“Everything you know is wrong.”
—The Firesign Theatre, October 1974
IT IS INTERESTING TO HEAR the thirdhand stories from deer-stalkers hunting in the Dawson Forest. There are accounts of deer, obviously mutated by ionizing radiation playing havoc with their genetic material, having six legs or snow-white pelts. There are pygmy deer the size of squirrels, giant deer that can knock over trees, and even a Cyclops deer with one eye in the middle of its forehead. There are reports of oak leaves the size of an elephant’s ear and pinecones that you don’t want to stand under. There is not a spot on Earth with a better chance of having strange flora and fauna than the Dawson Forest, but not one artifact or photograph has yet to support these claims. This and the fact that giant eight-foot-long ants have not taken over New Mexico frustrate nuclear dramatists to no end. There is simply no physical evidence, and these accounts are most likely the fabrications of active imaginations.
The adventure that I will spin in this chapter is no more believable than accounts of rats the size of feral pigs turning over trash cans in Dawson County, but I swear it really happened. I was right there in the middle of it, and I can prove it.
On Friday, March 24, 1989, life was good. I was a senior research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), with an office in the basement of the Electronics Research Building on Ferst Street.86 Across the street loomed the seven-story Joe Howie Physics Building, and right behind us on Atlantic Drive was the gleaming white containment structure for the high-flux nuclear reactor, the Frank H. Neely Building. My office had once been the “Iridite Room,” filled with open-topped barrels of chemicals used to put a golden color on things made of aluminum and prevent corrosion. With explosive growth in the early 1970s, the machine shop and small labs on the basement floor had been converted into private offices for senior personnel. I had a repainted steel desk, a combination-locked filing cabinet, a chalkboard, one piece of chalk, a dial telephone with lighted buttons, and bookshelves to the ceiling groaning under the weight of printed material. The walls, painted a dingy light green, were cinder blocks, and my PRI Deluxe scintillation counter in the corner kept track of the gamma rays streaming out of them. My window looked across the parking lot and into the reactor’s redwood cooling tower.
Next door to me was Al Becker, head of research security and filled near the bursting point with secrets left over from World War II. He had served in “Wild Bill” Donovan’s OSS (Office of Strategic Services) during the war, and he was good for an oblique tale of wartime intrigue if things were slow. Across the hall was a cypher-locked lab full of much newer secrets. Things were seldom slow. If I wanted to talk to somebody, I went upstairs.
There was a personal computer in everyone’s office, and we had access to the proto-Internet, but digital communication services were different back then and somewhat crude. There was no universal e-mail. We had a system installed by IBM called “profs.” It allowed us to send and receive messages on campus, but there was no profs connection to the outside, and the World Wide Web was lame compared to what it has become. The nearest thing to an Internet was the “Newsgroups.” The Newsgroups was a form of large, universal BBS (Bulletin Board System). Anyone could sign on to a specific subgroup, such as “alt.fusion,” and post a message or read postings left by other interested parties.87 The personal computer connection to it was by modem through a mainframe in the Richard Rich Computer Center. It was simple, eight-bit ASCII text, with no graphics. I had a cellular telephone, but it was bolted to the driveshaft tunnel in my car, between the front seats.
This morning I was sitting in Darrell Acree’s office with my feet up on his desk, sipping a can of Dr Pepper from the drink machine in the break room. Darrell had BA and MA degrees in mathematics and an MS in electrical engineering from the University of Kentucky. I considered him a valuable resource in subjects ranging from quantum electrodynamics to stoichiometry, and I could count on him for an enlightening discussion to begin my workday. We were in the eerie, dangerous stillness that exists between projects, and we would have to quickly scrounge up something to support our salaries.
Darrell’s office was on the main floor, but it was small and windowless, and it was at the nervous edge of the human traffic circle that flowed through the building. On one wall was an unframed print of van Gogh’s The Sower, on another was a plotter rendition of an MH-53J helicopter, and taped to his filing cabinet was a portrait of Jed Clampett from The Beverly Hillbillies.
The first topic of discussion this morning was an odd phone call I had gotten at 7:20 the previous night from Mark Pellegrini. Darrell had apparently received a similar phone call from Mark about something he saw on the MacNeil/Lehrer news report on the local public broadcasting station, channel 30.
Mark had a BS and an MS in “double-E” (electrical engineering) from Georgia Tech, and like the rest of us, he had worked at GTRI since graduation on myriad projects that at times seemed far afield of his formal education. In this racket, one had to be flexible. We were, for lack of a more accurately descriptive term, “techno-whores.” We would do anything, as long as it didn’t break the skin. Working at GTRI meant that we were paid by the State of Georgia, but the State was paid by external sources needing specialized research and development for which we were the lowest bidder. Most of the work was for the Department of Defense, and the traditional strongpoints of GTRI had always been radar measurements, advanced radar design, and foreign technology exploitation. We did a lot of secret work, and there were pockets of extremely focused radar expertise in the many GTRI buildings. Darrell’s office at 8:30 Friday was not one of them.
Mark’s calls concerned an apparent breakthrough in fusion-power research. Two electrochemists at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City had staged a scientifically strange news conference at noon on Thursday, breaking to the world that they had achieved a net power output from deuterium-deuterium fusion using an electrolysis cell the size of a water fountain cup. They had repeatedly referred to the process as “cold fusion,” to separate it from everybody else’s fusion reactor.
The common mode of fusion-power attempts to that point had been trying to outdo the Sun with millions of degrees of heat and nucleus-crushing pressures. In 1989, the United States government was going to put another $350 million into a continuing series of experiments trying to coax a net power out of one of the very large, complex, and power-hungry “hot fusion” machines scattered from Princeton to Lawrence Livermore. Forecasts were that it would take “another thirty years” of funded work to see positive results. The United States was competing with countries from Great Britain to Japan to see who could pour the most money into hot fusion. Worldwide, probably $10 billion had been spent trying to get more power out of a fusion reactor than was put into trying to achieve fusion. To claim to have jumped over forty years of heavy research and found the Holy Grail of nuclear science in a glass of water seemed strange, to say the least, and a bit reminiscent of Ronald Richter’s adventure down in Argentina.
It was also very irregular and Richter-like to make a scientific announcement in a news conference. The usual way is to publish a paper describing the breakthrough experiment in a refereed journal. A panel of anonymous referees would read the paper before publication, making sure that the claims were scientifically reasonable and adequately explained. There had to be enough detail that another scientist could use the paper as a guide and reproduce the experiment as described, confirming the claims.
Mark’s description of this miracle was too sketchy to make out what was going on. He did say that they were making neutrons, and that is a signature of deuterium-deuterium fusion. There is no chemical reaction that will release neutrons from the nucleus. If a neutron escapes, then there has been a profound disturbance on the nuclear level involving a million times more energy than the most energetic chemistry can achieve. I confidently dismissed it as two chemists having rediscovered one of the many ways to make neutrons using compact setups.
“That’s done all the time in A-bomb triggers. It’s not new,” I opined. “You can make neutrons with small systems, but there’s no way it’s an energy source.” At that time, the only system that could achieve a net power from fusion reactions was a thermonuclear weapon.
Darrell probed me for an opinion about the weird cold-fusion announcement from Utah, but honestly, I needed some details to even tell what they were doing, much less criticize it. We were debating the topic when Rick Steenblik bounced into Darrell’s office, looking even more enthusiastic than usual.
