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Path: santra!tut!draken!kth!mcvax!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mit-eddie!mit-amt!straz From: straz@mit-amt (Steve Strassmann) Newsgroups: sci.physics,alt.fusion Subject: Congressional Testimony by R. Ballinger, MIT Message-ID: <3761@mit-amt> Date: 3 May 89 08:36:17 GMT Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA Lines: 188 Xref: santra sci.physics:6472 alt.fusion:867 I asked Prof. Ballinger for a copy of his Congressional testimony, and his secretary kindly gave me a Mac disk and permission to distribute it on the net. The original is a Microsoft Word document, which I've converted to plain ascii and enclosed below. I've also sent the Mac document to Vince Cate (vac@cs.cmu.edu) in case he wants to make it publically accessible, along with the other papers (thanks, Vince!). I have two other short documents, but not in electronic form. One lists the names of 19 faculty and grad students as members of the "MIT Cold Fusion Group". The other, is Prof. Ballinger's bio, which says (in part) that has a joint appointment at MIT's Dept. of Nuclear Engineering and MIT's Dept. of Material Science and Engineering. His areas of specialization are (1) Environmental effects on material behavior, (2) Physical metallurgical and electrochemical aspects of environmentally assisted cracking in aqueous systems, (3) Stress corrosion cracking and hydrogen embrittlement in Light Water Reactor systems, (4) The effect of radiation on aqueous chemistry and stress corrosion cracking, (5) Experimental fracture mechanics techniques and analytical methodology, and (6) Materials development for cryogenic applications. Steve Strassmann grad student, MIT Media Laboratory (not a fusion researcher!) straz@media-lab.media.mit.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Comments on "Cold Fusion" Testimony presented to Committee on Science, Space, and Technology U.S. House of Representatives Washington, D. C. by Professor Ronald G. Ballinger Department of Nuclear Engineering Department of Materials Science and Engineering Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts April 26, 1989 Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee: I am Ronald Ballinger, a faculty member of the Departments of Nuclear Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I am very grateful for your invitation to convey my views related to the recent reports of the achievement of "cold fusion". I am a member of an interdisciplinary team at MIT that is involved in an attempt to reproduce the reported "Cold Fusion" results of Professors Pons and Fleischmann of the University of Utah. The teams' principals include Dr. Ronald R. Parker, Director of MIT's Plasma Fusion Center; Professor Mark S. Wrighton, Head of the Chemistry Department; and myself. (A complete list of team members and areas of expertise is included). The team is composed of experts in the fields of physical metallurgy, electrochemistry, plasma physics, instrumentation, and radiation detection. The team has been involved in attempts to reproduce the results, reported by Professors Pons and Fleischmann since shortly after their results were released to the press and for publication in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry. As I am sure that you and the members of this committee are aware, any breakthrough in the area of energy production that has the potential to supply current and future energy needs in a non polluting manner must be given serious attention. Quite apart from its impact on basic science, the results recently reported by Professors Pons and Fleischmann, should they prove to be correct, represent such a breakthrough. The basic nature of their results have been described and discussed by earlier testimony before this committee. Basically, the team at the University of Utah has reported the fusion of deuterium atoms in a palladium matrix at room temperature. As evidence that "cold fusion" has taken place the production of excess heat and neutron radiation has been reported. The reported magnitude of both of these is such that their presence could be verified by other investigators. Much more modest results have been reported by a team of investigators at Brigham Young University. We feel that it is important to distinguish between the BYU results, which are of scientific interest but of limited or no practical significance and those of the University of Utah which, should they prove correct have major implications for future energy production. Since the reports of these results, a number of teams worldwide have been attempting to reproduce these results. To my knowledge, with the possible exception of the Stanford results and results from Europe and the USSR of which I have no personal knowledge, no team has been successful. As far as the results of attempts by the team at MIT are concerned, we have been thus far unable to scientifically verify any of these results. This is in spite of the fact that we are employing calorimetry and radiation detection methods of even greater sophistication and sensitivity than those of the University of Utah. Having said this I can assure you that these negative results have not been the results of a lack of effort. The MIT team has been, as I am sure is the case with other teams, laboring around the clock. However, we and the other teams have been handicapped by a lack of enough scientific detail to guarantee that we are actually duplicating these experiments. In the scientific community the soundness of experimental or theoretical research results is evaluated through peer review and duplication. For results such as those reported, whose potential impact on the scientific community and the world are so great, this review process is absolutely essential. Unfortunately, for reasons that are not clear to me, this has not happened in this case - at least so far. The level of detail concerning the experimental procedures, conditions and results necessary for verification of the Pons and Fleischmann results have not been forthcoming. At the same time, almost daily articles in the press, often in conflict with the facts, have raised the public expectations, possibly for naught, that our energy problem has been "solved". We have heard the phrase "too cheap to meter" applied to other forms of electric energy production before. And so the scientific community has been left to attempt to reproduce and verify a potentially major scientific breakthrough while getting its experimental details from the Wall Street Journal and other news publications. Experiments conducted in haste and based on insufficient detail coupled with premature release of results have often resulted in retractions and embarrassment on the part of the scientific community - caught in the heat of the moment. I guess we are all human. The result of this unsatisfactory situation has been that a healthy skepticism and, in some cases, distrust of the reported results has developed. We at MIT share this skepticism. At the risk of becoming too technical in my comments, I feel that I must be a bit more specific with regard to the source of this skepticism. As I mentioned earlier the major results, reported by the University of Utah group are that there has been a generation of excess heat and the measurement of neutron radiation. By excess heat I mean that there has been a measurement of more energy produced than has been supplied to the system. From our standpoint, the key point of verification is the detection of neutron radiation. From an engineering point of view, however, the importance of excess heat production is critical. On these two critical points we have found that the results reported in the few available published documents from the University of Utah are inconclusive or unclear. For example, with respect to the detection of neutrons, critical products of the fusion reaction, the reported results are confusing. They either do not agree with or are not presented completely enough to show that they are consistent with what one would expect from the emission of neutrons from the deuterium fusion reaction. Specifically, the gamma-ray spectrum shown in the Fleischmann/Pons paper and attributed to neutron emission does not exhibit a shape and intensity that demonstrates the increase reported in the number of detected neutrons above normal background. Further, the reported rate of neutron emission and level of tritium production are consistent with natural background. The results have nevertheless been reported as "significant". Those inconsistencies can only be resolved by a full disclosure of the details of the experimental measurements for examination by the scientific community. Until such time as this occurs we feel that the data is insufficient to demonstrate the presence of neutrons. As far as the issue of excess energy is concerned we are also faced with a confusing situation. While the presence of excess energy is documented in the Journal of Analytical Electrochemistry paper, the method by which this excess energy was determined is not clear. With metals, such as palladium, which act as hydrogen storage media and at the same time as catalysts for many chemical reactions, both situations which can result in discontinuous chemical energy releases, it is critical that a total energy balance over time be done. To us it is not clear that this has been the case. Until this issue is clarified we are unable to make a judgement concerning the excess energy issue. In conclusion I feel that it is safe to say that the scientific community is (1) excited about the possibility of a significant advance in the area of fusion energy research, (2) but is, at the same time, skeptical of results that have not been verified to this point and (3) is very frustrated at the methods by which the discovery has been handled both in the scientific and non-scientific community. Thank you.