Fusion bid fails

Press, 13 April 1989, Page 8

Fusion bid fails

NZPA-AAP Canberra For the last two weeks three Victorian C.5.1.R.0. scientists have been frantically busy in their laboratory, searching for the answer to one of science’s most recent mysteries.

Since news first filtered out from the United States on March 23 that two scientists believed they had achieved the impossible and created nuclear fusion in a test-tube, Dr Steven Fletcher and two other researchers from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s Mineral Products Division have been trying to duplicate the experiment.

As more and more information about the American process came out, the scientists have adjusted their apparatus and tried and tried again — so far without success.

Nuclear fusion, the opposite of the nuclear fission chain reaction which now powers- nuclear reactors, has long been seen as the ultimate energy breakthrough. If commercially achievable, it could product huge amounts of cheap, clean energy from seawater, with almost no environmental consequences.

“I’m still sceptical,” Dr Fletcher told AAP. “But because the rewards are so enormous it’s something that has to be looked at.

“The implications are so vast that it’s hard to grasp them all.”