“Well,” he began, “What do you think?”
Darrell glanced at me, thinking, “Let’s slow this boy down before he starts spinning on his major axis.” He leaned way back in his chair, making the springs squeal. “Think about what, Mr. Rick?”
“Cold fusion! Haven’t you heard?” Rick’s kinetic enthusiasm could make me feel sluggish in comparison, but it could also stir the thought process. Sometimes knowing Rick was like being urged forward, being tugged at, but sometimes it was like being dragged by a car with my hand caught in the door.
“Oh, that. Yeah. Jim here thinks it’s spark fusion. There’s nothing to get excited about.”
“No! No! It’s not spark fusion.88 Didn’t you see the piece on MacNeil/Lehrer? It’s electrolysis. Deuterium into palladium. I have a tape of it, if you’d like to see it.”
I sat straight up. “You’ve got a tape? Where’d you get a tape?”
“The MacNeil/Lehrer hour is on twice. It comes on channel 30 at seven o’clock and on channel 8 at nine. I saw it first at seven, and then I taped it at nine.”
“There’s a VHS recorder upstairs in the Quiet Room. I’ll get a key to the room, you get the tape, and we’ll meet you there.”
I had met Rick Steenblik several years ago, when he was working in the Technology Applications Laboratory (TAL) on the other side of the campus. He was a research engineer with a BS in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech. He had grown up, to some extent, in Hialeah, Florida. I went to see his power plant simulator routine running on a modest Commodore 64 microcomputer. It was impressive, but I was blown away by his original design of a stereographics method. He pulled out a pair of handmade glasses having two prisms of unequal refraction indices bonded to each of the lenses. He brought up an ordinary-looking graphic on his Commodore screen, showing solid geometric figures, crudely rendered in color. Using the glasses, the figures jumped off the screen. The method did not separate left and right images to achieve stereo vision. It translated the color of the image into depth using the convergence angle of the eyes. Bluish objects were far away, and reddish things looked very close.89 It was ingenious. By the time he had worked a few years at GTRI, first as a student assistant, he already had patents pending. His first invention was a spiral solar-power sunlight collector.90
The working model of his spiral was now on the wall in his windowless top-floor office, crowded with three desks, a bicycle, and a large aquarium. Rick had left GTRI in 1984, hoping to find an environment that was less on the constant verge of a financial crisis, and he took a design engineer job at Auto Ventshade Company. There he was free to think and create to his heart’s content, as long as he created Ventshade products for automobiles. After a couple of years, he came back to GTRI, and he was earning a master of science in physics in the building across the street while working full-time. His specialty was optics.
The Quiet Room was thoroughly sound-insulated on the walls, the ceiling, and the floor. It had been configured years ago as a place to interrogate mynah birds in private. (Don’t ask.) Now, it was used for secret briefings or “read-ins” and as a storage space for unused office furniture. Chairs were piled up on the far wall. We took three chairs down and set them in front of the television monitor. Darrell closed the door. Rick switched on the VHS recorder, fed it the tape, and touched the Play button.
The crack of an atomic bomb detonation came over the speaker as on the screen a fireball turned into a mushrooming cloud of dust. Rick jumped forward and turned down the sound. The voice of Charlayne Hunter-Gault, a journalism school graduate of the University of Georgia, came on over the rumbling sound of the bomb’s shock wave. “There are two types of nuclear energy,” she began. “Fusion and fission. The most familiar is nuclear fission. . . .” The video turned to shots of the rising mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, Japan; the Three Mile Island meltdown; and the smoking wreckage of an RBMK graphite reactor at Chernobyl. The brief commentary pointed to the contrast between the destructive, dangerous, and expensive action of nuclear fission and the benign, gentle consequences of nuclear fusion using hydrogen isotopes. A final bit of film after the Chernobyl shots showed an aerial view of Elugelab Island being obliterated in 1952 by an 11-megaton tritium-deuterium fusion event. The casual viewer may have missed the joke.91
The scene then shifted to the studio, showing Hunter-Gault sitting in front of a picture of a Rutherford lithium atom, made obsolete in the 1920s with the advance of quantum mechanics. The caption, “Fused with energy,” was above the picture. She continued, “The advantages of fusion energy are many. It is less radioactive. Therefore the waste disposal problem is reduced, if not completely eliminated, and the power released by fusion would be inexpensive and abundant, capable of supplying the energy needs of the entire world. Here with us now to explain their work and its implication are the two researchers.”
The scene cut to a close-up of Dr. B. Stanley Pons, an electrochemist and former restaurant manager who enjoyed cooking and had unusually large lenses in his glasses. He was forty-six years old; was born in Valdese, North Carolina; and earned his PhD at the University of Southampton in England.
“Stanley Pons is a professor of chemistry at the University of Utah. His collaborator . . .”
The scene switched to Dr. Martin Fleischmann, retired professor of electrochemistry and occupier of the Faraday Chair at the University of Southampton. He also liked cooking, and the two men enjoyed the sport of snow skiing. He was sixty-two years old; was born in Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia; and got his PhD at Imperial College in London. He spoke clearly with a hint of a European accent, his comb-over was looking thin, and his eyeglass frames were the type we wore back in the early 1960s. The plastic was dark across the top but clear on the bottom halves of the lens frames. They both had the pale, serious, “put up wet” look of active research scientists.
“. . . is Martin Fleischmann, a professor of electrochemistry at the University of Southampton in England. Gentlemen, to you both, congratulations. Your discovery is being hailed as a breakthrough. Professor Pons, how accurate is that?”
“Well,” Pons began, modestly. “It’s, uh, sort of a breakthrough in the field of nuclear fusion. Uh, we have a cell which is comprised of a block of metal, which is immersed in deuterium oxide, which is heavy water, and the amount of heavy water present on the earth is enormous. It is virtually an inexhaustible source of fuel, if it can be used for a fuel.” Pons had sort of leapt over any explanation of how this block of metal was causing two deuterium nuclei to fuse together, something to which nature was opposed, but we remained patient, straining to hear critical details.
The interviewer continued with what was for us a useless question. “What makes it heavy water?”
“Unlike normal water where each of the hydrogen atoms in the water have a single proton, the hydrogen atoms in heavy water have both a proton and a neutron. So it’s a heavy isotope, if you like, of water.”
“And, you were saying?”
“In this particular cell, we use an electrical current to change the water into deuterium gas.”
The camera switched to a close view of the cold-fusion cell, lying on its side on a tabletop. We leaned forward in our seats and squinted. On brief glance, it looked like a test tube inside a larger test tube, with a white Teflon stopper on top and a Teflon ring inside to support the end of the inner tube. It was hard to tell, but we got the impression that the anode of the electrolysis cell was at the center, long, thin, and vertical, and the cathode was a wire wrapped in a helix, using the inner glass tube as a support. Out the top, wires and vents emerged.
Pons continued. “These are then forced into the lattice, the metal lattice, by the current, and are highly compressed in that lattice. They are compressed to the point and are retained close enough to each other and for a long time, that fusion occurs.”
The interviewer nodded in apparent understanding. “All right. I want to get into the details of that experiment . . .” (Finally!) “. . . in the simplest terms possible, but first let me ask you . . . Mr. Fleischmann, this is also being hailed as the ideal energy source. Is that the case?”
