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Contamination at 3 Labs Casts Doubt On Results Pointing to Cold Fusion
By William J. Broad
The New York Times

June 8, 1990

Three top laboratories whose work supported low-temperature nuclear fusion said yesterday that their experiments had used palladium metal that was contaminated with tritium, a byproduct of fusion.

The disclosure of the contamination cast a cloud on experimental results from some of the most respected laboratories that still professed to find puzzling evidence that cold fusion might be real. Those laboratories had cited the presence of tritium as evidence of nuclear fusion.

The laboratory most respected by skeptics, at Texas A&M University, said the tritium contamination had falsified all its results, while the two others said they believed some experiments might still be valid.

Even so, scientists once open-minded about the field said they thought this was the end of one of the most unusual chapters in the history of science.

'The Nail in the Coffin'

''I think it's over,'' said Dr. Kelvin G. Lynn, a physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. ''A lot of this has been bad science, with a few sincere people making an honest effort to understand what was going on. Now these people have results plagued with systematic errors. It's the nail in the coffin.''

While skeptics had long ago written off the field, a dedicated group of researchers has been working on the puzzle, although their numbers have shrunk greatly from the levels of the first chaotic days of cold fusion some 15 months ago.

Driving the residue of interest is the promise of a cheap source of nearly endless energy.

Nuclear fusion is the force that powers the sun, the stars and hydrogen bombs, fusing atoms together rather than breaking them apart as nuclear reactors do. The process frees vast amounts of energy but usually requires temperatures of millions of degrees to get started.

In an announcement that stunned the scientific world, Dr. B. Stanley Pons, chairman of the chemistry department at the University of Utah, and Dr. Martin Fleischmann of Southampton University in England said in March 1989 that they had achieved fusion at room temperature in a simple, tabletop device. A test tube had been fitted with palladium electrodes and filled with heavy water, in which heavy hydrogen, also known as deuterium, replaces normal hydrogen. When an electric current was passed through the electrodes, the device gave off heat the scientists said was generated by fusion.

Cause of Excitement

During the ensuing controversy, in which hundreds of scientists failed to duplicate the reported achievement, the thing that stirred most of the excitement among cold-fusion enthusiasts was the finding of tritium, since it kept cropping up in significant quantities and is a major byproduct of nuclear fusion.

The tritium findings most respected by skeptics were those reported by Dr. Kevin L. Wolf, a physicist at Texas A&M. He himself was openly skeptical of the cold-fusion assertions, but his experiments kept coming up with tantalizing amounts of tritium. His work was widely cited, even by the Utah chemists, as proof the field was no illusion.

Now, it turns out, the work was just that.

''Our results are consistent with contamination,'' Dr. Wolf said in an interview. ''And it's non-trivial. We can offer no support for tritium being produced by cold fusion.''

An analysis of virgin palladium later used in fusion experiments revealed the previously unseen tritium, Dr. Wolf said, nullifying any subsequent findings. The palladium metal came from Hoover & Strong Inc., a metals processor in Richmond.

The Utah chemists are thought to have used palladium obtained from a different company, Johnson Matthey. But their claims for evidence of cold fusion never relied heavily on tritium, instead centering on very large amounts of excess heat.

The contamination of Dr. Wolf's experiments was first reported yesterday in The Wall Street Journal.

Palladium from the same company was used by two other important cold-fusion laboratories: a different one in the chemistry department of Texas A&M and one at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The Los Alamos work was done by Dr. Edmund K. Storms and Dr. Carol Talcott, two chemists. They had reported finding production of tritium in about 10 percent of cold-fusion cells they studied.

In an interview, Dr. Storms said one of the positive results reported had been obtained with palladium provided by Texas A&M that came from the same company's contaminated metal. That positive finding was clearly wrong, he said, although he noted that his laboratory had 11 other positive results.

Dr. Storms said he could not rule out contamination in those other experiments, adding that he planned to do an analysis similar to that at Texas A&M to see if that was the case. But he said that the heating of palladium when it was formed should drive out any tritium, making it nearly ''impossible to understand how it was retained.''

He said he was still hopeful for cold fusion. ''My personal feeling is that the phenomenon is real,'' he said.

The third laboratory is that of Dr. John Bochris at Texas A&M. He used large amounts of palladium from Hoover & Strong, said Dr. Wolf, who has worked closely with Dr. Bochris. However, that batch of metal was different from the one in which contamination was found, said Dr. Wolf, adding: ''I'm not sure contamination does explain the Bochris results. All we're trying to do is explain ours.''

The amounts of tritium believed by Dr. Bochris to have been produced by cold fusion were much larger than those of Dr. Wolf and the Los Alamos team, leading skeptics to view them with great caution.

The Wall Street Journal quoted Dr. Bochris as saying that ''about two-thirds of our work'' used palladium from Hoover & Strong.

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