TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/041789/04178900.063

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 104 lines

SCIENCE, Page 72

Trying to Tame H-Bomb Power

Researchers rush to check out a possible breakthrough in fusion


    The claim was so spectacular that it was difficult to believe.
News reports suggested that scientists might have achieved the
world's first controlled, energy-yielding nuclear-fusion reaction
-- a Holy Grail of physics for nearly 40 years. Moreover, the event
had not occurred in one of the great national laboratories; it was
the work of a pair of chemists operating on a shoestring budget and
using little more than a test tube, a pencil-thin strip of metal
and a car battery. Even more incredible was the assertion that this
humble apparatus, fueled with a form of hydrogen found in ordinary
seawater, had generated four times as much energy as it consumed.
Could this be a new and virtually limitless source of cheap, clean
power?

    Thus late last month began a saga that continues to engage the
attention of the scientific world as rarely before. The
announcement by the two chemists, B. Stanley Pons of the University
of Utah and Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton in
England, while greeted with skepticism, also triggered a kind of
free-for-all as researchers rushed to re-create the controversial
experiment.

    There were grounds for skepticism. While well respected in
their fields, Pons and Fleischmann were far from the mainstream of
fusion research. In addition, they had released their results in
a manner that tended to cast suspicion on their claims, staging a
press conference in Utah complete with television cameras. For
several days researchers around the world were dependent on TV and
newspapers for scraps of information about what could conceivably
be the biggest science story of the year -- if not the decade.

    Then the details of the experiment began to emerge. By an
informal process known as "publication by fax," copies of a paper
Pons and Fleischmann had prepared began to circulate from lab to
lab. Next, one of the best-known figures in the field, physicist
Steven Jones of Brigham Young University, announced that he too had
achieved fusion in a jar, although, significantly, with far lower
energy output. Even a pair of Hungarian scientists claimed to have
carried out room-temperature fusion.

    Last week, in an unusual move, a Dutch scientific journal
pushed forward its schedule and published the report by Pons and
Fleischmann. But at week's end the more prestigious British journal
Nature had not yet decided whether to print their findings. The
scientific community, while not at all convinced by the claim that
the power of the H-bomb had finally been harnessed, was at least
taking it seriously.

    Nuclear fusion, the process that fires the sun, usually occurs
when two atoms are squeezed together at very high temperatures to
make one new atom. For example, two atoms of deuterium -- an
isotope of hydrogen -- can be fused to form a helium atom and a
neutron, releasing a sizable burst of energy. But before that can
occur, deuterium nuclei generally need to be compressed with
sufficient force to overcome their mutually repellent electrical
charges. In H-bombs, that force is supplied by the detonation of
an A-bomb. Conventional fusion techniques require giant magnets,
powerful laser beams and particle accelerators. But none of these
approaches have succeeded in generating more energy than they use.

    The researchers at B.Y.U. and Utah took a different tack. Each
constructed an apparatus similar to that used by ninth-grade
science students to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Instead
of ordinary H2O, however, they used deuterium-rich heavy water
(D2O). The scientists tried an array of exotic elements for their
electrodes, including palladium, a semiprecious metal known to
absorb large numbers of hydrogen -- and deuterium -- atoms. Plunged
into a bath of heavy water and charged by a twelve-volt battery,
a palladium rod will draw swarms of deuterium ions out of the
liquid and into its latticelike crystal structure. There the ions
lodge and gather in such concentrations that they supposedly
overcome their natural repulsion and fuse. Just how that happens,
even B.Y.U.'s Jones cannot say. "We have an experiment but not a
theory," he confesses. "We have Cinderella, but we don't have her
shoe."

    Where the B.Y.U. and Utah teams part company is over how much
energy such a device can produce. The startling claim by Pons and
Fleischmann was that for every watt they pumped into their crude
fuel cell, more than four watts came out. Jones, on the other hand,
measured less than a trillionth of a watt. That is quite a gap. As
he puts it, "It's the difference between a dollar bill and the
national debt."

    Why the huge discrepancy? One hypothesis, put forward by a
group at England's Birmingham University, is that Pons and
Fleischmann achieved fusion in an unconventional fashion. They had
added lithium to their heavy water to make it a better conductor
of electricity, and the lithium may have fused with the deuterium.
This might account for the exceptionally high energy output.

    Researchers are working feverishly to make sense of the fusion
mystery. A British lab was swamped with requests from the public
for advice on how to re-create the reaction, including one from a
housewife who said she had already stockpiled a supply of heavy
water. But even if the experiment is successfully duplicated, there
is no guarantee that it will lead to a large-scale power plant. It
could be decades before the commercial potential of the process,
if any, is determined. For now, no one knows whether Pons and
Fleischmann have simply made an embarrassing blunder, or if they
are destined to become two of the most famous scientists who ever
lived.