Tritium Technology - The Cleanest Signature

What makes tritium the ideal witness for fusion?

Tritium is the heaviest form of hydrogen: it has one proton and two neutrons, instead of hydrogen's usual zero neutrons. It's radioactive, and it decays with a half-life of about 12 years, meaning half of any given amount of it disappears in that time. When it decays, it releases a small particle called a beta particle, carrying about 18.6 kiloelectron-volts (keV) of energy — a unit used for very small amounts of energy at the atomic scale. That particle only travels a few millimeters through air before losing all its energy, so detecting it takes a specific technique called liquid scintillation counting: dissolve the sample in a special liquid that gives off a tiny flash of light every time a beta particle passes through it, then count those flashes with a light-sensitive detector called a photomultiplier.

This method is sensitive enough to register individual radioactive decays in a small vial of water. You aren't guessing at how much tritium is present from a temperature reading or a pressure change — you're literally watching individual atoms announce themselves, one at a time.

That level of precision sets up a specific, testable expectation. At the low energies relevant here, deuterium-deuterium (d+d) fusion — a nuclear reaction between two atoms of deuterium, a heavier form of hydrogen — happens through two roughly equally likely pathways:

d + d → helium-3 + a neutron
d + d → tritium (T) + a proton

The second pathway, which produces tritium and a proton, is slightly more likely at the energies involved in these experiments. So any real d+d fusion process should produce tritium and neutrons in roughly matching numbers, and it should produce tritium in proportion to how much energy it gives off, since every fusion event releases a few million electron-volts (MeV) of energy and leaves behind either a neutron or a tritium nucleus. These are specific, numerical predictions — exactly the kind a simple counting measurement can test.

What is solid-state fusion, and why is heat a hard number to trust?

In 1989, chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced they had observed nuclear reactions happening inside a palladium electrode soaked in deuterium. Palladium metal can absorb hydrogen isotopes into its crystal structure at very high density. The idea was that if you pack enough deuterium atoms close enough together inside the metal, they might interact in ways that wouldn't normally happen. The main piece of evidence they claimed was excess heat — meaning the cell put out more energy than the electricity that was fed into it.

Measuring heat with real precision, though, is genuinely difficult. This kind of heat measurement, called calorimetry, depends on how well the cell is insulated, how accurately the input power is calibrated, and several other sources of error that can quietly create a false signal without anyone noticing. Tritium offers a much cleaner test: it's one specific type of atomic nucleus with one specific, well-understood way of decaying. Counting individual tritium decays is a far more direct kind of evidence than trying to account for a few hundred milliwatts of unexplained heat. If a real nuclear reaction is happening, tritium should show up in amounts you can actually calculate ahead of time.

What did two independent laboratories find in 1989?

The first careful, published tritium report came from a research group at Texas A&M.¹ Using heavy-water electrolysis (running electric current through water made with deuterium) on palladium electrodes, they measured tritium levels in eleven cells that were 100 to 100,000 times higher than what ordinary isotope separation during electrolysis could explain. (During electrolysis, the heavier hydrogen isotopes naturally tend to build up at the negative electrode, so a small, expected amount of tritium enrichment does happen on its own — but these levels were far beyond that normal effect.) The university's radiation-safety team checked the lab and the researchers themselves for contamination, and those checks came back clean. The group was careful to frame their result modestly at first: just establish that tritium shows up on these electrodes, then figure out why afterward.

Halfway around the world, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Bombay ran a much larger set of experiments.² About a dozen independent research groups there tested cells built in many different shapes and setups — some using electrolysis, others loading deuterium gas directly into titanium metal. Since BARC is a nuclear research facility, it already had neutron detectors and gamma-ray detectors on hand, so it could look for several different signals at once. It reported detecting both neutrons and tritium, sometimes at the same time, along with photographic evidence showing radioactivity concentrated near the electrode tips. Most of the groups involved found some kind of positive signal.

So two independent laboratories, on two different continents, using different equipment and different cell designs, both reported tritium levels above background coming from deuterium held in metal. That's real data, and it deserves to be treated that way. The trouble starts once you ask whether the actual numbers match what real d+d fusion would produce.

Why do the reported numbers not add up?

There are two separate problems here, each coming from a different lab.

