Pons, Stanley

In March 1989, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons reported their discovery of cold nuclear fusion. They announced that during electrolysis of a solution of hthium hydroxide in heavy water (DjO) with a cathode made of massive palladium, nuclear transformations of deuterium at room temperature can be recorded. This announcement, which promised humankind a new and readily available energy source, was seized upon immediately by the mass media in many countries. Over the following years, research was undertaken worldwide on an unprecedented scale in an effort to verify this finding. 

Dr. Rolison is a member of the American Chemical Society, AAAS, the International Zeolite Association, the Materials Research Society, and the Society for Electroanalytical Chemistry (SEAC). She wrote Ultramicroelectrodes, the first textbook in this very active research area of electrochemistry, with Martin Fleischmann, Stanley Pons, and Peter Schmidt. She and Henry White guest-edited an issue of Langmuir devoted to the electrochemistry of nanostructured materials (February 1999). Dr. Rolison was a member of the Advisory Board for Analytical Chemistry and is a current member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry and Langmuir. She is a member of the Board of Directors for the SEAC and has served since 1997 as editor of the society s newsletter, SEAC Communications. 

The scientific world was stunned in March of 1989 when two electrochemists, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, reported that they had obtained evidence for the occurrence of nuclear fusion at room temperatures. During the electrolysis of heavy water (deuterium oxide), it appeared that the fusion of deuterons was made possible by the presence of palladium electrodes used in the reaction. If such an observation could have been confirmed by other scientists, it would have been truly revolutionary. It would have meant that energy could be obtained from fusion reactions at moderate temperatures. 

On March 23, 1989, the University of Utah held a press conference that shook the energy world. Electrochemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced reproducible cold fusion 10% more energy released than supplied. They passed an electric current through palladium and platinum wires in a container of heavy water and lithium sulfate. Cold fusion is nuclear fusion at ambient temperature. When the two hydrogen atoms in a water molecule are replaced with deuterium (called heavy hydrogen because it has one proton and one neutron), it is called heavy water. 

In 1989, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann startled the scientific community with their claims that they could achieve fusion under ordinary experimental conditions (so-called cold fusion). One of the nuclear reactions they claimed to have achieved is as follows. Calculate Q (or the amount of energy) that is produced by this reaction. 

II. Electrodes Under Thin-Layer and Semi-infinite Diffusion Conditions and Indirect Coulometric Iterations, William H. Heineman, Fred M. Hawkridge, and Henry N. Blount Polynomial Approximation Techniques for Differential Equations in Electrochemical Problems, Stanley Pons Chemically Modified Electrodes, Royce W. Murray... 

Precision in Linear Sweep and Cyclic Voltammetry, Vernon D. Parker Conformational Change and Isomerization Associated with Electrode Reactions, Dennis H. Evans and Kathleen M. O Connell Square-Wave Voltammetry, Janet Osteryoung and John J. O Dea Infrared Vibrational Spectroscopy of the Electron-Solution Interface, John K. Foley, Carol Korzeniewski, John L. Dashbach, and Stanley Pons... 

Some readers of this book will consider that this chapter on cold fusion represents Martin Fleischmann s greatest scientific failure however, the authors believe that this may instead be one of the greatest contributions that Martin Fleischmann, along with Stanley Pons, made to science [1,2]. Unfortunately, early attacks on this field were vigorous, even resorting to personal and unscientific criticisms [3-5], and progress in this field has been slow because of the consequential lack of funding and the difficult problem... 

It was scientists who exposed the false findings behind the cold fusion case in 1989, when a pair of researchers (Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons) publicly claimed (mistakenly) that they had produced fusion and heat production during the electrolysis of heavy water it was careful and persistent application of scientific methodology that identified the errors in the claim from CERN that neutrinos were superluminal and could travel faster than light. 

John K. Foley, Carol Koneniewski, John L. Dashbach, and Stanley Pons... 

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