Looking distinguished and professorial, Fleischmann answered. “Yes. There would be many advantages in using it as an energy source, because as was referred to in the run-in to this program, the reaction would be clean, the fuel supply would be, and, this Professor Pons has said, the fuel supply would be plentiful, and it could, in this embodiment, be carried out in a very simple manner.”
“. . . the fuel supply being inexhaustible,” added the interviewer. “Does that relate to this ‘heavy water’?”
“Yes,” continued Fleischmann, “it’s the content of heavy water in the sea which would be the fuel in this instance.”
“Does it indeed have the potential of transforming the world’s energy source?” Where were these details, albeit simple, that we were getting to?
“If the engineering problems can be solved, certainly. Yes.”
“Is that a big if?”
“Wha . . . ? I beg your pardon?”
“Is that a big if?”
“Well, in any scientific investigation there are always the problems of a science, and there are the technical problems. But, we do not see such massive technical problems as there might be in some of the other approaches that have been tried so far.”
“You have described this process as ‘ridiculously simple.’ Something that could be done in a freshman chemistry class. Mr. Pons, you did this in the kitchen, right?”
Pons gave a nervous chuckle. “I think the kitchen thing has been blown up a little today . . .”
“Well, it’s pretty sexy. I think maybe that’s why . . .”
“Yeah. Well, the . . . uh . . . it’s the simplest of electrochemical cells. It contains two electrodes. It contains a large palladium electrode that serves as the device for containing the deuterium. It contains another electrode, an anode, which is wrapped around that but is electrically isolated from it except by the solution between them, and you simply pass a current between the two electrodes.”
“How did you know you were creating nuclear fusion?”
“First by the enormous amount of heat that was generated. There is no known chemical process or other process that we’re aware of that could explain such huge amounts of energy, and subsequent to that we have detected particles that are associated with nuclear fusion reactions over and above normal background. Those particles would be neutrons.”
“How long did this go on?”
“We have sustained cells for several hundred hours over the last few years. This latest experiment we’ve been running one or two hundred hours at very high energy outputs.”
“Mr. Fleischmann, was there anything else that you could see or feel during the course of this investigation that gave you more information that you were generating fusion?”
“No. I think that Professor Pons has given really the correct description. The main indication that we had nuclear fusion was the extremely large release of heat energy from the cell.”
“Scientists the world over and governments have spent billions of dollars with very sophisticated equipment trying to generate the incredible amount of heat that . . . that would simulate the heat in the Sun to create this reaction. What led you to think that you could do it at room temperature?”
“The conditions in this cell are completely different to the conditions which are now investigated in the conventional approaches to nuclear fusion. I think one can best explain it in simple qualitative terms by saying that if you pass an electric current into the cathode under the conditions which we have used, then if you try to achieve the same conditions in the cathode by compressing of the gas, you would need a billion-billion-billion atmospheres. That is, a billion-billion-billion times the pressure at the surface of the earth, and it seems it is this enormous compression of the species in the lattice which made us think that it might be feasible to create conditions for fusion in such a simple reactor.”
The billion-billion-billion, or ten to the twenty-seventh power, was a big number to throw at us, and it made the intended impact. Fleischmann went on to say that when captured in the crystal lattice of palladium, any isotope of hydrogen had an effective density greater than it had in the form of a gas. It was, in fact, greater than hydrogen compressed into a liquid, higher than liquid hydrogen compressed into hydrogen ice, and still higher than hydrogen ice compressed into its metallic form. That was a stunning statement, and we could see how it could mean fusion. At that kind of pressure, you could fuse tapioca pudding. These electrochemists had twiddled with hydrogen fusion at the opposite end of the spectrum from where everyone else had been trying to achieve more than a momentary event. They had looked where nobody had thought to look, at the cold end of the temperature spectrum, banging deuterium nuclei together using a quirky attribute of palladium metal and discovering a previously unknown cross-section resonance.
All nuclear interactions, from neutron capture to fusion, are probabilistic events, with the probability expressed as the effective size of the target particle, expressed in barns. In a situation in which an interaction probability between a moving subnuclear particle and its target is very high, the target is “as big as a barn.” The probability of two deuterons fusing is extremely low, due to the fact that both are charged electrically positive and they repel each other. They simply cannot get close enough to use the strong nuclear force to hold them together and fuse into a heavier element.
Exceptions, however, have been known to occur. The primary example is fission by slow-moving (thermal) neutrons. In 1934, Dr. Enrico Fermi, coinventor of the nuclear-fission reactor, had measured the fission probability of neutrons hitting uranium-235, and had found that when the incoming neutrons were slowed to room-temperature speed, the probability of fission increased dramatically.92 By pure chance, his research team in Rome, Italy, discovered a sharp, high upward blip on the graph of neutron speed versus fission probability, a resonance, at the bottom end of the speed scale. The best way to get uranium to fission was not to use fast neutrons but to use very slow ones. Who would have predicted this outcome? This discovery led to the design of the first reactor using slugs of uranium distributed throughout a matrix of pure graphite, used to slow fission neutrons down to thermal speed. Had Stan and Marty discovered an analogous phenomenon in the fusion realm? I wasn’t sure. The rest of the interview wandered off to discuss acid rain and the greenhouse effect. Fleischmann indicated that their paper describing their experiments would probably be published in May. The two scientists ended the interview with a vague warning to anyone who would dare replicate their experiment, implying a danger factor.
Having watched the taped interview, Darrell, Rick, and I now knew as much about cold fusion as anyone else in the world, with the possible exception of Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann. Rick and Darrell caught fire and wanted to commence a confirmation experiment immediately. I could see the need, but I would have to think about it. Unfortunately, the journalist had not known the right questions to ask. It was clear that the palladium electrode in the cold fusion cell was loaded with deuterium atoms using simple electrolysis. But for electrolysis to occur, there had to be something dissolved in the heavy water to make it conduct electricity—an electrolyte. What electrolyte were they using? Darrell thought sulfuric acid. What purity was their heavy water? Mixing a little sulfuric acid into heavy water would introduce a contamination of non-heavy hydrogen. Would this inhibit the fusion reaction? What voltage were they applying across the fusion-cell electrodes? At what level of electrical current did it operate? We and everybody else were forced to wait until sometime in May to get the details needed to replicate the experiment and confirm their wild-assed claim. One thing the three of us agreed on: Pons and Fleischmann either had a lock on the Nobel Prize for physics or they were crazy. There was no middle ground.
On that day, March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez, a 987-foot-long oil tanker, crashed into the Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, spilling eleven million gallons of crude oil into the delicate subarctic environment. A worldwide energy angst had been growing for a long time, and this particular incident kicked it into orbit. People were ready for a positive change and a release from a nagging worry about the atmosphere, oil supplies, and imagined piles of radioactive fission-dirt. The cold-fusion announcement was timed perfectly, punching a human resonance.
On Friday evening, the Pons and Fleischmann cold-fusion experiment was the second-biggest story on NBC Nightly News, right behind the big oil spill in Alaska. It was in the newspapers on Saturday, but there were no further technical details.
