A delightful story;;; reproduced with the kind permission of the author.
Cold Fusion Travelogue - Akito Takahashi
This essay is an English translation of 常温核融合紀行, Appendix in my
book 常温核融合 2008 (Cold Fusion 2008), Kogakusha Publ. 2008
F2.1: Announcement of cold fusion
In March 1989, it was a small newspaper article at first. It was about the success of nuclear fusion in America using a small electrolysis device like a test tube. On a business trip to the Japan Atomic Energy
Research Institute in Tokai-mura, I met Professor Masaharu Nakazawa of the University of Tokyo on the JR Joban Line. He denied the rumor, saying, "I can't believe it. I can't imagine that two deuterium atoms can
be close enough to each other to fuse together. It's a hoax." However, after a few days, it was reported on the front page of every newspaper, which surprised me. It was the beginning of the cold fusion fever.
I later became acquainted with these chemists, Fleischman and Pons (FP) from the University of Utah, who just claimed to have observed a large amount of excess heat from the cathode of palladium metal during the
electrolysis of heavy water. Excess heat is the amount of heat that exceeds the power input. The amount of heat was more than 200 times higher than the upper limit of energy that can be explained by chemical
reactions per atom. Therefore, they claimed that it could only be described as an unknown nuclear reaction. Deuterium nuclear fusion (DD fusion) was immediately thought of. If a DD reaction occurs, neutrons and tritium should be generated in equal amounts. A small amount of neutrons and tritium was detected, but the amount was 6-8 orders of magnitude less than the excess heat level of considerable
nuclear reaction rate. It is thought to be an unknown nuclear fusion reaction at room temperature. This announcement was leaked to the media by the University of Utah. Meanwhile, S. Jones of Brigham Young
University (BYU), a famous Mormon university in the same state of Utah, published a paper in the famous British scientific journal Nature, claiming that he had detected "2.45 MeV neutrons" in a similar electrolysis
experiment, which was evidence of DD fusion. Thermonuclear fusion research is very large-scale, as seen in ITER and other facilities, and requires a large amount of people and money. It is extremely difficult to
achieve nuclear fusion on earth. If nuclear fusion could be easilyachieved at room temperature using table-top equipment, it would be a dream technology. Moreover, it would be clean, with almost no radiation
being emitted. Newspapers and magazines wrote about it, and television aired special programs.
At the end of March 1989, the Atomic Energy Society of Japan, which was then meeting at Osaka University, held an emergency special meeting. I, who was a planning committee member for the society, was in charge of planning the meeting. Professor Koyama of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, who had been reported in the newspapers as being one of the first to succeed in a follow-up test, was invited to give a lecture, and comments
were made by Assistant Professor Tanabe of Osaka University's Nuclear Engineering Department and the Laser Research Laboratory. On behalf of the Atomic Energy Society of Japan, Professor Inoue Akira of Tokyo Institute of Technology and Professor Higashi Kunio of Kyoto University also held a press conference. Similar scenes must have been seen at physics, chemistry, nuclear science, and other academic conferences around the world at that time....continues.
