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British Fusion Effort Fails
The New York Times

May 9, 1989

LONDON, May 8 — Britain's top atomic energy laboratory said today it had failed to generate large amounts of energy by nuclear fusion at room temperature, despite the cooperation of a chemist who played a major role in a claim last month that such fusion had been achieved. The announcement dampened hopes of finding a cheap and limitless source of energy.

A spokesman at the Atomic Energy Authority laboratories at Harwell, near Oxford, said scientists there had become convinced that ''cold fusion'' experiments would not produce energy on a large scale.

''We knew within a few days that large-scale effects were not going to be seen and we transferred our attention to looking for small-scale effects,'' said Nick Hance, a spokesman for the laboratories.

The research center said it has received cooperation in the experiments from Martin Fleischmann, a British electrochemist who, with a colleague at the University of Utah, announced last month that cold fusion had been achieved.

Mr. Hance said scientists at Harwell had not achieved such results but would continue their experiments until at least the end of May.

''We are doing a whole range of different experiments, looking for neutrons, nuclear effects and heat,'' he said. The Harwell team had detected some neutrons but were checking to see whether these came from fusion or background radioactivity.

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