High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The hafnium controversy is a debate over the possibility of `triggering` rapid energy releases, via gamma ray emission, from a nuclear isomer of Hafnium, 178m2Hf. The energy release is potentially 5 orders of magnitude (100,000 times) more energetic than a chemical reaction, but 3 orders of magnitude less than a nuclear reaction. In 1998, a group led by Carl Collins of the University of Texas at Dallas reported having successfully initiated such a trigger. Signal-to-noise ratios were small in those first experiments, and to date no other group has been able to duplicate these results.