A couple of things about the announced phenomenon bothered me greatly. Both Pons and Fleischmann had claimed over and over that their apparatus was producing “tremendous” heat and “measurable” neutrons. On the news, they were shown hovering over their operating fusion reactor, closely examining the apparatus as the oxygen and deuterium bubbled. That didn’t make any sense. It should have been the other way around—tremendous neutrons making measureable heat. If they were, in fact, making tremendous heat, then they would have been killed by the heavy neutron flux and secondary radiations broadcasting out of the unshielded deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction. Maybe the problem was their definition of “tremendous?” The cooling water in which the fusion cell was suspended wasn’t boiling or even misting up their glasses.
The concept of a thin electrode made of palladium holding deuterons together with a force 10 times atmospheric pressure was hard to grasp. It seemed like an energy conservation problem. What was doing the work of forcing the deuterons together, and why did the palladium cathode not explode from the internal force?
We, Pons, and Fleischmann did not realize it at the time, but there was nothing new about cold fusion using electrolysis-loaded palladium. History was repeating.
The year 1926 was a turning point in Germany. The Germans had been on the losing side in World War I, and they had been forbidden from rearming by the Treaty of Versailles. This restriction included rigid, hydrogen-filled airships, which had been used as bombers to harass London and Paris, and this really crimped the economy in Friedrichshafen, home of Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH. Since 1917, Zeppelin had been building airships in the United States with Goodyear Tire and Rubber, and the German engineers were very impressed with the Americans’ use of helium instead of hydrogen as the fill-gas. The hydrogen was extremely flammable, but the helium was completely inert and would not burn under any condition. They wanted helium, and they wanted to build airships back in Germany.
On December 1, 1925, the Locarno Treaties were signed in London, giving the Germans permission to, among other things, build rigid airships, and by early 1926, Zeppelin was in production. Zeppelin wished for helium, but the only industrial-scale production was in the United States, where it was considered a strategic material and could not under any circumstances be exported.
Two Austrian chemists, Friedrich “Fritz” Paneth and Kurt Peters, working at the University of Berlin, thought they had the answer to the helium problem. Although the neutron, a component of the atomic nucleus, had yet to be discovered, and the structure of the element-defining nucleus was still murky, the chemists thought that helium could be synthesized by fusing hydrogen nuclei together. The combination medium would be metallic palladium, known to all chemists as having a strange affinity for hydrogen. A block of palladium, just standing on its own, will absorb 900 times its volume in hydrogen with no encouragement from compression. Palladium was well-known as a “hydrogen-leak window,” used in high-vacuum systems to introduce hydrogen, one atom at a time, to be electrically accelerated or otherwise used in several physics experiments. A section of an otherwise gas-tight system made of palladium would admit hydrogen as if it were a hole in the wall.
Thinking that a 900-times compression would surely make hydrogen atoms fuse together, Paneth and Peters made a thin capillary out of palladium, heated it red-hot to expand the distance between palladium atoms, and directed hydrogen gas through the center. Cooling the palladium, they expected the additional compression given by the shrinking of the crystal lattice of the metal to ensure fusion of the hydrogen absorbed under heated conditions.93
They were not disappointed. Spectroscopic analysis detected helium mixed with the excess hydrogen flowing out the end of the palladium capillary tube. The amount was small, but in this first experiment they had demonstrated the synthesis of an element, not by radioactive decay on the heavy end of the periodic chart of the elements, but by combination, on the bottom end of the chart. Several sources of possible error were considered and eliminated. The chemists composed a detailed description of their groundbreaking experiment and its results, “Über die Verwandlung von Wasserstoff in Helium” (The Transmutation of Hydrogen into Helium), and sent it to the German chemistry journal, Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellshaft. The interesting paper was received on August 17, 1926, and was published in the September issue, volume 59. The distinguished English journal Nature published a full account of the experiment as a news article in the October 9, 1926, edition.
Follow-up experiments were disastrous. Paneth and Peters found, to their ultimate embarrassment, that helium floating around in the lab had contaminated the experimental apparatus. In fact, all of their glassware showed helium inclusions. They had discovered a problem that would bedevil experiments, particularly those involving high vacuum, for decades to come. The fact is, with every breath you take, you inhale atoms of helium. It seeps out of the ground and most building materials, as the slight inclusion of uranium or thorium in most minerals decays slowly, emitting alpha particles. An alpha particle is nothing less than a helium atom, once it readily acquires a couple of stray electrons, and helium will diffuse slowly through the best glassware seals. The chemists immediately submitted retracting papers to the German and English publications. The retraction with explanations of the helium detection errors in Nature appeared in the May 14, 1927, issue, volume 119. It was the right thing to do.94
Dr. John Tandberg, humorist, radio personality, and industrial chemist at Electrolux in Sweden, read Paneth’s and Peters’s first disclosure paper in 1926 concerning hydrogen fusion catalyzed by palladium. He was excited by the idea of fusion and was correct in thinking that the fusing together of hydrogen nuclei to make helium was a change in nuclear structure and similar to nuclear decay. As such, it would release a million times more energy per fusion than any chemical reaction would release per reaction. Chemical reactions twiddled with weakly held, outer-orbital electrons in atoms, while the slightest change in the atomic nucleus involved much more powerful forces and would result in greater net energy release. He therefore saw the fusion of hydrogen as a clean, compact energy production scheme, and helium synthesis was a side product.
In the Electrolux laboratories in Stockholm, Tandberg and his collaborator, Torsten Wilner, set up a unique fusion experiment, using electrolysis to load the palladium. In a glass beaker filled with water he connected a piece of palladium to the negative terminal on a battery and a platinum wire to the positive terminal. Under the electrical influence of the battery voltage, the water disassociated into hydrogen and oxygen, with the hydrogen gas bubbles piling up on the palladium electrode and the oxygen bubbles on the platinum electrode. The palladium sucked up all the hydrogen, presumably subjecting it to enormous pressure within the crystalline lattice of the metal.
Tandberg reasoned that simply loading the palladium with hydrogen was not going to produce fusion. He decided to subject the preloaded palladium electrode to a high-voltage discharge, giving the metal a temperature jolt to trigger a cascade of fusions. Calculating that the energy release from one high-voltage arc across the palladium would be the equivalent of setting off one kilogram of dynamite, he bravely sent Wilner home, instructing him to tell the authorities exactly what had obliterated the Electrolux laboratory once the smoke cleared.
The experiments produced the deafening bangs of an overdriven electrical arc, white-hot flashes, transformer smoke, and rattling glassware, but they didn’t produce any detectable radiation, helium, or net energy.
Never discouraged, Tandberg soldiered on. He ignored Paneth’s and Peters’s retraction of their experimental findings, apparently believing that they had been bought off by the American helium cartel. On February 17, 1927, Tandberg applied for a Swedish patent for “A method for production of helium.” The patent examiner found Tandberg’s description of the method hard to follow, and the application was denied.
In 1932, deuterium was discovered as a contaminant in ordinary water. Seeing its value as something more likely to fuse, Tandberg begged a purified sample of it from Dr. Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. With deuterium oxide substituted for the water used in his original setup, Tandberg’s improved cold-fusion technique was functionally identical to that used by Pons and Fleischmann.
