Word: deuterium
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...neutrons and a proton in its nucleus, occurs naturally in minute quantities in raindrops and groundwater. But the radioactive gas took on strategic importance in 1952, when the U.S. exploded its first hydrogen bomb. That explosion demonstrated the destructive force that can be released when tritium fuses with deuterium, another hydrogen isotope, to yield helium and a burst of nuclear energy. Today, tritium is used both to enhance the power of atom bombs and in the trigger mechanism of the far more destructive H-bomb. Because it decays at the rate of 5.5% a year, the gas must be regularly...
Fusion occurs when two small atoms combine to form a larger atom, releasing energy. The Utah researchers reported that when they ran an electric current through a flask containing heavy water and palladium, a sharp increase in water temperature occurred. The pair claimed that atoms of deuterium (a form of hydrogen found in heavy water) entered the palladium and fused together into helium atoms...
Silvera leads a team in the Lyman Labs that is using a high-pressure diamond anvil to crush together a palladium and deuterium cell. Silvera says their first test, which failed to release heat or emit subatomic particles that are expected by-products of fusion, could have failed because of accidental leaking by the liquid deuterium...
...physicists offered several theories about where the Utah experiments had gone wrong. Pons and Fleischmann claimed that they had caused the nuclei of deuterium atoms, a heavy form of hydrogen, to fuse together to form helium, thus releasing radiation and heat energy. But, the physicists suggested, the radiation detected might have come from radon that was already present in the laboratory's air. The helium reported could also have seeped into the apparatus from...
...sort of fusion. And if the two chemists cannot think of any way to explain the excess heat in their experiment without resorting to nuclear reactions, others can. Chemist Linus Pauling, a Nobel laureate and himself something of an iconoclast, thinks that when absorbing high concentrations of deuterium, the palladium lattice may become unstable and deteriorate, releasing heat...