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The Index and Table of Contents for Fusion Fiasco, a 530 page book telling what happened before and after Pons and Fleischmann made their misguided public announcement (prompted by other scientists and university attorneys), have been posted online. The other two books also have their Table of Contents and Indexes posted online also.

The Index and Table of Contents for Fusion Fiasco, a 530 page book telling what happened before and after Pons and Fleischmann made their misguided public announcement (prompted by other scientists and university attorneys), have been posted online. The other two books also have their Table of Contents and Indexes posted online also.

Of course not, no papers published at all. It's all part of the conspiracy, MAN! Because as we all know, scientists despise clean energy and grant money is given out in accordance with how much you don't do anything revolutionary. Fight the evil scientist cabal!

You are correct of course. Thanks for pointing that out. I should have written "proof". Likely Tart puts it better. To agree with you, from:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/A...
"There are a few caveats to take into account to refine what a lack of supporting evidence says about a hypothesis. Absence of evidence is not necessarily strong evidence that outright disproves the hypothesis in the way that an observation that contradicts the hypothesis would be. ... As such, absence of evidence acting against a hypothesis is only a probabilistic approach and works best in a full Bayesian-style framework, which also takes into account other probabilities and other evidence."

== Some rambles on weighing the meaning of absence of evidence in US society

First, Tart claims evidence os paranormal activity from research studies. People may dispute that including by questioning the studies, so let's just assume there still is no evidence for the sake of discussion.

An important factor in weighing the meaning of the absence of evidence is the intense competition for research funds which is increasingly corrupting science. See: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals."

For example, when Pons and Fleischmann submitted their "cold fusion" results to a peer review process for grant funding, it turned out one of the reviewers was working in the same area and was about to publish on it. This conflict (whoever is most at fault) ultimately lead to the press conference announcement (against the scientist's preferences) at the university wanted to claim priority on the discovery (via creating artificial scarcity through patents). A handful of hot-fusion scientists (especially at MIT) after fairly brief and limited attempts then claimed the results could not be duplicated an that failure to replicate was essentially proof that Pons and Fleischmann were wrong and "cold fusion" could not exists given popular conceptions of nuclear physics at the time. Pons and Fleishmann may have been wrong in several ways, including in calling it "fusion" of any sort and also in their neutron measurements. But these were expert chemists well experienced in heat measurements and that part of what they did was likely valid, and likely they did detect excess heat. But for *decades* any mention of doing cold fusion research became academic suicide based on the handful of failures to replicate by people whose short-term interests were served by not finding results. Only a few (mostly older, tenured) people continued to work on that. Related:
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/r...
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...
http://undsci.berkeley.edu/art...

"Cold Fusion" (now LENR) Research has been picking up in the last few years though, such as with this LENR conference ironically at MIT:
http://world.std.com/~mica/201...

Another example is when Halton Arp was denied telescope time to pursue his "electric universe" ideas. Ignaz Semmelweis is another example from centuries ago, where his evidence of how to prevent disease by hand-washing was dismissed as in conflict with conceptions of health and disease at the time.

http://www.quantumheat.org/index.php/en/
http://www.lenr-coldfusion.com/2013/01/26/mit-cold-fusion-101-videos/
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/WL/WLTheory.shtml
"In 2005, Dr. Allan Widom, a condensed matter physicist with Northeastern. University, and Lewis Larsen, president and CEO of Lattice Energy LLC, began publishing papers that presented a new theory to explain the experimental anomalies observed in LENR experiments. Their theory claims these anomalies are due not to a fusion reaction, which would involve the strong force, but to other low energy nuclear reactions that involve weak interactions, namely neutron formation from electrons and protons/deuterons, followed by local neutron absorption and subsequent beta-decay processes. The following published papers and news items provide more details on the Widom-Larsen Ultra-Low-Momentum Neutron Catalyzed Theory of LENRs."

Although there are also similar reports going back decades before Pons & Fleischmann...

