This proved to be impossible: you can imagine
the bureaucratic problems associated with flying a ‘fusion’ device around
the globe. The next idea was to fly Harwell’s detector out to Utah, but
this too was out of the question because it weighed several tonnes. Thus
in mid-March, Fleischmann was reduced to giving Harwell details of the procedures
so that a Harwell team could perform the measurements themselves to try
to confirm the phenomenon.

While this was going on, Fleischmann and Pons had come up with what
they believed to be a way of detecting neutrons for themselves. Any neutrons
produced in the fusion would shoot out of the cell and into a surrounding
water bath. As the neutrons slowed down, they would be captured by protons
in the water and emit gamma rays with a characteristic wavelength. These
could be detected by crystals of sodium iodide. A radiologist at the university,
Bob Hoffman, took the data and found what appeared to be a gamma-ray peak
at an energy of about 2500 kiloelectronvolts. Neutrons produced by deuterium
fusion have an energy similar to this. On 11 March, Pons submitted a ‘preliminary
note’ for publication in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry entitled
‘Evidence for Fusion ..’. This paper gives the impression that the gamma-ray
signal is a proof of the neutrons and an indicator of their energies.

At the time of the press conference on 23 March 1989, the scientific
community had not seen any of the data on which the claims were based. The
first display of these was five days later, following the Easter weekend,
on Tuesday 28 March, when Fleischmann spoke to a select audience at Harwell.
It was here that the first problems began to emerge.

A crucial piece of evidence for their claim for fusion rested on the
gamma-ray signal at 2500 keV. The experts at Harwell, however, told Fleischmann
that real gamma rays from neutron capture should have shown up near 2200
keV (actually 2224 keV), not at 2500 keV. The official report of the meeting
noted that: ‘It was hard to see how the calibration (of the gamma-ray spectrum)
could be so wrong.’ Fleischmann transmitted this information to Pons who
was in Utah with all the details of the experiment. By 31 March, the axes
had been redrawn, generating the peak on the graph as presented in the publicly
circulated paper. The data are essentially the same as that measured at
2500 keV but the total number of events has mysteriously altered, the energy
scale has been stretched out and the central value changed from 2500 to
2200 keV. I am told that neither Hoffman nor Hawkins, who had made the original
measurements, had done any further experimental work to recalibrate the
position of the peak.

Indeed, when I and Richard Garwin – a member of the official panel investigating
cold fusion – asked for information on the calibrations made to relocate
the peak, we were unsuccessful. Even at 2200 keV, the peak is wrongly positioned
as it should centre on 2224 keV, a fact that many researchers noticed and
thought that the Utah team had misidentified the gamma radiation that occurs
naturally at this energy.

This is but the first of several idiosyncratic approaches to the gathering
and analysis of data that makes it essential to look at the original logbooks
if we are to evaluate what happened. A second set of dubious claims concerns
the heat – whether or not control experiments were made with ordinary water
in place of heavy water. If heat was due to the fusion of two deuterium
nuclei in the heavy water, then there should be no such heat when ordinary
water is used. At lectures, researchers repeatedly asked Fleischmann and
Pons whether they had carried out a control experiment and with what results.
The general impression is that they had not made this rudimentary test before
going public (even though in a recent paper they claim that they did). Yet
their own record seemingly denies this most recent claim and reveals how
the psychology underlying belief can override observation and deduction.

At Harwell on 28 March and again at CERN, the European Laboratory for
Particle Physics, on 31 March, Fleischmann intimated that no control experiments
with ordinary water had been done, stating that ‘these experiments are now
in progress’. Two weeks later at a special meeting in Erice, Sicily, he
said that he was ‘not prepared to answer’ and maintained this in the face
of repeated requests from the audience. However, in Dallas that same day,
12 April, Pons was less reticent and admitted to the media that he had made
an experiment with plain water and that it also produced heat.

The conclusion should have been that there had been a miscalibration
or that the heat source was not deuterium fusion. The chemists’ belief in
the phenomenon was so strong, however, that they decided that the heat in
plain water must be due to fusion between the copious protons and the trace
of deuterium that occurs naturally (about 1 part in 6000). Indeed, Pons
convinced Charles Martin of Texas A & M University to go public on 10
April with the first claims of replicating cold fusion, even though his
research group found heat with plain water too and were concerned that this
implied some error in the experiment. In fact, there was. A bad earth connection
had caused electric current to enter the cell and heat the contents. Being
unaware of this at the time, the team interpreted the heat as ‘excess’.