The first is the ratio between tritium and neutrons. BARC found roughly a hundred million times more tritium than neutrons. Standard d+d fusion predicts that these two should show up in roughly equal numbers. A process that suppresses neutron production by a factor of a hundred million while still churning out plenty of tritium doesn't match any known form of d+d fusion. No accepted nuclear theory explains how deuterium fusion inside a metal lattice could behave that way. The BARC team acknowledged this themselves in their published report, describing the process as essentially "aneutronic" (meaning "without neutrons") — a term which, taken literally, suggests something other than ordinary d+d fusion was producing that tritium. That leaves two possibilities: either the metal lattice hosts some genuinely new kind of nuclear reaction with no current theoretical explanation, or the tritium and the neutrons actually came from two different sources and shouldn't be compared to each other in the first place.

The second problem is simply the amount, and it comes down to arithmetic. Producing just one watt of power from d+d fusion requires roughly a trillion (10¹²) fusion reactions every second — each reaction releases a few million electron-volts of energy, and converting that into watts gives you that number. About half of those reactions would leave behind a tritium nucleus, so a one-watt fusion source should generate somewhere between a hundred billion and a trillion tritium atoms every second. Run a cell like that for just a few days, and you'd expect to accumulate around a hundred quadrillion (10¹⁷) tritium atoms — an amount a scintillation counter would detect instantly, with no ambiguity at all. What the actual experiments reported were tiny trace amounts, many orders of magnitude below that expected number. In any experiment claiming both excess heat and tritium together, if you take that as evidence of real d+d fusion, the two measurements disagree with each other by an enormous margin.

These two problems are completely independent of each other. BARC's issue is the ratio: its own tritium and neutron counts, side by side, simply don't fit what d+d fusion predicts. Texas A&M's issue is the amount: the tritium it found is far too small a quantity to explain the amount of heat being claimed. Neither result needs an outside skeptic to point out a flaw — each set of numbers already contradicts itself.

If tritium is already everywhere in the lab, how do you know you made it?

This is the contamination problem, and it's a fundamental one. Commercially available heavy water (D₂O) naturally contains a trace amount of tritium as an impurity to begin with. Electrolysis naturally concentrates the heavier hydrogen isotopes at the negative electrode, so any tritium already present in the starting solution will slowly build up over time — whether or not any nuclear reaction is actually taking place. So the phrase "above background" doesn't mean anything useful until that background level has been carefully measured, and every single tritium atom in the system has been accounted for before the experiment even begins.

The Texas A&M results ran headlong into exactly this problem, and very publicly. In 1990, a reporter for the journal Science laid out a circumstantial case suggesting the tritium found in some of the cells might have been introduced from outside — either through accidental contamination or deliberate tampering — rather than genuinely produced by the experiment.³ One of the original researchers later said he believed his own measurements came from an impurity, not from fusion. A university investigation found no evidence of intentional fraud, concluding that accidental contamination, or some other unidentified cause, was far more likely than deliberate tampering — but it was never able to pin down exactly where the tritium had actually come from. This episode stands as a useful lesson: a real isotope, correctly measured with a real instrument, can still fail to mean what it first appears to mean. Detecting the tritium was never the hard part. Figuring out its true origin was.

What actually determines whether a tritium reading counts as real evidence is provenance — a complete, careful accounting of every bit of tritium in the system, from the very start of an experiment to its end. Without that kind of accounting, the measurement is ambiguous by its very nature.

What has replicated, and what hasn't?

Reports of tritium from deuterium-loaded metals have shown up across multiple laboratories over several decades. But they're sporadic, hard to reproduce reliably on demand, and rarely come with the kinds of controls needed to rule out ordinary enrichment or contamination as the real explanation. In 2004, the U.S. Department of Energy organized an expert review panel; the panel was split on whether the excess-heat evidence was convincing at all, and was even more skeptical that any of it had a genuine nuclear origin.⁴ A well-funded research collaboration published its results in 2019 after spending years testing the field's core claims with modern instrumentation; it did not reproduce excess heat, and it flagged the process of achieving extreme deuterium loading as a genuinely underexplored area of materials science.⁵ Tritium above background in these systems remains a reported and contested claim — not clearly proven, and not clearly disproven either.

What would a definitive test actually require?

The current state of the evidence isn't a permanent dead end. Tritium is actually the claim within solid-state fusion research that's most within reach of a final answer, and the tools needed to get that answer already exist within tritium-measurement technology, since similar tools are already used for nuclear weapons monitoring and fusion fuel accounting.

