Chapter 44

The phone rang as soon as Harold entered his offiice. "Dr. MacAnish, Good morning this is Dr. Pons. I was wondering if I could come talk to you for a few minutes at your convenience." Harold was a bit flustered early in the morning.

"Sure. When are you available?" Harold pushed a large pile of papers back and forth on his desk desperately searching for his appointment book.

"Ten."

"Great. What do you want to discuss?" Harold frequently forgot to ask this before scheduling meetings. He had met Pons before and always enjoyed his company. He hung up and scribbled in the appointment book.

At ten o'clock there was a knock at Harold's door. He had forgotten the appointment but welcomed Dr. Pons in and offered him a chair. "To what do I owe the great pleasure?"

"Dr. MacAnish."

"Please call me Harold."

"Dr. MacAnish, I have been watching your Venusian project with great interest. I would like to complement you on your successes. I have one question. With the great distances and weight expenditures, what are you going to use for a power source?

"That is a problem. We have lots of hydrocarbons left over from the original organic rain but if we burn them we create more carbon dioxide and slow the process of clearing the atmosphere. We want to avoid CO2 production until the biologic sink is much larger. We also need enough power to be able to make rocket fuel on Venus to power return vehicles. We plan to use clean, safe, electricity from a nuclear reactor."

"And the environmentalists are letting you take a reactor to Venus?" Pons had had his share of runs ins with the Green.

"Well not exactly. We are trying to keep it quiet. We bought a Russian space reactor design and they are building ten of them for the trip. They are being funded with money for Russian strategic prevention planning. I hope it works out. I am a little concerned using somebody elses reactor so far from home." Harold had a lot to worry about.

"As you know we have been working for the last 15 years on solid state fusion. We now have a power supply ready for testing and I thought with your reputation we could both profit each other."

"Why me?" Everybody kook in the world thinks they can profit from me why should he be any different.

"We are having funding difficulties because of the gas fusion people. If you could help us get funding you would get a power supply. We would get much needed developemental cash and a high profile use of the technology." Pons had been a parriah ever since he used the National Enquirere to publish his work.

"Why are you having difficulties if the process works?" Harold didn't follow the cold fusion literature.

"The gas phase fusion people get two billion dollars each year for experiments that are excedingly difficult to perform and may never work. They certainly haven't worked in the last 30 years of effort. We ask for a million dollars a year for an excedingly simple process and are turned down. The people who make a living on gas phase fusion see us as a threat and deny funding. They are afraid we will break their rice bowl." Pons still thought denial was a river in Egypt.

"Do you have a device that is ready for testing? We need something that works." The practical side of Harold once again emerged.

"Yes, but we need some money for fabrication." And psychiatric care but Pons was the last to realize it.

"That's easy. We can give you a million a year fabrication grant and not even mention the topic. How does it work?" Does it work? Does it work? That is the question.

"It is quite simple. A Japanese investigator back in 1990 demonstrated that deuterium that was allowed to diffuse into a thin section of paladium at one atmosphere caused the production of a large amount of heat and a neutron flux when the sample was placed in a vacuum. The deuterium apparently was concentrated on the surface in the crystal lattice and had its degrees of freedom restricted sufficiently to undergo fusion." Pons had an explanation.

"The solid phase restricts the path length of the deuterium and allows low temperature fusion?" Harold loved this stuff.

"It is not really low temperature. The sun is at 10 million degrees but the hydrogen in the sun is in the gas phase. In the paladium crystal the deuterium is restricted in path length and instead of moving in three dimensions may only need the energy in one dimension." Pons' explanation even made some sense.

"The cube root of 10 million is less than a thousand degrees." Harold grasped the simplicity of the argument.

"Exactly. The surface of the palladium has a high concentration of deuterium and a restriction of path length. When the reaction takes place the temperature goes well above a thousand degrees and neutrons are produced. Our power cell uses palladium powder and a tritium/deuterium mixture. The palladium powder is moved from a high to a low pressure state and heat is given off from solid state fusion in the low pressure side. The palladium is then recycled. The neutrons are collected in a uranium shield for use in later fission reactions." If only it worked.

"We don't need to save the neutrons and that will cut the weight of the generator. How much power can it produce?" Harold cut to the big picture.

"Our first reactor makes one megawatt. It weighs two thousand kilograms and is one cubic meter in size." Lie, just lie MacAnish will give you the money and you can diddle for years.

"Dr. Pons. Welcome to the BioAtmospherics project. I will call my secretary to write the check." And I thought he was a wacko?

Chapter 45

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