The power output from the cell was more than 60 watts per cubic centimetre in the palladium. This is approaching the sort of power output of the fuel rods in a conventional nuclear fission reactor. After the cell had operated from batteries for 10 hours producing several watts of power, Pons detected gamma rays with the sort of energy one would expect from gamma radiation produced by fusion. When he turned off the power, the gamma rays stopped too. Pons also told delegates that he had found tritium in the cell, another important sign of fusion taking place.
Pons estimated that the cell gave off 10,000 neutrons per second. This is many times greater than the rate of background level of natural radioactivity, but is still millions or billions of times less than the rate of neutron emission that one would expect from a fusion reaction -- a puzzle which Fleischmann and Pons acknowledge as a stumbling block to acceptance of their phenomenon as fusion by any conventional process.
This was perhaps the high water mark of cold fusion. Scores of organisations over the world were actively working to replicate cold fusion in their laboratories, and although many reported difficulties a decent number reported success. And by the end of April, Fleischmann and Pons were standing before the U.S. House Science, Space and Technology committee asking for a cool $25 million to fund a centre for cold fusion research at Utah University.
Then things began to go wrong. An unnamed spokesman for the Harwell research laboratory -- the home of institutional nuclear research in Britain -- spoke to the Daily Telegraph saying that 'we have not yet had the slightest repetition of the results claimed by professors Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons. Of the other laboratories around the world who have tried to replicate the Pons-Fleischmann result, all but one have recanted, admitting that either their equipment or their measurements were faulty.'
'We believe our experiments are much more careful than those conducted by others. Perhaps for that reason we have been unable to observe any more energy coming out of the experiment than was put in.'
By late May, the headlines in both the popular press and the scientific press were beginning to carry words like 'flawed idea' when the biggest blow of all hit supporters of the cold fusion idea. Dr Richard Petrasso of the Plasma Fusion Centre of the ultra prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology presented the results of a series of intensive investigations into the Fleischmann-Pons experiment. The fundamental data put forward by the two men, said Petrasso, was probably a 'glitch'. The entire gamma ray signal in the Fleischmann-Pons experiment, he said, might not have occurred at all.
'We can offer no plausible explanation for the feature other than it is possibly an instrumental artefact with no relation to gamma-ray interaction,' he told the same reporters who had clustered around Fleischmann and Pons only two months earlier.
Dr Ronald Parker, director of MIT's Plasma Fusion Centre, said; 'We're asserting that their neutron emission was below what they thought it was, including the possibility that it could have been none at all.'
Thus within two months of its original announcement, cold fusion had been dealt a fatal blow by two of the world's most prestigious nuclear research centres, each receiving millions of pounds a year to fund research in hot fusion.
The measure of MIT's success in killing off cold fusion is that still today, the U.S. Department of Energy refuses to fund any research into it while the U.S. Patent Office relies on the MIT report to refuse any patents based on or relating to cold fusion processes even though hundreds have been submitted.
If Dr Parker had left his statement there, it is likely that the world would never have heard of cold fusion again -- or not until a new generation of scientists came along. But flushed with success at killing off MIT's embryonic rival, he decided to go all the way and openly accuse Fleischmann and Pons of possible scientific fraud.