A truly rigorous experiment would need at least four things. Precise mass-spectrometry testing of the starting heavy water would establish exactly how much tritium was present before the experiment even began, turning "above background" from a vague claim into an actual, auditable number. Sealed experimental cells with continuous tritium monitoring built into both the gas and liquid systems would catch any enrichment as it happens, instead of only guessing at it afterward. Coded, unlabeled samples sent to an independent lab that never even sees the original cell would settle any question of tampering once and for all. And measuring tritium, neutrons, and heat all together, on the same cell, on the same timeline, would directly test whether all three signals rise and fall together the way a genuine nuclear source requires — or drift apart from each other the way the early data seemed to suggest.

None of this asks anyone to accept a particular explanation ahead of time. Every one of these steps is achievable with equipment and techniques that already exist today. The tritium that was measured was real. Whether it came from fusion, from an ordinary enrichment effect, or from something nobody has identified yet is a question that better experimental design — not better arguing — is built to answer.

Editorial note: This primer presents an accessible overview of tritium as an experimental signature in solid-state fusion (SSF) research, written for a general college-level audience. The underlying nuclear claims of SSF/LENR remain scientifically contested; this piece takes no position on them and instead focuses on the measurement, provenance, and replication questions that stand on their own. Readers are directed to primary sources for deeper technical evaluation.

Notes & References

1. Kevin L. Wolf et al., "Neutron Emission and the Tritium Content of Deuterium-Loaded Palladium and Titanium Metals," Journal of Fusion Energy 9, no. 2 (1990): 105–113. ↩
2. M. Srinivasan et al., "Observation of Tritium in Electrolytic and Gas Phase Experiments with Pd/Ti Cathodes and Hydrogen/Deuterium Electrolytes," in Anomalous Nuclear Effects in Deuterium/Solid Systems, AIP Conference Proceedings 228 (1991): 154–180. ↩
3. Gary Taubes, "Cold Fusion Conundrum at Texas A&M," Science 248, no. 4958 (1990): 1006–1011. ↩
4. U.S. Department of Energy, Report of the Review of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (Washington, D.C.: DOE, December 2004). ↩
5. C. P. Berlinguette et al., "Revisiting the Cold Case of Cold Fusion," Nature 570, no. 7759 (2019): 45–51. ↩

Introduction: A Tritium Atom Cannot Keep a Secret

A tritium atom cannot keep a secret. Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen. When it decays, it releases a low-energy particle called a beta particle (about 18.6 keV), and it does this on a half-life of a little over twelve years, meaning half of any sample decays away in that time. A good liquid-scintillation counter — an instrument that detects radioactive decay by the tiny flash of light it produces in a special liquid — can register that decay from an almost absurdly small number of tritium atoms in a vial of water.¹ Tritium is countable. You aren't guessing at it from a temperature change. You're watching individual atoms announce themselves, one at a time.

That's why, if deuterium (a heavier form of hydrogen) were really fusing inside a palladium metal lattice, tritium ought to be the piece of evidence you could trust most. Ordinary deuterium-deuterium fusion splits almost evenly between two possible outcomes: about half the time it produces helium-3 and a neutron, and the other half it produces tritium and a proton, with tritium being slightly the more common of the two at low energies.² So tritium should make up about half of whatever a real deuterium-fusion process does. Look for it, and either it shows up in the expected amount, or the whole story falls apart.

In 1989 and 1990, two serious laboratories looked. They found tritium. And the tritium they found did not match the fusion story they were telling about it.

Section I — Why Tritium Should Be the Trustworthy Witness

Tritium-detection technology exists precisely because tritium is both easy to detect and hard to handle safely. The same low-energy particle that makes a single decay countable also can't travel more than a few millimeters through air, so scientists have built an entire field around pulling a faint, short-range signal out of background noise, using special detection liquids and careful tracking of where every atom of the isotope came from and where it went. These are measurement challenges, and they're why tritium detection has been refined into a precise science over decades, from nuclear weapons monitoring to fusion fuel research.

That expertise is exactly what connects to solid-state fusion (SSF), also called condensed matter nuclear science, which asks whether nuclear reactions can happen inside a metal lattice packed with hydrogen under conditions nobody expected to matter. The hardest problem in this field isn't theory — it's trusting the measurement. Excess heat, the original signature that started the whole field, comes from a technique called differential calorimetry, and that's exactly the kind of measurement where small, hidden errors like to hide. Tritium offers a different, cleaner kind of evidence. A tritium atom is one specific type of atomic nucleus with one specific way of decaying, and counting individual decays is a much more solid claim than measuring a few hundred milliwatts of unexplained warmth. If SSF really has a nuclear component, tritium should be the signal a careful measurement scientist could nail down.

