On the site of his book, Edmund Storms have posted an article about the rational approach to evaluate LENR theory.
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It has been posed that a major criterion for evaluating theory is “comparison with the observations we expect it to ‘explain’”, such as
1) A failure to observe intense penetrating radiations.
2) A failure to observe secondary hot reactions (recoil etc.)
3) Why the reaction takes place mainly outside the bulk.
4) How tritium / neutrons are produced.
5) How energy is transmitted to the lattice as heat.
6) How the above can occur in both light and heavy hydrogen systems.
7) Iwamura’s transmutations.
I have studied LENR now for 26 years. I found the difficulty in creating the effect very frustrating. Most of my attempts failed. When a sample made energy, it seemed no different from the samples that did nothing. Finding an explanation for this difference became my goal. Use of trial and error was not practical because I did not have the resources to run the required large number of experiments.
I turned to the explanations that were being proposed and found that they ignored the unique conditions required to initiate the nuclear reaction and focused on the nuclear process using selected behavior. In other words, they were useless in showing me how to make success more reliable.
Having a chemical background, my first question was, “What was unique about the material that could cause a nuclear reaction”? After all, for over 100 years, scientists failed to detect any indication that a nuclear reaction could be affected by the chemical environment no matter how extreme the conditions and no matter how hard they looked. Clearly, a very rare and unique condition had to be created. In 1996, I identified this condition as the nuclear active environment (NAE).
