POISON AND A SHOULDER SHRUG

Apart from the confirmed F&P heat, the month brought two other encouraging points: 1) Prof John Appleby of Texas A&M found that when lithium ions in the electrolyte were replaced by sodium ions, the heat effect was quenched; when lithium ions were reintroduced, the effect reappeared. 2) On May 14, Pons' col-laborator Walling revealed (in an interview to a member of the Usenet computer net) that they had spectroscopically detected helium 4 as a gas coming off the electrodes, and performed control experiments noting its absence at the beginning of the run and when working with "dud" palladium samples.

Both these points are important: the second, if confirmed, would confirm fusion. Lithium, too, could be involved as a proton-producing nuclear reactant [as suggested by reader Ed Manning [AtE May 89].

It is not, by itself, the palladium and the deuterium, nor the other ingredients and setups that have been used in all of the ex-periments, including the ones that don't work. What, then, do the hundreds of experiments not have in common?

Poisons and impurities, among others.

Poison is the name given by electrochemists to an extremely small quantity of some chemical that is added to the electrolyte to affect the deposits on the electrodes (catalytically). In particular, the maximum "loading" of palladium by deuterium (the capacity of Pd to absorb D) is 0.8 atoms of deuterium per atom of pal-ladium. Poisoning the electrolyte will increase the loading to a value well above one, according to some reports to as much as two. Higher loading means closer proximity of the deuterium atoms, and a better chance for fusion.

Chemical impurities in the palladium will disrupt or otherwise affect its crystal structure, and perhaps allow higher loading. The extrusion vs. casting effect may be in this category also.

The poisoning may not have been done deliberately so far, but it will set in anyway by the type of form used for casting. There is any amount of poisons, effective and useless. Each lab did its own cast-ing or had somebody do it for them. That alone could explain the seeming inconsistences.

Take the far removed analogy of "doping" in semiconductors. The main material is silicon, which is doped by a very small amount of (say) gallium arsenide. Here we know exactly what the doping does; but imagine that somebody had discovered a transis-tor by growing silicon crystals and attaching base, collector and emitter to them, but not knowing how the current amplification worked and not realizing that doping was necessary. His great dis-covery would be imitated by many, but only a few would acciden-tally dope it, and with the right material at that.

The rest would shout "incompetence and delusion." But please do not take this possibility as a proof of cold fusion. The P&F heat effect has now been shown genuine, but its origin remains un-known. It could be fusion, or it could be something else. The some-thing else is a shoulder shrug, but fusion would break some accepted theoretical rules.

So the puzzle remains a puzzle. But hope remains alive.