That sets up a clear, testable expectation. Since tritium makes up about half of what real deuterium fusion produces, any genuine fusion happening inside a metal lattice should also produce a comparable number of neutrons, and it should produce tritium in proportion to however much energy comes out as heat. Those are specific, numerical predictions — exactly the kind that a simple counting measurement can check.

Section II — What Two Labs Found

The first careful tritium report came from a research group at Texas A&M in 1989.³ Working with heavy-water electrolysis (running electric current through water made with deuterium instead of ordinary hydrogen) on palladium electrodes, they measured tritium levels in eleven cells that were 100 to 100,000 times higher than what normal isotope separation during electrolysis could explain. They used liquid-scintillation counting to measure it, and they had the university's radiation-safety staff check the lab and the researchers themselves for contamination — those checks came back clean. The team was careful to keep their claim modest at first: just establish that tritium shows up on these electrodes, and worry about explaining why afterward.

On the other side of the world, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Bombay was running a similar, larger effort. Within weeks of the original 1989 cold fusion announcement, roughly a dozen groups across BARC set up experimental cells of many different designs — some using electrolysis, others loading deuterium gas directly into titanium metal.⁴ Because BARC is a nuclear research facility, it already had neutron detectors, gamma-ray detectors, and tritium-measuring equipment on hand. It reported detecting both neutrons and tritium, sometimes at the same time, along with photographic evidence showing radioactivity concentrated near the electrode tips.⁵ Most of the groups involved reported some kind of positive signal.

So two capable laboratories, on two different continents, using their own separate equipment, both reported tritium levels above what background alone would explain, coming from deuterium held in metal. Taken at face value, that's a genuine anomaly, and it deserves to be treated as real data rather than dismissed as an embarrassment. The trouble starts when you check whether the actual numbers match the nuclear fusion story being used to explain them.

Section III — Where the Numbers Don't Add Up

They don't, in two separate ways.

First, the ratio between tritium and neutrons. Ordinary deuterium fusion makes roughly equal numbers of neutrons and tritium atoms, so a real fusion source should set off a neutron detector about as strongly as it fills up a scintillation vial with tritium. BARC's results didn't show anything like that. Its tritium levels were roughly a hundred million times higher than its neutron levels.⁶ The research team said so themselves in their published report, describing the process as essentially "aneutronic" (meaning: without neutrons), and noting that such a lopsided ratio doesn't match how anyone understood deuterium fusion to work. That leaves two very different possibilities. Either the metal lattice supports some entirely new kind of nuclear reaction pathway that behaves unlike ordinary fusion — which would be genuinely new physics — or the tritium and the neutrons never actually came from the same source in the first place. The first option is a much bigger claim than it sounds: a process that suppresses neutron production by a factor of one hundred million while still producing plenty of tritium is very hard to reconcile with ordinary deuterium fusion, and no accepted physical theory explains how that could happen. That difficulty is itself a clue pointing toward the second, more mundane possibility.

Second, the sheer amount of tritium involved, which a bit of simple arithmetic makes clear. Each deuterium fusion event releases a few million electron-volts of energy, so producing just one watt of fusion power would require roughly a trillion (10¹²) fusion reactions every second. About half of those reactions would leave behind a tritium nucleus, meaning something like a hundred billion to a trillion tritium atoms produced per second. Run a cell at that rate for just a few days, and it should build up roughly a hundred quadrillion (10¹⁷) tritium atoms — an amount a scintillation counter would register instantly and unmistakably. What the actual experiments reported were tiny trace amounts many, many orders of magnitude below that. Wherever excess heat was claimed alongside tritium — in both the original Fleischmann-Pons experiments and the Texas A&M work that followed — the two were supposed to come from the very same nuclear process. Read that way, as ordinary fusion, they disagree by an enormous margin, with far too little tritium to account for the heat being measured.⁷

These two problems come from different labs, different experimental setups, and different instruments, which is exactly why each one is telling on its own. BARC's problem is the ratio: its own neutron and tritium counts don't line up the way real deuterium fusion requires. The problem for the heat-claiming experiments — both Texas A&M and the original Fleischmann-Pons work — is the amount: if the heat really came from nuclear fusion, there should be a huge amount of tritium to match it, and there just isn't. Neither result needs an outside critic to poke holes in it, because each set of numbers already contradicts the fusion explanation given for it. And notice something that has never actually been done: nobody has measured tritium, neutrons, and heat all together, on the same cell, at the same time, which is exactly the measurement that would reveal whether the three signals rise and fall together the way a real nuclear source requires. None of this makes the tritium go away — it was measured, and it was real. The open question is what actually produced it.

