Participants Debate Cold Fusion During MRS Spring Meeting Panel Session
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MRS President R.P.H. Chang introduces panelists at the late-news session on cold fusion (left to right): R. W. Siegel (moderator oftlie session and 1989 Spring Meeting cochair), j . Rafelski, R.A. Huggins, M. Rosenbluth, H.K. Birnbaum, and D. Overskei.
Capping an exciting day at the 1989 Spring Meeting of the Materials Research Society in San Diego, a special three-hour session on "cold fusion" was held Wednesday evening, April 26, following the plenary lecture by two-time Nobel laureate Prof. Linus Pauling. (See "Linus Pauling Addresses MRS in San Diego" elsewhere in this issue.) The session, the largest session in MRS history with over 1,700 participants, was sponsored by the Society to provide MRS meeting attendees with an unbiased scientific forum for the presentation and discussion of results and issues regarding recent "cold fusion" announcements in the press. The announcements had captivated the world's interest the preceding month while being met with a healthy amount of scientific skepticism. Such skepticism was not lost on the nation's cartoonists, many of whose works on "cold fusion" were shown during the evening's proceedings. The special session was organized and moderated by Meeting Cochair Richard W. Siegel, with the help of Angelica M. Stacy and Robin F.C. Farrow (also Meeting Cochairs) and MRS President R.P.H. Chang. A distinguished panel of invited speakers from the nuclear fusion and materials research communities was assembled to discuss the purported fusion of deuterium nuclei dissolved in palladium or titanium
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at or near room temperatures. The session considered the phenomenon of cold fusion from a perspective of what is already known about (1) nuclear fusion in the context of theoretically understood phenomena and (2) hydrogen and its isotopes in metals, particularly Pd and Ti, from many years of theoretical and experimental research. It also provided an opportunity for attendees to hear—and question—firsthand two of the groups that had made observations of the effects (excess heat release and neutron production) attributed to cold fusion. The panel of invited speakers consisted of Dr. David O. Overskei, senior vice president for the fusion division of General Atomics; Prof. Howard K. Birnbaum, director of the Materials Research Laboratory, University of Illinois-Urbana; Prof. Marshall Rosenbluth of the University of California at San Diego; Prof. Robert Huggins of Stanford University; and Prof. Johann Rafelski of the University of Arizona.
Overview of "Hot Fusion" Overskei "warmed u p " the audience with an informative introduction to the field of traditional "hot fusion," the fusion of deuterium and tritium nuclei in an extremely high temperature plasma under conditions of magnetic confinement, and the progress being made in this area. He
pointed out the well-known precipitous drop in fusion cross sections as the temperature of the nuclei falls into the kilovolt region, which has appeared to preclude any significant nuclear fusion occurring in the vicinity of room temperature. Gener
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