So began a remarkable week, by the end of which the DOE were in some
panic. The claim from Texas A & M was soon followed by claims by Georgia
Institute of Technology of finding neutrons and by researchers at the University
of Washington in Seattle of detecting tritium. This seemed to put all of
the ingredients of fusion in place. But each result was subsequently withdrawn
as the researchers found errors in their experiments. Nevertheless, some
people are still claiming the results are confirmations.

Pons was feted as a hero in Dallas and the DOE called in one of its
past chairmen, Glenn Seaborg, a Nobel Laureate for discoveries in nuclear
chemistry, for advice. Seaborg was sceptical but advised that the DOE set
up a special investigation panel. He also briefed President Bush on the
subject. Seaborg contacted Pons who told him about the heat in ordinary
water and his belief that it was due to fusion between protons and deuterium
nuclei. But in addition, Pons claimed that the key to the heat and lack
of radiation in the heavy water experiments was that the fusion produced
helium-4 and that experiments to test this idea were currently under way
in Utah.

On the Sunday evening, just two days later, Pons announced that the
helium-4 had been found and in quantities commensurate with those expected
given the amount of heat that he was claiming. The reaction at the DOE was
immediate: the heads of nuclear and fusion programmes at all of its laboratories
were ordered to drop whatever they were doing and come to Washington for
an emergency meeting on the morning of Tuesday 18 April. Directors from
the West Coast came by overnight flight and, bleary eyed, met with their
eastern colleagues to be asked, ‘Why are you doing nothing?’

It rapidly transpired that roughly five teams per institution were already
doing experiments, working night and day with state-of-the-art equipment.
It was too soon for them to go on the record and write scientifically reputable
papers, but the trend was already clear – there was no sign of test-tube
fusion. This did not mean that they saw nothing. In fact, they were seeing
things, the same sort of things that others had seen and had called press
conferences about. The difference was that the major laboratories contained
a wide range of expertise, knew many of the pitfalls that the unwary could
fall into and had already pointed out to some groups where they had gone
wrong. Later, a research group at the California Institute of Technology
showed that Pons’s claim to have produced helium by fusion was impossible
to support, given his apparatus, and that the helium had been detected was
almost certainly from the atmosphere.

In addition, researchers at Los Alamos reported that they were already
negotiating with Utah to have access to a working cell in order to test
it for radiation, but this collaboration was stillborn, the excuse from
Utah being that patent attorneys were ordered to redouble their efforts,
report weekly – which is when I became involved. An official national panel
of some two dozen experts was charged to examine the claims. By the end
of the year the experts concluded that there was no evidence for fusion,
had identified flaws in several ‘positive’ experiments and advised against
any special funding of the research.

The cost had been tens of millions of dollars in human effort and equipment,
not to mention other research programmes that were curtailed in the interim.
In Britain, the Harwell Laboratories, which had been advised early on by
Fleischmann, performed what many regard as among the most complete and definitive
range of experiments in the world. They found no evidence for fusion, not
even for heat. This negative result came from a team of experts spanning
a wide range of physics, chemistry and materials science aided by first-rate
equipment, far superior to that used by the groups who claimed positive
results. Harwell’s reputation and the received opinion among experts of
the quality of their work effectively killed off the episode in Britain,
though it is still being pursued in isolated pockets around the globe.

Supporters of cold fusion will cite anecdotal confirmations but they
fail to mention the many groups who have reported negative results. The
research groups for cold fusion tend to be small and tend to be relatively
‘amateur’ compared with the full-time, large-scale teams of laboratory scientists
who have, almost universally, seen nothing.

The fluidity of the evidence from Fleischmann and Pons made many nervous.
Some supporters have responded by suggesting that there is some establishment
conspiracy wishing to suppress these dramatic discoveries. This we can surely
dismiss. ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵs, especially theoretical physicists, are all awaiting
the next revolutionary breakthrough that overthrows the paradigms. When
a radical new result arrives, see how they all drop what they were doing
and pursue the new promise. That is what happened when the news of cold
fusion erupted.

We crave new discoveries and the attendant excitement and promise, that
is what drives many of us into science in the first place. The art of research
is to judge when to pursue an outlandish notion and when to ignore it. As
students, we read the textbooks, attend the lectures and are guided into
research. But I have never forgotten the advice that my research supervisor
gave me the first time that I was pursuing a dead end: ‘It is important
to recognise when to quit.’ As far as cold fusion in a test-tube is concerned,
we can safely say that it is time to move on to pursue other routes for
harnessing fusion.

Frank Close is senior principal scientist at the Rutherford Appleton
Laboratory and distinguished scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory,
Tennessee, US. His first-hand expose of the race for cold fusion called
Too Hot to Handle is published this week by W H Allen at 14.99 Pounds.