Energy production from the palladium setup was difficult to pin down, and Tandberg’s exploits in cold fusion, unknown outside Scandinavia, faded away. Tandberg advanced to the head position in the Electrolux chemistry lab, worked on a home refrigerator design, and retired in 1962. He died on November 3, 1968, in Lund, Sweden.95
Ideas for fusion, hot or cold, kept rising, but they would pop and submerge. Fusion and its promise of pollution-free power never lost its allure, but it remained beyond the grasp of science and technology, as the quest for the hidden trick, the undiscovered cross-sectional resonance, continued.
A bright spot flared in 1947, and it would eventually lead a crooked path to an odd convergence in Utah in 1985. In 1947, after wartime service in the Air Ministry, Sir Frederick Charles Frank, FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society) was employed to do research at the University of Bristol physics department in Bristol, England. Intrigued by a new cosmic-ray particle discovered by the head of the department, he hatched an idea.
The new particle was the muon, which is very similar to the electron, only it is 207 times heavier. It has the same negative electrical charge as the electron, and it can orbit the proton at the center of a hydrogen atom just like an electron, but being heavier, it rides 207 times closer to the nucleus. The problem with fusion was always the stand-off distance between nuclei, caused by the fact that, stripped of the electron cloud by the extremely high temperature required for fusion, the protons repel one another. What if you keep it cold and retain the electrons? The size of the atom, due to the radius of the electron orbit, still keeps the protons (nuclei) apart. What if you could shrink the orbits? With muons replacing the electrons in hydrogen or deuterium atoms, they could snuggle up 207 times closer than normal, greatly increasing the probability of spontaneous fusion.
Papers were written discussing muonic fusion in theoretical terms, including one by Andrei Sakharov, father of the Soviet atomic bomb, in 1948. In 1956, Louis Alvarez at University of California, Berkeley unaware of the previous theories, found evidence of muonic fusion in a bubble chamber photograph.96 He was briefly exhilarated, believing that all the fuel problems of mankind had been solved. However, when the excitement calms down, there are always two problems with cold fusion using muons: a muon has a mean lifetime of 2.2 millionths of a second, and it takes more energy to artificially generate muons than can be recovered from muonic fusion.97 Hope is diminished, but not eradicated.
Leonid I. Ponomarev of the Soviet Union announced a possible deuterium-tritium (D-T) muonic fusion in 1977, and in 1982, there was a new push for muon-catalyzed cold fusion at the Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico. Involved in the experiments was Dr. Steven E. Jones from Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah.
The team achieved something that had never been accomplished before. They achieved eight D-T fusions using one miserable muon. Artificially made muons directed into a liquid deuterium-tritium mixture would replace the electrons in two close-together hydrogen isotopes. If the isotopes happened by chance to be deuterium and tritium, which together have an unusually high fusion cross section, there was an enhanced chance of spontaneous fusion between them. As soon as the fusion happened, the muons would spin off and find other hydrogen isotopes to engage, and on the average, one muon could infect eight successful fusions before it disintegrated into an electron and two neutrinos. To achieve break-even fusion, in which as much energy is generated as it takes to make it happen, an average muon would have to participate in about one thousand fusions. In any other endeavor, this would be seen as a possible failure to succeed, but in the optimistic world of fusion research, this was a breakthrough.
Steve Jones managed to keep the muon fusion concept alive for another five years with Department of Energy (DOE) contracts, but by 1985, the fire was dimming out and he turned to another idea. Fellow physicist at BYU Paul Palmer had been interested in the gases trapped in volcanic ash.
Helium is in the noxious mixture of gases that escape from a volcano, and helium is temporarily trapped in the lava and rocky debris that come up from beneath the surface in an active volcano. Helium gradually diffuses out of any material, into the air, where its light weight causes it to rise to the top of the atmosphere and be blown away by the solar wind. This is the common helium-4 isotope and is understood to be constantly produced by alpha-particle emissions from radioactive nuclides in the Earth’s crust. Palmer was finding helium-3 as well as helium-4, and this seemed a little strange.
In the nucleus of helium-3 are two protons and one neutron. Four billion years ago, the Earth was probably contaminated with a measurable helium-3 content, left over from the supernova debris from which rocky planets are formed, but in those billions of years it was thought to have all escaped into outer space. Something underground had to be making new helium-3, and an explanation was fusions of deuterium nuclei. The deuterium-deuterium fusion (D-D) results in one helium-3, one neutron, and 3.2 MeV of energy.98
There are 156 deuterium atoms per million water molecules in and on the Earth. The chances of two being next to each other and encouraged to fuse, even in the high temperature and pressure involved in geologic processes, seems vanishingly small. Why would there be D-D fusions inside the Earth? Jones concluded that hydriding, the tendency for certain metals to absorb protons into their crystalline structures, could encourage deuterium nuclei to fuse. Nickel is a hydriding agent, and there is a lot of nickel in the earth’s core. In 1986, Jones started trying to make fusion by loading up palladium, which is a more enthusiastic hydriding metal than nickel, using electrolysis.99
Incredibly, at the University of Utah (UU), 45 miles away, Pons and Fleischmann had the same idea and began work on the same experiment hoping for the same results at the same time. As Peter Dehlinger, patent attorney for the university, would say some years later, “You’d think the gods would’ve put them a little farther apart.” The two secretive projects bumped into each other by 1989, and the two factions, BYU and UU, reached a handshake agreement: they would each submit their papers describing their cold-fusion discovery to the journal Nature on Friday, March 24, shipping by FedEx from the same depot at the Salt Lake City airport, and may the better team win.
The potential fame and fortune was too great to leave to chance, and the UU administration convinced Pons and Fleischmann to jump Jones by having a press conference on March 23. This stratagem had not occurred to Jones. His cold-fusion experiments using palladium to hydride heavy water produced, at best, barely detectable neutrons and no heat worth measuring. This seemed a lot more reasonable than Pons and Fleischmann’s claim of tremendous heat, but the fortune potential in Jones’s findings was a lot smaller.100 This was the point at which we and the rest of the world intersected cold fusion on that Thursday evening in 1989.
By the time I got to work Monday morning, Rick and Darrell were finalizing the confirmation experiment plan. I had to admit, I was curious about this out-of-left-field claim. We could set it up on a tabletop in one afternoon and get this over with.
Rick’s excitement was contagious. As I entered his office, he swung around in his chair. “You won’t believe,” he began, “how difficult it is to find palladium. It’s not like buying aluminum, or steel, or copper. It’s a precious metal. You buy it like you buy gold, only it’s not as common as gold.”
I blinked. “So, you’ve found some? Where is it? Where is the money coming from? Do we have a project number?”
“It’s in Chicago, and they can sell us, get this, one ounce. Only one ounce. It seems that there was a run on palladium this morning, and the price went up 20 percent in a couple of hours, and they don’t know why.” Rick slapped the desktop and laughed. “They are mystified. The price of palladium has been stagnant for years, and suddenly it takes off.”
That sounded ominous. I had to sit down. “So, you’re saying that we aren’t the only ones who want to try this experiment?”
“Yep. The metal brokers don’t have a clue. Guess how much an ounce costs.”
“I have no idea.”
“A 99.9% pure ingot, drop-forged in a single block and weighing one ounce, costs a hundred and four dollars. They will have it here tomorrow by plane. We have to pick it up at a bank, over in Vinings.”
“And how are we paying for it?”
“We’re not buying it.”
“What?”
“I’ve been talking to Billy Livesay. Do you know Livesay?”