I guess the same forces that keep us on Windows instead of Linux keep us on coal and oil instead of solar and LENR? :-)

Here is a statement from Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist, NASA Langley Research Center:

The current situation is that we now have over two decades of hundreds of experiments worldwide indicating heat and transmutations with minimal radiation and low energy input. By any rational measure, this evidence indicates something real is occurring. So, is LENR "Real?" Evidently, from the now long standing and diverse experimental evidence. And, yes - with effects occurring from using diverse materials, methods of energy addition etc. This is far from a "Narrow Band" set of physical phenomena.

There is a physical theory NASA is evaluating, no violation of thermodynamics required.

You might also be interested in this presentation by another NASA scientist. From the summary page:

• A cheap, abundant, clean, scalable, portable source of energy will impact EVERYONE.
• Singular solution to peak oil, climate change, fresh water, and associated geopolitical instabilities.
• Drop-in replacement for traditional utility heat sources. Minimal impact to existing infrastructure
• Enables widely distributed generation. Homes and businesses generate what they need - on site.
• Enables whole new approaches to all of NASA’s missions - we can affordably get off this rock!

If true, guilt-free high intensity energy all around! :-)

There was a colloquium at CERN last year, see http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=177379

you will find the presentation about the Widom-Larsen-Srivastava that TFA talks about.

you will also find the slides about the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries transmutation experiment (and the Toyota replication of it) http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?resId=5&materialId=slides&confId=177379

As mentioned above it was also presented at the American Nuclear Society's winter meeting in Nov 2012:

"Replication experiments have been performed in some universities or institutes mainly in Japan. T.Higashiyama et al. of Osaka University observed transmutation of Cs into Pr in 2003[7]. H.Yamada et al. performed similar experiments using Cs and detected increase of mass number 137 by TOF-SIMS. They used a couple of nano-structured Pd multilayer thin film and observed the increase of mass number 141 (corresponding to Pr) only when 133Cs was given on the Pd sample [8]. N. Takhashi et al., the researchers of Toyota Central R&D Labs, presented that they detected Pr from the permeated Pd sample using SOR x-ray at Spring-8 and the detected Pr was confirmed by ICP-MS and TOF-SIMS [8]." http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ANS2012W/2012Iwamura-ANS-LENR-Paper.pdf

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries reported transmutation of Cs to Pr at low energies, it was presented at a CERN colloquium last year.

http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?resId=5&materialId=slides&confId=177379

Toyota has replicated the experiment.

It was also presented at the American Nuclear Society's winter meeting in Nov 2012:

"Replication experiments have been performed in some universities or institutes mainly in Japan. T.Higashiyama et al. of Osaka University observed transmutation of Cs into Pr in 2003[7]. H.Yamada et al. performed similar experiments using Cs and detected increase of mass number 137 by TOF-SIMS. They used a couple of nano-structured Pd multilayer thin film and observed the increase of mass number 141 (corresponding to Pr) only when 133Cs was given on the Pd sample [8]. N. Takhashi et al., the researchers of Toyota Central R&D Labs, presented that they detected Pr from the permeated Pd sample using SOR x-ray at Spring-8 and the detected Pr was confirmed by ICP-MS and TOF-SIMS [8]."

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ANS2012W/2012Iwamura-ANS-LENR-Paper.pdf

I am talking about a very different technology to produce the transmutations.

Mitsubishi made experiments which showed that Cs can be transmuted into Pr at low energies. The results were presented at a CERN colloquium last year http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?resId=5&materialId=slides&confId=177379

Recenty Toyota (not Hitachi, my mistake) replicated the results, this was presented at the ANS winter meeting:

"Replication experiments have been performed in some universities or institutes mainly in Japan. T.Higashiyama et al. of Osaka University observed transmutation of Cs into Pr in 2003[7]. H.Yamada et al. performed similar experiments using Cs and detected increase of mass number 137 by TOF-SIMS. They used a couple of nano-structured Pd multilayer thin film and observed the increase of mass number 141 (corresponding to Pr) only when 133Cs was given on the Pd sample [8]. N. Takhashi et al., the researchers of Toyota Central R&D Labs, presented that they detected Pr from the permeated Pd sample using SOR x-ray at Spring-8 and the detected Pr was confirmed by ICP-MS and TOF-SIMS [8]."

