Brigham Young University physicist Steven E. Jones is finally stepping out of the shadows for his own moment in the sun.
In the past several months, Jones has appeared before thousands of scientists to validate his research on cold nuclear fusion. Wednesday his research was confirmed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory at the Cold Fusion Phenomena workshop in Santa Fe.Despite the confirmation, some scientists at the workshop scoffed at Jones' claims and at cold fusion in general.
In a telephone interview with the Deseret News, Jones said, "This is something we have been looking at for years."
Jones said his cold fusion experiments don't produce nearly the energy claimed by others - and nothing approaching what is needed to produce a marketable energy source - but, he said, most reports to date on cold fusion, including a handful presented during the New Mexico workshop, confirm his research.
Cold nuclear fusion became a household word for many people when University of Utah electrochemist B. Stanley Pons and his British colleague Martin Fleischmann announced March 23 that they had produced excess heat from a fusion experiment.
They claim to have produced excess heat, some neutrons and helium by using electrodes of the metal palladium and platinum in a container of "heavy" water where hydrogen was replaced by deuterium.
If successful, the table-top experiment could result in a virtually inexhaustible source of energy, they said.
Jones, a pioneer in cold nuclear fusion, followed with his own announcement saying he had detected low levels of neutrons in a similar experiment but nowhere near the amount needed to produce energy.
At the workshop, sponsored by the Los Alamos laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists from Los Alamos and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy said they detected the same amount of cold fusion neutrons as has Jones.
"This was the results of our collaboration with the University of Bologna, Italy and Los Alamos," Jones said. "They announced the results and laid them on the table."
The rate of neutrons is much smaller than those reported by the Pons-Fleischmann experiment, he said, and "it is clear to everybody here that the level of neutrons they report is wrong. It is a factor of a million larger than what we are actually seeing reported in papers."
The various tests conducted by Los Alamos and the Italian team show that the number of neutrons reported from energy bursts and random emissions is too small to account for the excess heat, Jones said.
Jones said the BYU research received its "careful confirmation" Wednesday and "our claims are being repeatedly confirmed."
But Jones does not disregard the Pons and Fleischman experiment and says there are still a few loose ends to tie up before calling the Utah phenomenon an artifact.