I looked at the ceiling. “Uh, yeah. I know him from the Nuclear Safeguards Committee. He works over in the Baker Building, in the Electromagnetics lab?”
“Right. Well, I’ve been talking to Livesay about hydrogen coupling in metals. Turns out, he’s a world-class expert on hydrides. Back during President Carter’s alternative energy push, he studied hydrides as a hydrogen storage method.”101
“Makes sense.”
Dr. Billy Livesay from Texas had a PhD in metallurgy, I thought. His location in the Baker Building, which was one block west of us, was a hotbed of earth-science projects. Or, at least it was a warmbed. Carter’s vision of a hydrogen-based energy economy had seen better times, and the money had dried up years ago.
“. . . and,” Rick added, “Livesay wants us to skip the palladium and use lanthanum-nickel 5. He says it’s a much better hydriding agent than palladium, and he has a sample we can use.”102
“No.”
“What? Why? We wouldn’t even have to buy any palladium.”
“You’re jumping ahead, Rick. This is an extremely dubious claim. We have to confirm that the process exists before we can try to improve it. Besides that, buying the palladium is the first test. If we can’t buy palladium, then the experiment is not meant to be.”
“Okay. I’ve been thinking about that. If we can get five people to throw in twenty-one dollars apiece . . .”
“No. We’re not doing this in your kitchen. We’re doing it at Georgia Tech. The institute pays for it, or it doesn’t count. Let me know when you’ve wrangled a charge number. I’ve got to go see Darrell.”
I wanted to talk about electrolysis, and Darrell was the closest thing we had to a chemist in our building. He had worked as a lab assistant in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Louisville from 1964 to 1972, while pursuing a degree. I began, “How many volts will it take across the electrodes to disassociate water, with sulfuric acid in it?”
Darrell sat back and twiddled his thumbs. “Oh, I don’t know. Action will probably start at two or three volts.”
“But why didn’t they mention any electrolyte in the interview? Does that bother you?”
“Not particularly. The electrolyte has no active role in the process, other than making the water conduct electricity. Just a few drops of sulfuric acid will do, and I can’t see it being much of a contaminant. Do we have any heavy water lined up? Don’t they have plenty of that down at the reactor?”
“About twenty-three thousand gallons, give or take a gallon. But it doesn’t belong to them. It’s on loan from the DOE, and besides, it’s heavily contaminated with tritium and helium-3. I think I know where I can get a small bottle of it. Over in the Baker Building. On a shelf in the laser lab.”
“How pure is it?”
“I don’t know. How pure does it need to be?”
“I don’t know.” Darrell was starting to squirm as the unknowns formed into a pile. “How pure is a palladium ingot?”
“Ninety-nine point nine. Is that pure enough?”
“I don’t know.”
I tried to bring it back down. “Well, look. We’re not trying to make energy. We’re not measuring heat. The D-D fusion results in neutrons and helium-3s, in equal measure. No use trying to detect helium-3s. There’s too much outside explanation for that. It’s the neutrons we want. Establish a background count, and turn on the electrolysis cell. If any neutrons over background are produced, then we’ve got something. If any neutrons, if one neutron, is produced by a glass of water with three volts across it, then that, sir, is a Nobel Prize for doctors Pons and Fleischmann. That’s all there is to it.”
The following day, Tuesday, March 28, at about ten o’clock, our cold-fusion quest quietly slipped over the border, a dimensionless line separating that which cannot be done from that which cannot be stopped.
Rick popped into Darrell’s office, where we continued to pile up unknowns and loose ends. He announced that his division chief, Hugh Denny, a member of the infamously tight-fisted management, counting pennies and keeping his domain afloat in the storms, was paying for the palladium ingot. “I just danced into his office and asked him, right up front. He just looked up and said, ‘Shit. Buy it with petty cash, and leave me alone.’”
My excuse for not trying cold fusion had just been jerked out from under me. Rick placed the order. Our palladium would be at the bank tomorrow morning.
On Wednesday, early, I drove the three of us to the bank in Vinings, 13 miles north of the campus. Darrell put it on his MasterCard, and the teller slid a small, round-cornered slab of hydriding agent into my hands. I took it out of its plastic sleeve, and we stared. The face of the ingot was finely coined, with a beautiful polish on the slightly dished surface. Written on the face in raised letters was “Deak-Perera, since 1928, 99.9 PALLADIUM, ONE TROY OUNCE, 5631.” On the back was a repeating, octagonal pattern, slanted at 45 degrees, containing the word “ENGLEHARD.”
“It looks like . . . platinum,” I mumbled.
“No, not really,” said the teller. “Here’s platinum.” She produced a shiny, round token, coin of the realm for the Isle of Man. I could see the difference. The platinum looked colder, and not as attractive. I passed the ingot to Darrell.
“Well,” he said, fondling the metal, “We’re in deep now. This object cannot be resold, given away, discarded, or destroyed. It’s property of the State of Georgia. It can only be used for the purpose for which it was purchased, or it can be surplused.”
On the way back, we talked work assignments. Darrell would find some glassware and some sulfuric acid. Rick would clear out a space in Livesay’s storage room in the Baker building. I would get the nuclear instruments and a power supply. We all knew that this experiment would have to be done quietly, with an informal secrecy. The chances of it working were so slight, it seemed too silly to be trying. There were more important, pressing matters at GTRI, and this was just something we wanted to try. We scattered as soon as we got back.
I walked down the hill to my old stomping ground, the research reactor building. Years ago, there had been a big nuclear presence in GTRI, which had then been named the Engineering Experiment Station, or just “the Station.” The reactor and its research facilities were another laboratory branch, and were owned not by the school but by the Station. As nuclear research lost its reason to live in the late 1970s, ownership of the white elephant and everyone who worked in the building were transferred to the School of Nuclear Engineering. I was probably the only researcher with nuclear specialty left at GTRI.
I went through the front door, breezed through the security checkpoint, turned left, then right, and down the back hall to the health physics office. “Jerry,” I blurted, “I need a portable neutron detector.”
Jerry Taylor looked up from what he was writing and decided to start from the top. “Hi, Dr. Mahaffey. How’s it going?”
“Just awful. Look, I need one of those little Eberlines.”
“How’s Carolyn doing? We haven’t seen her in a long time down here.”
“She’s fine. You know, the handheld BF-3, with a built in moderator.”
“Come to think of it, we don’t see much of anybody.”
“And a set of fresh batteries. And a Geiger counter.”
“You say you need a detector?”
“That’s right.”
“Sure. What for?”
“Huh?” I started to sweat.
Jerry, by this time, had changed the slouch-angle in his chair. “What’s it for? Just curious. Do you have any neutrons?”
“No. None at all.” Oh God. He’s going to make me fill out a radiation work permit. Please, Jerry, just give me the damned thing. I hate filling out forms.
“You don’t have any neutrons at all, but you need something to count them with?” he asked, beginning to catch on.
“No! I just want to be absolutely sure I don’t have any neutrons.”
A little smile of recognition came over Jerry’s face, and he nodded. “Ahhhh. You’re going to try cold fusion.”
“Yeah, that’s right. But, look, don’t tell anybody. It’s just something we’ve got to try. You know, to see if it works.”