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ANS2012W/2012Iwamura-ANS-LENR-Paper.pdf

It's more than one engineer for god's sake... You too need to read the research papers!

We are just starting to be able to understand how to reliably reproduce it. See the table starting on page 16, more than a dozen groups have reproduced it: http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2012/2012Celani-WSEC.pdf

Ignoramous.

Ignoramous.

Ignoramous.

Ignoramous.

Ignoramous.

Ignoramous.

Ignoramous.

NASA's research is based on the Widom-Larsen theory, yet the video never gives credit to them.

Joseph Zawodny (who works for NASA at the Langely Research Center) used to give credit to Widom and Larrsen for this theory, but rcently has been trying to take credit for it by himself. This video by NASA is the result. It never once mentions Widom or Larsen.

Here's an article about this whole thing from Larsen's perspective: LENR Gold Rush Begins at NASA

NASA's research is based on the Widom-Larsen theory, yet the video never gives credit to them.

Joseph Zawodny (who works for NASA at the Langely Research Center) used to give credit to Widom and Larrsen for this theory, but rcently has been trying to take credit for it by himself. This video by NASA is the result. It never once mentions Widom or Larsen.

Here's an article about this whole thing from Larsen's perspective: LENR Gold Rush Begins at NASA

I have been following this lightly for a while. On the one hand Rossi's history does not give confidence to this being real. On the other hand he doesn't seem to approach it like I would expect a scammer to approach it - he does get in touch with universities and professors, and he does not ask for money, even apparently financing the contruction of this 1 MW plant himself. Also holding a large-scale demonstration with big-name media present does not seem usual. If it is a hoax, I am not sure what he would get out of it besides publicity (being in the news).

There are 3 options: (1) it is a hoax/fraud, (2) he really believes it is true and cannot manage to do measurements correctly or is in some kind of denial and interprets the results incorrectly so they fit his beliefs, (3) it is true.

It is not clear whether this demonstration will make it clear. There have already been 11 other smaller-scale demonstrations and apparently there has never been conclusive evidence throughout all these. It also depends on who is vetting the test. There is someone from PESwiki there tweeting updates, tweeted "Q&A just finished; reading of results; 470 kW maintained continuously during self-sustain; customer satisfied; sale made; more later." and expects to post an article on the wiki/blog in the next hour or so. PESwiki historically has followed/reported on hundreds of bogus technologies. But the customer is satisfied? Who is the customer! Also an AP writer from NY is apparently attending the demo. However, a link to the likely writer says that he covers "telecommunications, consumer electronics, etc" for the AP, so it's not likely he is knowledgeable about energy technologies.

It will be very interesting to see the reports.

Here are the various semi-high-profile news articles about this technology that have recently been published, to collect them all in once place:
Forbes blog, Oct 28th
Wired, Oct 28th
Forbes blog, Oct 17th
Wired, Oct 6th
And then plenty of other sites like blogs and physorg since January of this year.

I have been following this lightly for a while. On the one hand Rossi's history does not give confidence to this being real. On the other hand he doesn't seem to approach it like I would expect a scammer to approach it - he does get in touch with universities and professors, and he does not ask for money, even apparently financing the contruction of this 1 MW plant himself. Also holding a large-scale demonstration with big-name media present does not seem usual. If it is a hoax, I am not sure what he would get out of it besides publicity (being in the news).

There are 3 options: (1) it is a hoax/fraud, (2) he really believes it is true and cannot manage to do measurements correctly or is in some kind of denial and interprets the results incorrectly so they fit his beliefs, (3) it is true.

It is not clear whether this demonstration will make it clear. There have already been 11 other smaller-scale demonstrations and apparently there has never been conclusive evidence throughout all these. It also depends on who is vetting the test. There is someone from PESwiki there tweeting updates, tweeted "Q&A just finished; reading of results; 470 kW maintained continuously during self-sustain; customer satisfied; sale made; more later." and expects to post an article on the wiki/blog in the next hour or so. PESwiki historically has followed/reported on hundreds of bogus technologies. But the customer is satisfied? Who is the customer! Also an AP writer from NY is apparently attending the demo. However, a link to the likely writer says that he covers "telecommunications, consumer electronics, etc" for the AP, so it's not likely he is knowledgeable about energy technologies.

