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Inston-Salem Ournal Winston-Salem, N.C Great Expectations Tell Me Why SCIENCE Duke focuses on winning it all Judge undecided about calling Reagan & MEDICINE The Nation, Page 6 Page 4 • Ewing leads Knicks past Hornets • There are no lightweights in Final 4 Picture That • Is NASCAR ignoring crews' safety? For some, drawing can spell relief Sports Section Brickey, Ferry, Smith Accent, Page 29 Judge Gerhard Gesell INSTON-SALEM OURNAL WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. e TUESDAY, MARCH 28, 1989 44 PAGES e 25 CENTS LATE BLOOMER: Scientific Pathfinder Had Roots in N.C. By Greg Hitt was financed with $100,000 of their own that is most famous for its Waldensian his• JOURNAL REPORTER money. tory. B. Stanley Pons was just another kid ''We were just regular Pons, 46, graduated from Wake Forest Pons' family traces its roots to the from a small town in North Carolina when in 1965 with a bachelor's degree in chemis• Waldensians, a Protestant sect from Italy he came to Wake Forest University in boys doing regular try. John W. Nowell, the retired chair- that settled in Burke County in the late 1962. things." man of the chemistry department, remem• 1800s to escape persecution, Richard Pons Back then there was little about the bers Pons as a hardworking, "good stu• said. But despite the Waldensian influ• Valdese native to separate him from the - Richard Pons dent, but not that much better than anyone ence, Valdese wasri't much different from crowd, except that he was an athlete Brother of B. Stanley Pons else." any other provincial Southern town. with better-than-average grades who want• Nowell taught Pons in a class in phys• "We would ride around a lot when we ed to study chemistry, say those who ical chemistry, generally taken by those ei• were boys," said Richard Pons, adding that knew him then. cal of the notion that his experiments ther pursuing medical careers or ad• they played football and basketball and As his brother, Richard Pons of Hick• were conducted at room temperature and vanced chemistry degrees. ran track to keep themselves occupied. "It ory, put it, "We were just regular boys do• done with no more equipment than could "We used math and physics to under• was a small town. There wasn't much to ing regular things." be found in a typical college lab. stand chemistry," Nowell said Sunday. "It do but gather at the community center to All that changed last week, when Nuclear fusion, the power that fuels was basic work. I suspect that he's prob• talk and meet with friends or maybe go Pons, now the chairman of the chemistry the sun, is regarded as an ideal non-pollut• ably learned a heck of a lot since then. out and eat some place." department at the University of Utah, ing source of energy. Thousands of re• "He was an awfully energetic fellow, E. Worth Campbell, who taught sci• stepped out of a crowd of researchers to an• searchers, spending millions of dollars, have sort of an entrepreneur," Nowell added lat• ence at Valdese High School, said Pons nounce that he and a British colleague been searching to achieve controlled nu• er. "He went home a lot of weekends to was a good student but not a bookworm. had harnessed the uncontrolled power of clear fusion for more than 30 years. work for and with his dad." "We talked a good bit about atomic AP WIREPHOTO the hydrogen bomb. Pons and Martin Fleischmann of the Pons' family owned a number of small energy in those days," said Campbell, now B. Stanley Pons (left) and Martin Fleisch• The claim stunned the world of sci- University of Southampton in England said textile mills near Valdese, a community of mann say their research took 51/2 years. ence, setting off a chorus of naysayers criti- that their research took 51/2 years and about 3,000 in eastern Burke County See SCIENTIST, Page 5 ter several weeks of excitement, the claim was disproven. Scientists have SCIENTIST since been extremely skeptical of any Continued From Page 1 such claim. Pons has said that the idea for his an assistant to the president at Cen• experiment arose about six years ago tral Piedmont Community College in when he noticed some unusual re• Charlotte. sults from an experiment in separat• "It was a pretty new subject, and ing isotopes by electrochemical the students and I were interested. means. He and Fleischmann, whom You've got to remember, in the late Pons met while finishing his doctoral '50s and early '60s, there was a lot of degree in England, pondered the re• hype about nuclear fission - and sults during a drive across Texas and even some talk about atomic cars - during a hike up a canyon outside so it was a topic that everyone was Salt Lake City. interested