Jerry laughed, got up, and started sorting through his keys to find the one for the equipment cabinets. “Sure. Let me know if it works. We’ve been talking about it for days down here, but nobody’s doing anything about it. At least you’re working on it.”
He handed me an Eberline PNC-6 portable neutron counter, normally used by health physics to check for unusual neutron activity around reactor experiments. It looked very similar to a Geiger counter, except that clipped under the chassis was an aluminum box filled with paraffin. A little brass tube, about an inch in diameter and connected by a cable back to the chassis, fit into a hole bored in the front of the box. The tube was sensitive only to thermal neutrons, the type that would escape a nuclear reactor and be floating around a reactor like gas leaking from a cracked hose on a grill. To detect fast neutrons, as were made by fusion, the tube stayed in its hole, and the paraffin slowed them down to thermal speed.
In my other hand I carried away a Ludlum survey Geiger counter. I could not predict any need for a Geiger counter, which would detect gamma and beta rays, but it seemed foolish to set up an experiment possibly involving atomic nuclei without one. In the vanishingly remote possibility of something happening, I would hate to have to explain afterward why I had not thought to monitor for ionizing radiation. For this experiment we would be scratching around in a totally black unknown. I signed for them, begged a variable DC power supply and a set of leads from the electronics shop at the end of the hallway, and walked over to the Baker Building.
The rest of the conspiracy was already in place and fussing over the apparatus. Billy Livesay couldn’t make it. He was in meetings all day. I connected up the power supply and positioned the PNC-6 to pick up neutrons spraying out of the palladium ingot. It was hanging by an alligator clip in a beaker of 100 cubic centimeters of deuterium oxide, 99.8% pure, with a platinum wire circled around it in a spiral. Both electrodes, the palladium cathode (negative) and the platinum anode (positive) were supported by a ring stand. Rick set up a video camera to record the event on tape, I adjusted the power supply to deliver three volts across the electrodes, and Darrell measured out three drops of sulfuric acid into the beaker.
“Are we ready?” I inquired.
“Ready here,” replied Rick, looking up from behind the camera.
“I can’t think of anything else,” said Darrell.
“Well,” I said, “who wants to turn it on? Darrell?”
“I think I’ll just stand back here, out of harm’s way.”
“Rick?”
“I’m working the camera.”
“That leaves me,” I reasoned. It was 2:20 on Tuesday afternoon. The amplified speakers attached to both radiation counters, the Geiger and the neutron detector, were making random popping noises about two every minute. That was the background, caused by the occasional cosmic ray or one of its daughters having made it all the way down the atmosphere from outer space, a gamma ray being flung out of the concrete floor, or just a random electronic spasm somewhere in the long paths from detector tube to sound reproduction. I flipped on the power-supply switch.
The power supply hummed slightly in the otherwise dead silence, with the occasional click from a detector. I could hear Rick’s tape running. After a few minutes, the novelty of the situation became stale. I spoke up. “Maybe we should look at it.”
Darrell responded. “Are you sure you want to get close to it?” By that morning, we had been advised by the rudimentary but active electronic media why Pons and Fleischmann had advised caution: Sometime in the autumn of 1984, one of their cold fusion setups had self-destructed. An electrolysis cell, similar to the one we were presently watching, had been running for seven months when, over one night, the one-cubic-centimeter palladium cube being used as the cathode apparently vaporized, leaving the setup disheveled. The information was sketchy.
Mark Pellegrini, the one who had brought up this subject originally, had taken the rumor in an oddly serious way, and that morning he had almost convinced Darrell that attempting the cold-fusion experiment was an immoral and dangerous act. Putting three volts across a glass of water could kill everyone on campus, and if we persisted, then we should at least broadcast a warning campus-wide so that people could choose to go home. Pons and Fleischmann interpreted the overnight palladium disappearance as definitive proof of principle. Obviously, to them, the palladium had suddenly reached a temperature far above the boiling point of palladium metal. I took it as a possible theft of their cathode.103
With the challenge so formally posed, I went over to examine the setup. “Nothing on the Geiger counter. Serious nothing on the neutron counter. Scintillator shows background.”
As a backup gamma-ray detector, I had brought my trusty PRI scintillator from my office. Unlike the other counters, it just showed the rate of gamma-ray hits on its detection crystal on the meter, with no event-marking clicks on a speaker. It was one hundred times more sensitive than the Geiger counter. It could find radiation in a common red brick. It was indicating nothing unusual. The electrolyte appeared to be boiling. Oxygen was streaming vigorously off the platinum helix, as expected. There was a faint rushing noise, a white noise, caused by the tiny bubbles breaking at the surface of the heavy water. There were no corresponding bubbles at the palladium anode. One would expect there to be two deuterium bubbles for every oxygen bubble. “We’re not getting any D-2 at the cathode,” I reported.
Rick offered, “That’s because the palladium is hydriding. It’s soaking up the deuterium as fast as it can electrolyze it. Are you sure there’s no radiation?”
“Positive. No gammas, no betas, no neutrons.”
And so it boiled. We turned the power up. We turned the power down. We checked the batteries in the instruments. We lifted out the palladium piece and looked at it. We thought. We speculated. We debated, lectured, and stirred the heavy water. We zoomed the camera in and out. We shifted the positions of the electrodes. We took the neutron probe out of the paraffin box and waved it around. Nothing made neutrons. Nothing.
We had not proven the existence or the nonexistence of a Pons and Fleischmann cold-fusion effect. All we had proven was that there was more to this experiment than had been revealed in that press interview. If the guys in Utah wanted to play rough and on the sly, so be it. It would not stop us or any of the hundreds of curious researchers around the world. We had all stopped what we were doing and with grim determination were diving headfirst into cold fusion. The race was on.
_________________
86GTRI at that time was divided into six or seven laboratories housed in five buildings on campus, a clump of buildings and a long-field testing range at Lockheed Georgia, north of town, and satellite offices in strategic places, such as the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. Our laboratory, the Electronics and Computer Systems Laboratory (ECSL), had about one hundred people inhabiting the three-story Electronics Research Building. The budget for GTRI was about $100 million in 1989.
87There were hundreds or perhaps hundreds of thousands of subgroups. There was no directory, nobody took the time to count them, and more subgroups were being added as the seconds ticked by. That morning on the “profs” campus mail system I found and deleted a memo from a project director reminding us of special security requirements at Warner Robbins Air Force Base, a press release announcing the results of someone’s project over in the electromagnetics lab, and a copy of the last progress meeting of project A-8265.
88The day before, I had regaled Rick and Darrell with a brief lecture concerning compact Z-pinch fusion reactors used as neutron generators, and the same day I had received an unsolicited catalog from the Sigma Chemical Company, which sells deuterium oxide (heavy water), lithium deuteride, and several other deuterated chemicals. Darrell would later interpret these happenings as prophetic.
89For a complete explanation, see US Patent number US4597634A, “Stereoscopic process and apparatus,” at www.google.com/patents. Richard A. Steenblik holds thirty-nine US patents and uncounted foreign patents. His “Unison” product is protected by twelve unusually voluminous patents, containing more than 1,200 claims, or about 100 claims per patent. On average, a US patent contains 18 claims. In comparison, the author’s name is on a measly two patents.