It will be very interesting to see the reports.

Here are the various semi-high-profile news articles about this technology that have recently been published, to collect them all in once place:
Forbes blog, Oct 28th
Wired, Oct 28th
Forbes blog, Oct 17th
Wired, Oct 6th
And then plenty of other sites like blogs and physorg since January of this year.

I have been following this lightly for a while. On the one hand Rossi's history does not give confidence to this being real. On the other hand he doesn't seem to approach it like I would expect a scammer to approach it - he does get in touch with universities and professors, and he does not ask for money, even apparently financing the contruction of this 1 MW plant himself. Also holding a large-scale demonstration with big-name media present does not seem usual. If it is a hoax, I am not sure what he would get out of it besides publicity (being in the news).

There are 3 options: (1) it is a hoax/fraud, (2) he really believes it is true and cannot manage to do measurements correctly or is in some kind of denial and interprets the results incorrectly so they fit his beliefs, (3) it is true.

It is not clear whether this demonstration will make it clear. There have already been 11 other smaller-scale demonstrations and apparently there has never been conclusive evidence throughout all these. It also depends on who is vetting the test. There is someone from PESwiki there tweeting updates, tweeted "Q&A just finished; reading of results; 470 kW maintained continuously during self-sustain; customer satisfied; sale made; more later." and expects to post an article on the wiki/blog in the next hour or so. PESwiki historically has followed/reported on hundreds of bogus technologies. But the customer is satisfied? Who is the customer! Also an AP writer from NY is apparently attending the demo. However, a link to the likely writer says that he covers "telecommunications, consumer electronics, etc" for the AP, so it's not likely he is knowledgeable about energy technologies.

It will be very interesting to see the reports.

Here are the various semi-high-profile news articles about this technology that have recently been published, to collect them all in once place:
Forbes blog, Oct 28th
Wired, Oct 28th
Forbes blog, Oct 17th
Wired, Oct 6th
And then plenty of other sites like blogs and physorg since January of this year.

Rossi escaped to the US. Here's his spin:

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/RossiECat/RossiPetroldragonStory.shtml

Can you connect him or his supporters to Santilli and the MagneGas project which is similar to Petroldragon?

NASA is also working on the LENR project
http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/05/06/nasa-working-on-lenr-replication-and-theory-confirmation/

Makes sense. Most science isn't "good" until it's been through the meat grinder that is peer review. One of the reasons I get so mad at the press. Show them a snappy enough press release and they'll report all sorts of stuff.

Efficient in what sense? Who cares if half the heat is lost? Car engines lose like 90% of the energy value of fuel and we still use them (although electric cars are better and we will be seeing them -- and electric car batteries could help level the grid load from renewables in various ways).

By the way, just to make gasoline from oil it may take more energy from electricity and natural gas than the gasoline holds:
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm

Add on 90% conversion losses on top of that, and how is that for "inefficiency"? But look around you and there are probably gas powered cars everywhere (mostly for political reasons at this point):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

I'd generally agree with you that if you want heat energy, you are best off collecting solar as heat. However, you stated essentially there are no storage solutions, and I pointed out one that is obviously working and could be used further.

Also, solar electric can be a lot more convenient in a lot of places than solar thermal (like for air conditioning loads that peak with the sun, or charging electric cars during the day, or when you have limited space on your site, or when you want electricity, and so on), so efficiency is relative to what you want to optimize and other constraints.

Another storage medium is creating synthetic carbon-based fuels using solar power and some feedstock.

What does "efficiency" matter in that sense, if the alternative is more Fukushimas or Chernobyls or some Peak Oil Dark age? So, we produce twice as much solar panels to deal with 50% thermal losses. Big deal. PV Solar panels will be dirt cheap (or really, as cheap as leaves) in twenty years. Who cares about 50% efficiency loss in that sense? Even if more storage conversion efficiency would be nice, don't get me wrong, and I'm all for energy efficiency in use as well.