Section IV — The Contamination Problem

This is where the science of radiochemistry proves its worth, because tritium's biggest strength as a tracer comes with a specific weakness. It's already everywhere in any laboratory that works with deuterium. Commercially available heavy water already contains a trace amount of tritium as an impurity, and electrolysis naturally concentrates the heavier forms of hydrogen at the electrode, so tritium that was already present in the cell will build up over time whether or not anything nuclear is happening at all. So "above background" doesn't actually mean anything useful until you've pinned down exactly what that background is with real precision — and that background level can shift over time.

The Texas A&M results ran directly into this problem, and very publicly. In 1990, a reporter for the journal Science laid out a circumstantial case suggesting the tritium in some of the cells might have been introduced from outside, either through accidental contamination or deliberate tampering, rather than actually created by fusion.⁸ One of the original researchers on the study later said he believed the tritium he'd measured came from an impurity, not from fusion.⁹ A university investigation looked into the matter and found no evidence of deliberate wrongdoing, concluding that accidental contamination, or some other unexplained cause, was far more likely than intentional tampering.¹⁰ The episode was never fully resolved one way or the other, and it stands today as a good example of how a real, accurately measured isotope can still fail to mean what it first appears to mean. The hard part was never detecting the tritium itself — it was figuring out where it had actually come from.

Tracing exactly where a substance came from — called provenance — is where these early experiments were weakest, and it's what ultimately decides whether a tritium reading means anything at all. Clean starting materials, carefully sealed accounting of every isotope in the system, and controls designed with the help of a skeptic: for a substance as common in the lab as tritium, that's really the whole game.

Section V — How Often Does This Repeat?

Less often than early supporters hoped, but somewhat more often than the field's poor reputation might suggest. Reports of tritium from deuterium-loaded metal keep showing up across different labs and different decades, but they're sporadic, hard to reproduce reliably on demand, and rarely come with the kind of cross-checks that would rule out the mundane explanations described above. When the U.S. Department of Energy organized an expert review in 2004, the panel was split on whether the excess-heat evidence was convincing at all, and even more doubtful that any of it had a nuclear origin.¹¹ A well-funded research collaboration spent several years and a lot of modern instrumentation re-examining the core claims and published its results in 2019. That project focused mainly on testing excess heat and extreme hydrogen loading rather than tracing tritium specifically, it did not reproduce excess heat, and it flagged the science of achieving extreme hydrogen loading as a genuinely underexplored area of materials science.¹² The fair summary is that tritium above background in these systems remains a reported, contested claim — not something either firmly proven or firmly disproven.¹³

Section VI — Two Kinds of Explanation, Kept Separate

It helps to be clear about what's actually being observed versus what's being proposed to explain it. What's observed is tritium above a claimed background level. The possible explanations fall into two very different categories that should never get blurred together.

The ordinary, mundane category is the one to rule out first, using standard measurement-science practices: tritium already present in the heavy water and concentrated by electrolysis, cross-contamination from a lab that regularly works with the isotope, and detection glitches in the scintillation counting itself, such as stray chemical light or interference effects. None of these explanations is exotic, and a well-controlled experiment can rule out every single one of them with the right precautions.

The exotic category is a single, specific hypothesis, stated plainly as a hypothesis rather than a fact: that a metal lattice under extreme hydrogen loading somehow supports a nuclear reaction that favors making tritium while suppressing neutrons, in a way ordinary free-space fusion doesn't. If that were actually true, it would be a huge deal. But no accepted scientific theory predicts it, and no experiment has ever established it. It's an interesting possibility the anomaly raises, but it should stay at arm's length from the actual data until the ordinary, mundane explanations have been carefully ruled out first.

Section VII — What Could Still Be Settled

The reason to focus on tritium instead of heat is that tritium is the one signal that's genuinely possible to settle for good, and the tools needed to settle it already exist within tritium-measurement science. These are measurement questions, and measurement questions have real answers.