90The sunlight-focusing collector reminded me of a Fresnel mirror, but it wasn’t. It was ingeniously unique. It was a spiral cut from mirrored Plexiglas, tensioned to make the outer edges of the spiraling plastic lean in and cause incoming sunlight to reflect and concentrate at a point in front. He carefully laid his newly completed working model on the backseat of his car, so as not to disturb the focusing, and he went to perform some other task. When he returned, he found the car filled with opaque smoke. The sunlight through the window glass, focused neatly on the headliner, had significantly reduced the car’s resale value. The windows were up, limiting the available oxygen inside and occluding the sunlight with the smoke, or the car would have burned to the ground. He and Georgia Tech benefited greatly from his stereo-vision patent, named “ChromaDepth.”
91We had started the tape 13 seconds into the news segment, and we had missed the opening sentence, putting us right there at the detonation of the Trinity test of the atomic bomb in 1945. See the first seven minutes of the interview on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00IFpIBpa9Y. The video quality of Steenblik’s VHS tape was much better than this YouTube rendition. We watched it twice that morning.
92Fermi had discovered nuclear fission, but he did not realize it. He thought that neutron bombardment had activated uranium into two new radioactive elements, which he named ausonium and hesperium. The importance of his discovery was that when neutrons were slowed down by colliding with the hydrogen nuclei in a wooden tabletop, they were much more likely to interact with uranium. He only misunderstood the nature of the interaction. This phenomenon was noticed when one of his activation experiments was transferred to a wooden bench from a marble-topped bench. The heavy marble top did not slow the neutrons down, but the wooden top, made of hydrocarbon compounds, did. The fission action was finally sorted out in January 1939 by Lise Meitner and her nephew, Otto Frisch, and Fermi’s discovery of the fission resonance in uranium-235 finally made sense. Otto Hahn of Germany was given credit for the discovery, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for it. The fission cross section of U-235 actually increases on a gradual slope as the speed of incoming neutrons increases, but at the lowest level of energy, there is a narrow blip of enormous fission cross section, called the “fission resonance.”
93This was Paneth’s and Peters’s fourth attempt to synthesize helium. They had also tried submitting hydrogen to an electrical discharge in an ozone-making apparatus, putting hydrogen in a Geissler tube with aluminum electrodes and bombarding certain salts with cathode rays. The heated palladium tube gave positive results, but a better-controlled experiment followed, in which “paladinized” asbestos was heated.
94Friedrich Paneth fled Germany in 1933 when Adolf Hitler assumed full control of the country, and he became a professor of chemistry at the University of Durham in England. In 1943, he was appointed head of the chemistry division of the joint British-Canadian atomic bomb project in Montreal. He returned to Germany after his retirement from the University of Durham in 1953 and became director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry until he died in 1958. The mineral panethite and a crater on the Moon are named for him. Kurt Peters remained in Germany during the war and worked at IG Farben, working on catalysts. After the war, the American military government appointed him as trustee for what was left standing of IG Farben. After that, he returned to academia in Vienna, Austria. He died in 1978.
95I once gave a lecture on cold fusion at a Mensa convention in Atlanta. My lecture was canned by that time, and I always would mention that Dr. Tandberg had written a book describing his cold-fusion experiments. It was only rumored to exist, and nobody had reported finding a copy, so I jokingly said that anyone having a copy of the book should see me after the lecture. As I turned off the projector and unclipped my microphone, a woman from the back of the audience came up and plopped a copy of Tandberg’s book in my palm. I was stunned. Unfortunately, it was written in Swedish.
96A bubble chamber is a container full of a transparent fluid, heated to just below the boiling point. A high-speed particle zipping though it will leave a trail of tiny bubbles, and a magnetic field running vertically through the chamber helps to determine the electrical charge on a particle. Negatively charged things curve right and positively charged things curve left, and given the speed of the detected particle, the radius of the curve indicates the mass. Electrons and muons both curve left, but the muon moves with a much longer radius of curvature. Watching as the long-curve particles disintegrate in the midst of a bubble track, the half-life is determined. The first fluid tried in a bubble chamber was beer, soon replaced by liquid hydrogen.
97The mean or average life span of a muon is 1.44 times its half-life. Muons are like every other decay-prone object in the nuclear world in that they decay exponentially, and the relative decay speeds are usually expressed as half-lives. After one half-life, half of the original crop of particles has decayed. In this case, the average time that a muon has to work on hydrogen fusion is more important than its half-life.
98As it turns out, there are natural sources of helium-3 that have nothing to do with fusion. It is in constant production by high-speed cosmic rays hitting nitrogen-14 nuclei in the atmosphere, the decay of tritium, and lithium spallation. Interplanetary dust collecting on the ocean floors, having sifted down through the atmosphere, is estimated to contain 1,200 metric tons of helium-3, and as much as 7 percent of the primordial helium-3 is still in the Earth despite the length of time it has had to diffuse away. As much as 7 percent of the natural gas you may burn in your home furnace and water heater is helium, and a few parts per million of that is primordial helium-3.
99The element with the highest affinity for hydrogen isotopes is uranium. The second greatest affinity is shown by palladium. Unfortunately, alpha-phase uranium immediately collapses into a white powder upon hydriding. The reader is challenged with finding the hydriding characteristics of beta-phase uranium. In the early days of hydrogen-bomb development, when the fission and fusion components were thought best colocated, a beta-phase uranium deuteride/tritide was considered for the active ingredient of the device code-named Alarm Clock. This research remains classified SECRET.
100 To put Steve Jones the scientist in perspective, note that in 2005 Jones presented research indicating that the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings in New York on September 11, 2001, was not caused by airliners crashing purposefully into the sides. These disasters were, according to his findings, caused by previously installed thermite bombs placed with engineering precision against the vertical support structures in the buildings. They were set off by the United States government, with the destruction sequence perfectly synchronized with the sacrificial airliner crashes. This absurd and inflammatory accusation, presented as science, put him under review at BYU, but he resigned before the investigation was completed. His further work involves the study of archeological evidence of Jesus Christ having visited ancient Mayans in Central America and radiocarbon evidence of pre-Columbian horses in the Western Hemisphere, both in support of the Book of Mormon.
101 If you are wondering about the accuracy of this dialogue after a quarter of a century, I made detailed notes at the time, kept an hour-by-hour timeline, and, by the end of April, had begun writing a book about the experience. It was still fresh, and the word exchange memories had not had time to drift and improve with age. I’ve condensed it down a bit so that the chapter won’t drag, but this dialogue is about as authentic as remembered dialogue can be.
102 We didn’t realize it until March 29, Wednesday afternoon, but Steve Jones had already tried lanthanum-nickel in 1988, along with titanium, aluminum, and iron as hydrides. He used both electrolysis and pressurized gas to load these hydrides, and found “tantalizingly positive” results using electrolysis on titanium.
103 Accounts differ, but it is agreed that young Joey Pons, Stan’s son, was in charge of that fusion cell. He had lowered the electrical voltage and gone home for the night. Upon returning the next morning, he checked in on the cell, saw that the setup was modified, and asked his father to take a look. Later work found that if subjected to electrolysis for many months, the surface of the palladium electrode collects silicate corroded off the inner walls of the glass enclosure, and this greatly increases the resistance of the electrolysis cell. Using a voltage-controlled power supply, the current will rise accordingly, the resistive heating in the cell increases, and the water can start to boil. This effect is not caused by any nuclear reaction.