Yes, I know newer nuclear plants (Hyperion?) are supposed to be safer (although they may still have unsafe chokepoints with reprocessing plants), but the point is, there are lots of factors to consider. You said no storage solutions exist, but they do exist. That is a fact, like that solar thermal plant shows, and that has been knows for decades.

Which is more likely to be workable in the short term, using molten salt to store excess wind and PV energy (to smooth the grid) or inventing a whole new nuclear cycle (and even thorium reactors and the related bigger processing cycle are vulnerable to big risks).

Compressed air stored in salt caverns is another solution that has been in use for decades in one location.
http://web.ead.anl.gov/saltcaverns/uses/compair/index.htm

If we invested any significant amount of money in refining these ideas, on the order of the scale of the energy problem, so trillions of dollars of investment, we would have amazing solutions. That we have the solutions we do is a tribute to the human spirit of continued innovation despite most energy-related financial resources going to prop up the oil, gas, and mainstream nuclear industries as well as the wars and mining that support them -- either directly or by ignoring externalities like health issues from mercury pollution or defense taxes or nuclear meltdown risk assumed by the government and so on.

There has also been a lot of progress on both hot and cold fusion, even on relatively small budgets, so it may be a lot closer than you think, as may other innovations (many may be BS but it only takes on success -- Hydrogen doing something interesting in Nickel matrix looks interesting, for example):
http://newenergytimes.com/
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

With that said, it is a shame that we did not develop thorium reactors in the 1940s. Peo

I've been following the American Nuclear Society's page:
http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2011/03/11/media-updates-on-nuclear-power-stations-in-japan/

In addition, this second link contains a concise summary and background about this accident:
http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/03/13/ans-japanese-nuclear-power-plant-update/
(I received the latter in pdf form from an ANS emailing, initially, and it's been the easiest* to read piece that I've seen so far)

*where easy means doesn't make me cringe, and IAAANE (I am almost a nuclear engineer)

Rossi has specifically stated that 'cold fusion' is not what is going on.

There's a lot of misinformation in the comments here, and in the slashdot post title. Go figure.

Go read this

Kudos to another poster for that link.

Someone posted this link above where it talks about a similar reaction starting to get out of control. They said they were able to stop the reaction before it got out-of-hand, which is good news if this turns out to not be a scam.

There is a chance that they stumbled upon something useful without having a clue how it works, therefore unable to produce a good paper on it. Notably 'cold fusion' appears likely to have nothing to do with it.

Someone writing it up along those lines:
http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/01/19/rossi-and-focardi-lenr-device-probably-real-with-credit-to-piantelli/

Hard to tell.

If it really works they could create a business out of it and retire.

There is a chance that they stumbled upon something useful without having a clue how it works, therefore unable to produce a good paper on it. Notably 'cold fusion' appears likely to have nothing to do with it.

Someone writing it up along those lines:
http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/01/19/rossi-and-focardi-lenr-device-probably-real-with-credit-to-piantelli/

Hard to tell.

This looked to be more informative commentary...

http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/01/19/rossi-and-focardi-lenr-device-probably-real-with-credit-to-piantelli/

That is: when scientist A finds anomalous results, it is expected -- and good science -- for scientists B, C, and D to find evidence for or against the anomalous results.

Sure, if scientists B, C, and D are as impartial as you imply. However, in practice when sacred dogma is being challenged by anomalous observations or experiments done by scientist A, well-funded scientists B, C, and D pop up to produce "evidence" to cast doubt on the anomalous finding. And for good measure, scientist A is subjected to character assessination. See for example what happened to Rusi Taleyarkhan. http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/bubblegate/BubblegatePortal.shtml

In short: science is in part about persuasion, and the highest quality of evidence is (almost always) the most persuasive argument available.

You have too rosy a view of scientific practice. Scientific practice is also about perception, and the highest level of funding tends to determine what people can be made to believe. See for example how the anthropogenic global warming theory was pushed.

