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What would it take, they were asked, to make that dream a reality? Money from Congress, of course. University of Utah President Chase Peterson, who was right there at the scientists' side, suggested that $25 million would be a nice sum to help his school set up a fusion research center. Some of the Congressmen appeared eager to oblige. "Today," rhapsodized Robert Roe, a New Jersey Democrat, "we may be poised on the threshold of a new era. It is possible that we may be witnessing the cold-fusion revolution...
...Congress had better wait a while before it starts pouring taxpayers' & money into Utah's test tubes. Even as Pons and Fleischmann stirred excitement on Capitol Hill, evidence was mounting that their form of fusion is probably an illusion. More and more scientists were openly scoffing at the chemists' claim that they had caused deuterium ions, which are commonly found in seawater, to fuse to form helium, liberating large amounts of heat. Physicists have never been able to achieve such a sustained reaction, even briefly, without subjecting deuterium to the kind of extreme temperature and pressure found inside...
...Pons being so cagey? Perhaps because the discovery he and Fleischmann claim to have made could be worth a fortune. Keeping some of the secrets to themselves could serve to protect their financial interests and those of the University of Utah, which has already filed five patent applications, with more to come. Pons insists, though, that he has reached an agreement with Los Alamos National Laboratory to help its scientists replicate his cold-fusion experiments...
...Pons and his dime-store equipment have been physicists. Retorts Pons: "Chemists are supposed to discover new chemicals. The physicists don't like it when they discover new physicals." In fact, many chemists feel -- with much justification -- that the physicists consider themselves intellectually superior. Says Cheves Walling, a Utah chemist who has developed one theory to explain how the cold-fusion experiment might work: "Chemists resent the fact that physicists can get money for multimillion-dollar experiments that could have gone to chemists to do something more useful...
Still, the cold-fusion combat is not just the physicists vs. the chemists. There is a sense in Salt Lake City that most of Pons' critics are what Utah chemist David Grant calls "the mean bullies from the Eastern establishment." Such snooty folks should remember, he says, that "science is not the domain of one set of colleges or one set of people anymore...