in." Later, while swapping sips of Jack Although Polls did well in science Daniel's whiskey in the Pons family and math, his mother, Jeannette kitchen, the two came up with a Pons of Valdese, said that she strategy for the experiment. doesn't remember science as some• Pons' experiment consisted of thing he wanted to devote his life to. wrapping a platinum wire around a "I don't even remember him hav• pencil-thin rod of palladium metal ing a chemistry set," she said yester• and sticking the assembly into a test day. "But this whole thing has just tube filled with heavy water - or been wonderful - like a dream. He water rich in deuterium - to create never talked much about his experi• an energy cell. ments and work. I knew he was work• According to information released ing on something, but I didn't think at the news conference, an electric it was anything like this." current sent through the platinum wires forces deuterium nuclei into AFTER PONS LEFT Wake the palladium. Trapped within the Forest, he did graduate work for two framework of the palladium, the deu• years at the University of Michigan terium nuclei are brought close and eventually obtained his doctor• enough together to overcome their ate in biochemistry from the Univer• mutual repulsion - and thus fuse. sity of Southampton. He has taught at the University of FLEISCHMANN AND PONS Utah since 1983. said that they knew fusion was tak• Last week, at a news conference in ing place because they detected heat, Salt Lake City, Pons and Fleisch• neutrons, tritium and helium - all mann announced that they had set expected byproducts of fusion reac• off a fusion re .ction in a test tube tions. that had lasted for more than 100 Their claim that they achieved hours. room-temperature fusion has not The reaction, they said, passed been ruled out by experts in chemical what is known as the break-even catalysis, who use similar materials point - meaning that it produced and techniques. more energy than it consumed. Nu• Scientists at widely scattered lab• clear fusion differs from convention• oratories thus far have been unable al nuclear-power plants, which use to duplicate the efforts of Fleisch• fission, because it fuses atoms rather mann and Pons, various sources said than splitting them and generates yesterday. little radioactive waste. The lack of success was blamed Until now, the only fusion partly on a shortage of information achieved on Earth has been inside about exactly how the experiment hydrogen bombs. Only they have was conducted. One scientist said, produced - for a split-second - the "Until someone else does the experi• combination of tremendous pressure ment for all to see, I think we must be and extremely high temperature to very wary of the claim." fuse hydrogen atoms into helium, re• Pons told The New York Times leasing a tremendous amount of en - that he expected criticism from tra• ergy in the process. ditional physicists. "The fact re• mains, there is no way we could have TIDS IS THE same thing that obtained the results we did without happens, continuously, at the center fusion," he said. of the sun. If tamed, nuclear fusion could pro• SINCE THE NEWS conference, vide the Earth with a practically lim• Pons has had little time for himself. itless supply of energy. The raw ma• Barbara Shelley, a university spokes• terial - a heavy form of hydrogen man, said that Pons has had thou• called deuterium - is found in sea sands of requests for interviews from water. With fusion, scientists esti• all over the world. mate that every gallon of sea water "There's a long list of papers ahead could produce the same energy as of you," Mrs. Shelley said. "I'm hold• 10,000 tons of coal. ing Japan on the line now just to talk Since the mid-1950s, physicists with you." have been trying to produce con• Further complicating Pons' sched• trolled fusion, spending hundreds of ule is his effort to set up additional millions of dollars using huge ma• experiments to verify his research. chines and lasers that attempt to im• "And this is also the first week of itate the sun's core. classes," she said. "He refuses to Martin and Fleischmann say that miss them." their experiment used nothing more Pons' old professor, Nowell, cau• than car batteries and a framework tioned that last week's announce• of thin palladium. ment will be closely scrutinized. Pons told The Wall Street Journal "A lot of people are skeptical of that the technology is so simple that anything that breaks out of the usual "I'm going to let my son do the ex• track," he said. "But if it proves true, periment." I think it will be a Nobel Prize." Others have made claims of dis• covering fusion.
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