The scientific method is what grounds science in reality. The further scientific practice deviates from a pure exercise of the scientific method, the less faith one should put in the truthfulness of the models and theories produced thereby,

"Silly" is something you should justify if you expect to be taken seriously. Name-calling is the least persuasive argument available.

It is silly on multiple levels. For one, it is a complex addition to the BB model with weak theoretical and observational grounding. On the scale of the universe, quantum theory has not been tested experimentally. Applying it to the universe as a whole is therefore quite a leap of faith. Moreover, there is a lot of theoretical leeway in which you can. Also, it has not been possible to marry quantum theory to general relativity. This makes it likely that at least one of the two is wrong. So applying both at the same time is excessively risky.

You know that reading this sentence strictly, an obvious answer is "relative motion introduces a Doppler shift", right?

Looking at Arp's observations, the interpretation that high-redshift objects are being ejected from "foreground" galaxies seems inescapable. For a Doppler shift to explain that, the objects would always have to be ejected away from our line of sight at fair fraction of the speed of light. Utterly implausible. The redshift must have a different origin.

You seem to imply that when a majority of observations js in accordance with a theory, this somehow outweighs a minority of observations that are at odds with it. The scientific method is not about majority voting.

I understand that people like to have a viable alternative theory. However, I hope yo will agree that even without providing an alternative theory, it is perfectly valid to engage in falsification.

"There has been a lot of crap science put forward over the years -- that debacle with cold fusion being foremost in my mind."

You're repeating that hoary old 'cold fusion was a fraud' meme? It sounds like you're unfamiliar with the literature on the subject. You can start educating yourself here.

http://www.newenergytimes.com/Reports/Start.htm

Just because we don't know what a phenomenon *is* and don't have a physical model for it or the ability to scale it up into working power plants on demand, doesn't give us the right to summarily dismiss the hard core of evidence for its existence. Anomalies are the engine that should drive science, if we actually practiced the scientific method.

Need something for that cough perhaps?

"Despite a backdrop of meager funding and career-killing derision from mainstream scientists and engineers, cold fusion is anything but a dead field of research. Presenters at the MIT event estimated that 3,000 published studies from scientists around the world have contributed to the growing canon of evidence suggesting that small but promising amounts of energy can be generated using the infamous tabletop apparatus."

"MIT's Peter Hagelstein, on the other hand, said "cold fusion" reactions have yielded surplus energy from as far back as the initial experiments in 1989. Verification of these controversial results is not the problem -- many labs around the world have reproduced parts of the results many times. "

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/08/cold_fusion?currentPage=all#

Navy Discovers Cold Fusion (again):
http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2292

"Last March, scientists at the annual conference of the august American Physical Society heard presentations on cold fusion. Next month, the Second International Conference on Future Energy will be held in Washington, D.C. The vast majority of physicists remains skeptical, but at the Office of Naval Research, six of the nine experiments performed produced an unexplainable amount of excess heat."

http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060808/REPOSITORY/608080316&SearchID=73253345954312

"Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a tabletop accelerator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature, providing confirmation of an earlier experiment conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), while offering substantial improvements over the original design."

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/ny_team_confirms_ucla_tabletop_fusion_10017.html

Science in Neglect
Nobel Laureate Speaks Out For Cold Fusion:

http://newenergytimes.com/news/2005/2005Lietz-ScienceInNeglectJosephson.htm

"The foreword by Dr. Frank Gordon in a [extern] summary report of February 2002 is so far the strongest statement of the Navy about their research:

We do not know if Cold Fusion will be the answer to future energy needs, but we do know the existence of Cold Fusion phenomenon through repeated observations by scientists throughout the world. It is time that this phenomenon be investigated so that we can reap whatever benefits accrue from additional scientific understanding. It is time for government funding organizations to invest in this research. "

http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/18/18580/1.html

"First, a dozen techniques have been found to produce anomalous energy and benign nuclear products in certain solids. These are listed in the table (p. 76). Most of these methods have been duplicated at independent laboratories, and several can be made to work by anyone who would take the time to learn how. "

http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/summ01/cold_fusion/cold_fusion.html

Edmund Storms* discusses the methods used to generate low energy nuclear reactions (LENR).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltZhii3g2HY

* Retired from the Los Alamos National Laboratory after thirty-four years of service. His work there involved basic research i

I pointed you towards the Naudin website because it shows you how to do a replication yourself, easily. Not because of any papers on there. For that I suggest the peer-reviewed literature and conference proceedings.

