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John R. Huizenga was an American physicist who helped build the world’s first atomic bomb and who also received more recent fame for debunking Utah scientists' claim of achieving cold fusion.
During World War II, Huizenga supervised teams at the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tenn. involved in enriching uranium used in the atomic weapon dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945. After the war, as a result of examining the world’s first hydrogen bomb explosion on a Pacific atoll in 1952, Huizenga was part of the team that added two new synthetic chemical elements, einsteinium and fermium, to the Periodic table.
In 1967, he became a professor of chemistry and physics at the University of Rochester where he worked for the remainder of his career.
In 1989, Huizenga co-chaired a panel which debunked claims by two University of Utah chemists that they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature. He later published a book “Cold Fusion: The Scientific Fiasco of the Century.â€
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