§ 24. Sir David PriceTo ask the Secretary of State for Education and Science whether, in view of the research work carried out by Professor Martin Fleischmann of Southampton university into the achievement of nuclear fusion at room temperatures, he will invite the Advisory Board for the Research Council to reconsider the nature and scale of United Kingdom research into nuclear fusion.
Mr. JacksonIn February 1989, the Science and Engineering Research Council decided to establish a panel to advise on future support of plasma physics and nuclear fusion.
This panel will be able to assess the prospects for research into "cold fusion" and make appropriate recommendations, through the Science and Engineering Research Council, to the Advisory Board for the Research Council about any change in the level of support for work in this area.
§ 31. Dr. BrayTo ask the Secretary of State for Education and Science what research programmes he is supporting specifically on cold fusion.
Mr. JacksonThe Science and Engineering Research Council is supporting work on muon-catalysed fusion carried out on the ISIS facility of the council's Rutherford Appleton laboratory. It is a collaborative programme with the University of Birmingham, the Culham laboratory of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), and groups in Italy, the Netherlands and the United States.
The council also supports groups in British universities and in its own establishments, which are participating in 74W attempts to replicate the recently-claimed cold fusion in electrochemical cells. Contact is also being maintained with similar work at the Harwell laboratory of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.