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. During his Argonne years, as a result of examining debris from the "
Ivy Mike"
nuclear test in 1952, Huizenga was part of the team that added two new
synthetic chemical elements,
einsteinium and
fermium, to the
periodic table. Huizenga and his colleagues were at first unable to publish papers on their discoveries in the open literature, because of classification concerns relating to the nuclear test, but these concerns were eventually resolved and the team was able to publish in
Physical Review and thus claim priority for their discovery. During his Argonne years he was one of the founders of the
Gordon Research Conferences on
nuclear chemistry, serving as chairman of the nuclear chemistry Gordon Conference in 1958. He received a
Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964 and took a sabbatical from Argonne to further his studies as a visiting professor at the
University of Paris for the 1964–1965 academic year. In 1967, he became a professor of chemistry and physics at the
University of Rochester where he worked for the remainder of his career, apart from a second Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to engage in research during the 1973–1974 school year at the
University of California, Berkeley, the
Technische Universität München, and the
Niels Bohr Institute in
Copenhagen. His research interests at Rochester covered topics in
nuclear structure of
actinides,
nuclear fission, and
nuclear reactions between heavy ions. He was chairman of the Department of Chemistry from 1983 to 1988, retiring as Tracy H. Harris Professor (later Professor Emeritus) of Chemistry. During Huizenga's time at Rochester, the university had its own
particle accelerator, a
tandem Van de Graaff accelerator that produced beams of nuclei accelerated to energies of several
MeV per nucleon. This facility, which opened in 1966, afforded him the opportunity to continue his research program in experimental nuclear science. However, the limited beam energies available led him to more powerful accelerators, such as the
SuperHILAC at Berkeley and the
Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility, LAMPF, at
Los Alamos National Laboratory, for his experimental work. His LAMPF proposal to study actinide
muonic atoms was one of the earliest experiments to receive beam time at the LAMPF stopped-muon facility. In 1989, Huizenga co-chaired, with
Norman Ramsey, a panel convened by the
United States Department of Energy which attempted to debunk claims by two University of Utah chemists that they had achieved
nuclear fusion at room temperature. The findings of the Huizenga/Ramsey panel, although highly skeptical of the reality of cold fusion, were cautious: Based on the examination of published reports, reprints, numerous communications to the Panel and several site visits, the Panel concludes that the experimental results of excess heat from calorimetric cells reported to date do not present convincing evidence that useful sources of energy will result from the phenomena attributed to cold fusion. ... The Panel concludes that the experiments reported to date do not present convincing evidence to associate the reported anomalous heat with a nuclear process. ... Current understanding of the very extensive literature of experimental and theoretical results for hydrogen in solids gives no support for the occurrence of cold fusion in solids. Specifically, no theoretical or experimental evidence suggests the existence of D-D distances shorter than that in the molecule D2 or the achievement of "confinement" pressure above relatively modest levels. The known behavior of deuterium in solids does not give any support for the supposition that the fusion probability is enhanced by the presence of the palladium, titanium, or other elements. Nuclear fusion at room temperature, of the type discussed in this report, would be contrary to all understanding gained of nuclear reactions in the last half century; it would require the invention of an entirely new nuclear process. However, Huizenga later published a book titled "Cold Fusion: The Scientific Fiasco of the Century". ==Awards and honors==