Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [84]
He was. He remembered the story I had written in 1999 and hinted darkly in his e-mail reply that the government might try to keep bubble fusion a secret, just as they had done with his earlier research. “Right after you did your story my project got classified. I hope something like this does not happen to this area. That would be a shame.” In the rest of the note Taleyarkhan clearly showed that he thought he had made an important discovery. “This current area could have somewhat revolutionary and far-reaching consequences with very significant impacts on everyday life and a variety of disciplines (ranging from materials synthesis to medicine to food sterilization to counter-terrorism to power production and the like).” Power production. There it was. He hedged, and he put it last in his list, but it was there. Taleyarkhan thought he had found a path to fusion energy. This was going to be a big story, one way or another. Taleyarkhan and I made an appointment to speak on Friday, February 8. On the evening of February 6, I learned that the bubble fusion article was on hold. Taleyarkhan’s employer, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was trying to apply the brakes. Gil Gilliland, an associate director of Oak Ridge, apparently called Science and complained that the paper had not yet passed Oak Ridge’s internal review process, which had been ongoing since November. (This was an unusually long time to spend on a review.) Gilliland promised to get the review finished as soon as humanly possible, and the manuscript was rescheduled for publication on March 8. I was asked to hold off on the interviews until the paper was back on track. I didn’t know it at the time, but the scene at Oak Ridge was getting ugly.
In fact, a battle was brewing. A number of physicists at the laboratory were extremely doubtful of the bubble fusion research, and their doubt triggered a flurry of activity behind the scenes. Shortly after Taleyarkhan submitted the manuscript—with Oak Ridge’s permission—to Science, the skepticism in the lab began to mount. Lab officials apparently asked two other Oak Ridge scientists, Dan Shapira and Michael Saltmarsh, to repeat the bubble fusion experiment. Saltmarsh was a fusion scientist who had testified before Congress about the cold-fusion affair. Shapira studied exotic fusion reactions induced by high-energy beams of ions. Both had the expertise to find neutrons from bubble fusion—if those neutrons existed.
Calling for other scientists to repeat an experiment before publication was an extremely unusual step, and it likely struck Taleyarkhan as a vote of no confidence, but Oak Ridge insisted. The lab seemed determined to avoid becoming the center of another cold-fusion fiasco. So, with Taleyarkhan’s assistance, Shapira and Saltmarsh set up an exact copy of the bubble fusion experiment, except for one detail: they used a bigger and better neutron detector. Not only was it physically larger (making it more sensitive, because more neutrons could strike it), but it also had more sophisticated electronics. Unlike Taleyarkhan’s detector, it could tell the difference between neutrons and gamma rays.
When Shapira and Saltmarsh analyzed the data they had gathered, the results were damning. They found no sign of fusion, no evidence for neutron emission from the bubbling deuterated acetone. They did not try to verify Taleyarkhan’s findings of tritium, but noted that if the tritium had been produced by fusion, the bubbling solution should have produced a million neutrons per second, and that level of activity should easily have been picked up by the neutron detector. According to their equipment, though, nothing was happening in the