You keep on coming back to the palladium experiments. From the perspective of energy production, they have not been of interest for a long time. Other much less expensive and scaled up systems have been validated. Read up on the state of the art before passing judgment. While doing so, take a bit broader perspective. There are pure plasma phenomena that are likely to be based on the same physical mechanisms underlying the LENR work. To read up on some of that, and get a good feel for how this class of research is being treated, see here: http://www.newenergytimes.com/BubbleTrouble/BubblegatePortal.htm

Mind you, the electrolytic LENR work can be safely ignored when viewing it as a candidate for economic energy production. Much cheaper methods have been developed and validated. I chose the LENR work as an example because it is well-known and well-corroborated. You see, the main challenge people face, when confronted with something that does not fit their belief system, is to move beyond their preconceptions. Good luck with that.

> If this was an instance of the violation of the law of thermodynamics, it wouldn't
> have been introduced to the world as a new car. It would have been heralded as the
> wondrous piece of science it would have been. It would turn science on its ear and
> literally change everything we think we know. You'll forgive my incredible scepticism
> when someone comes around with a scheme to break that law in the form of a gadget
> they are trying to hawk.

Mod this man up. If I was a Japanese guy who discovered some "free-energy-from-water" process, I wouldn't be using it to merely power a car. Japan doesn't have any native oil production at all. Hint, they started the Asian portion of World War II because the USA embargoed oil exports to Japan due to atrocities like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre "The Rape of Nanking". Due to the embargo, Japan was looking at totally running out of oil by the end of 1942. Civilians would starve, as would the occupation army in China, and their vaunted military machine would grind to a halt and collapse. Japan had a choice between pulling out of China and grovelling before the USA, or else militarily capture oil-producing territories. Guess which they chose?

Japan would dearly love to have "free-energy-from-water". Due to their annual oil bills, they would greatly benefit from something like this device. But rather than merely putting it in cars, they'd scale them up into large electrical powerplants that would run their cities. The Japanese desparation accounts for the fact that Japan is the last country where serious research into cold fusion is going on http://newenergytimes.com/news/2008/29img/Arata-Demo.htm. Cold fusion, BTW, is the only conceivable form of free-energy-from-water that doesn't break the known laws of physics, but implementation is the problem. The fact that the company is hawking a consumer product to the man on the street, rather than a big power plant to government, is what pegs my bogo-meter.

Steven,

This whole issue of Platinum and Palladium interacting with Hydrogen needs to be handled in a more professional manner.

People are being encouraged to believe things that are not true. Labs have been demonstrating these things for years, and they have never, as far as I know, been able to build reliable experiments or understand the physics. They don't even seem to try to understand the physics.

If I am wrong, write a good synopsis of what is known, publish it on your web site, and I will submit it to Slashdot as a story, or someone else could do that.

Stories that exaggerate the work, or cause people to have exaggerated ideas, make your job far, far more difficult.

I would say more, but at present your web site is not functioning, so I can't look at the web page again.

http://newenergytimes.com/news/2008/29img/Arata-Demo.htm

With some photos!

Apparently the blog story was stolen from New Energy Times: Arata-Zhang LENR Demonstration, May 22, 2008

Yoshiaki Arata works for the Welding Research Institute of Osaka University. He is not a physicist, apparently.

Old story: He's been reporting this kind of thing since before October 13, 2006: A New Energy caused by "Spillover-Deuterium". Quote: "Intermittent operation over a period of two years using this structure proved the complete reproducibility of these results."

I hope no Slashdot reader invests in this. Would it be too much to ask Slashdot editor Scuttle Monkey to do a little research before he posts stories?

This is not the first complaint about Scuttle Monkey: Who is Scuttle Monkey?

