Nature Magazine, which has iced cold fusion for several months, this week tried to put it in deep freeze.
In a study published in the British journal, a team from the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority's Harwell Laboratory said despite exhaustive work, it cannot reproduce the Utah findings.The team speculated that scientific sloppiness may lie behind the claims of B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, the chemists who rocked the scientific world March 23 with a report they had produced nuclear fusion in a table-top device at room temperature.
But Pons, who's been given the cold shoulder by Nature since the historic announcement, accused the journal of resurrecting old news to keep fusion in cold storage.
"This paper is not `another' blow to cold fusion; this is the now rather old paper which has been advertised by Nature for several months," Pons said Thursday.
The fusion findings of the Harwell team, now featured in Nature, were reported by the British press in June.
"We have presented many more results and details at several scientific meetings which totally refute the statements made by the authors," Pons said. "We have taken great care to complete two other independent rounds of experiments since March before saying much more about other's people's work."
Pons said he and Fleischmann, of Britain's Southampton University, completed their experiments in October.
He said a scientific paper presenting the results is currently being written and will be submitted for publication "in a reputable journal" in the next few days.
"We will then see who has really been sloppy," he said. "You must remember that these Harwell people slapped together a bunch of rather hasty experiments and ran them for a relatively short period of time.
"While they may be good at twiddling knobs, they certainly demonstrated their lack of expertise at experiment design."
Hundreds of international scientists who've tried to replicate the controversial experiments anxiously await a definitive fusion verdict.
While several fusion researchers throughout the world have reported duplicating some aspects of the Utah results, the British team has joined many others who are convinced fusion doesn't exist.
In the Nature article, the Harwell team said its experiments, patterned after Utah's, found no evidence of any extra neutrons - a key signature of nuclear fusion.
James Brophy, U. vice president for research, said Pons and Fleischmann "have said all along they could not account for the (excess) heat by traditional fusion reactions," marked by neutron emissions.
The British team said its measurements also failed to support Utah claims that cold fusion may be produced by an "unusual mechanism" that releases high-energy protons instead of neutrons.
In addition, R.I. Taylor and his colleagues reported they could not detect any heat even through they used three different types of calorimeters - devices used to measure heat output.
"We found these (Utah-style calorimeters) to be inaccurate instruments with some very subtle sources of error," the British researchers wrote.
But Brophy, who's now serving as interim director of the National Cold Fusion Institute, said: "We are confident our heat measurements . . . are real."