A serious research effort would start by nailing down provenance. Using a precise technique called isotope-dilution mass spectrometry on both the starting heavy water and the electrolyte over time would turn "above background" from a debate into a documented ledger. Sealed experimental cells with real-time tritium monitoring built into the gas and liquid systems would catch any buildup as it happens, rather than only inferring it afterward. Coded, unlabeled samples sent to an independent lab that never even sees the experimental cell would eliminate any possibility of tampering right from the start. And measuring tritium, neutrons, and heat all together, on the same cell, on the same timeline, would directly test whether the three signals move together the way a genuine nuclear source requires — or drift apart from each other the way the early data hinted they might. Every one of these is a standard capability that tritium-measurement labs already have. None of them requires anyone to believe in a mechanism ahead of time.

The ask here is narrow and honest. It doesn't ask anyone to accept a nuclear explanation, and it doesn't ask anyone to dismiss thirty-five years of scattered positive reports as meaningless noise either. It only asks that we notice how the single most testable claim in this entire field runs straight through a well-established measurement science. The tritium was real enough to measure. Whether it came from fusion, from an enrichment artifact, or from something nobody has identified yet is a question that better measurement science — not better arguing — is built to answer.

A tritium atom cannot keep a secret. The task ahead for this field is to stop letting it keep the wrong ones.

Editorial note: This article presents an interdisciplinary overview of SSF's relationship to nuclear chemistry and radiochemical measurement, written for a general college-level audience. The underlying nuclear claims of SSF/LENR remain scientifically contested; this piece takes no position on them and instead focuses on the measurement, provenance, and replication questions that stand on their own. Readers are directed to primary sources for deeper technical evaluation.

References & Footnotes

1. Tritium's half-life (12.32 years) and beta-decay endpoint energy (about 18.6 keV) are standard evaluated nuclear values. See National Nuclear Data Center, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Evaluated Nuclear Structure Data File (ENSDF). ↩
2. Evaluated deuterium–deuterium reaction data: D. A. Brown et al., "ENDF/B-VIII.0: The 8th Major Release of the Nuclear Reaction Data Library," Nuclear Data Sheets 148 (2018): 1–142. The two main d+d channels (t + p, Q ≈ 4.03 MeV; ³He + n, Q ≈ 3.27 MeV) carry roughly equal probability; the radiative ⁴He + γ channel (Q = 23.8 MeV) is suppressed by a factor of order 10⁻⁶ to 10⁻⁷. ↩
3. N. J. C. Packham, K. L. Wolf, J. C. Wass, R. C. Kainthla, and J. O'M. Bockris, "Production of Tritium from D2O Electrolysis at a Palladium Cathode," Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry 270 (1989): 451–458. ↩
4. P. K. Iyengar and M. Srinivasan, eds., BARC Studies in Cold Fusion, report BARC-1500 (Bombay: Atomic Energy Commission, Government of India, 1989). ↩
5. P. K. Iyengar et al., "Bhabha Atomic Research Centre Studies in Cold Fusion," Fusion Technology 18, no. 1 (1990): 32. ↩
6. The strongly tritium-dominated, neutron-poor character of the BARC results, and the team's description of the process as effectively "aneutronic," are reported in Iyengar et al. (1990) and reviewed in M. Srinivasan, "Revisiting the Early BARC Tritium Results," Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science 15 (2015): 137–148. ↩
7. This is the standard "missing ash" objection, and the arithmetic is direct. Each d+d fusion releases a few MeV (about 3.3 to 4.0 MeV per event; see note 2), so one watt of fusion power requires of order 10¹² reactions per second. Roughly half leave a tritium nucleus, i.e. of order 10¹¹ to 10¹² tritium atoms per second, so a cell run for a few days would accumulate on the order of 10¹⁷ atoms, an activity near 10⁸ becquerel that liquid-scintillation counting would register at once. The trace excesses actually reported lie many orders of magnitude below this. The mismatch is discussed in the primary literature and compiled in Edmund Storms, The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (Singapore: World Scientific, 2007). ↩
8. Gary Taubes, "Cold Fusion Conundrum at Texas A&M," Science 248, no. 4961 (1990): 1299–1304, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.248.4961.1299. ↩
9. "Wolf: My Tritium Was an Impurity," Science 248, no. 4961 (1990): 1301. ↩
10. "Texas Panel Finds No Fraud in Cold Fusion Experiments," New York Times, November 20, 1990. ↩
11. U.S. Department of Energy, Report of the Review of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Energy, December 2004). ↩
12. Curtis P. Berlinguette et al., "Revisiting the Cold Case of Cold Fusion," Nature 570 (2019): 45–51, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1256-6. ↩
13. Edmund Storms, The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction: A Comprehensive Compilation of Evidence and Explanations about Cold Fusion (Singapore: World Scientific, 2007). ↩