Since cold fusion has such a bad reputation, they are calling it Low -Energy Nuclear Reactions. It's not only a better name, but it describes more accurately what those scientists are seeing: Transmutations and excess energy in low energy conditions.

The offical LENR webcine New Energy Times has all the info:

http://www.newenergytimes.com/

Professor Akito Takahashi of Osaka University was an eyewitness to the demonstration.

"Arata and Zhang demonstrated very successfully the generation of continuous excess energy (heat) from ZrO2-nano-Pd sample powders under D2 gas charging and generation of helium-4," Takahashi wrote. "The demonstrated live data looked just like data they reported in their published papers (J. High Temp. Soc. Jpn, Feb. and March issues, 2008). This demonstration showed that the method is highly reproducible."

Takahashi wrote that 60 people from universities and companies in Japan and a few people from other countries attended, as well as representatives from six major newspapers (Asahi, Nikkei, Mainichi, NHK, et al.) and two television stations.

http://www.newenergytimes.com/news/2008/29img/Arata-Demo.htm

If Taleyarkhan has made errors of judgement with regard to the authorship of papers, I would sincerely like to know that and for him to come forward.

On the other hand, mastershake_phd makes an interesting comment. "There must be something im missing here, what motive could congress have to investigate this guy? This isnt some major incident, most of the public hasnt even heard about this. I wonder what they are after."

Run your clock back a year ago. He was accused of spiking his experiment with Californium. Turns out that that whole assault was based on theoretical calculations and speculation. As much as some people wanted to "prove" that he had committed experimental fraud, they have so far, failed to make their case.

I suspect that there is much more to this story than reported by the Times. An inquisitive person who looks at the larger span of events, http://newenergytimes.com/BubbleTrouble/BFControve rsy.htm might wonder what is really going on here.

As someone who has spent the last six years investigating controversial science, I have a good sense of the difficulties of new, poorly-understood science.

The challenge of replication in unchartered scientific territory is not to be taken lightly and readily dismissed as "evidence" of non-science. Many people in the field of science, when pushed, will admit that one can never prove a negative, no matter how may attempts fail.

I am also keenly aware of the multitude of human issues in high-profile science; among these, intellectual property, intellectual primacy, competition for funding and grants.

The bold, outspoken criticisms of respected scientists in the popular media do not always make it easy for the lay reader to distinguish between science fact and science politics.

The important question to ask here, is, why all the fuss, and why a Congressional inquiry about who is listed on a science paper?

Steven Krivit Editor, New Energy Times

My library has a subscription.

Here's a freely available article that apparently explains the theory. It is cited in an erratum to the original paper.

The Naturwissenschaften authors published an erratum in a later issue stating that the effect they had observed was explained by the following paper, of which they were unaware: Ultra low momentum neutron catalyzed nuclear reactions on metallic hydride surfaces

Actually, the budget that funded this paper was a few thousand dollars a year of discretionary funds http://newenergytimes.com/news/2006/NET19.htm#ee. One of the main contributions of Navy labs to this field is metalurgical skills. There has been actual funding from time to time but for the most part people work on this on their own time.
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Go solar sooner: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

The shut down was for the secondary coolant, not the primary.

Interestingly, folks at SPAWARS have recently developed a method to preload deuterium into pladium which might make the screen in the old style fusor more useful than in the past. They seem to be getting high energy particle tracks without so much effort though. http://newenergytimes.com/news/2007/NET21.htm#apsr eport.

I think we might be able to agree about the desirability of distributed power generation. Substituting such sources into the distribution network that solar power creates should be a fairly straight forward market development.

Just in case if someone wants to read about this issue:

• LENR-CANR repository of documents related to research
  
• Purdue story details about Bubble Fusion controversy
  
• Extraordinary evidence of Cold Fusion Very important: "The smoking gun" showing that CF really exist
  

Just in case if someone wants to read about this issue:

• LENR-CANR repository of documents related to research
  
• Purdue story details about Bubble Fusion controversy
  
• Extraordinary evidence of Cold Fusion Very important: "The smoking gun" showing that CF really exist