FP's experiments discussion

On 2/12/16, AlainCo wrote: “On[e] of the reason many theories like CCS survive against LENR, it is because experiments are discussed from an armchair, reading papers, and not by replicating the claimed artifact.”

And on 2/16/16, Abd wrote: “Again, this is Shanahan's very incomplete armchair understanding.”

These two gentlemen are repeating a comment that comes up a lot, but I would like to point out that, in an experimental study there are multiple phases. First come preliminary design of equipment, aimed at meeting some requirements derived from a hypothesis about the system being studied. That’s an armchair activity in most cases, i.e. the requirements, etc. are worked out by a guy sitting at his desk. Then comes building the equipment, not an armchair activity. Then comes preliminary testing of the equipment to see if it does what you wanted, not an armchair activity. Next, you go get the data, not armchair. Then you take your data back to your desk and analyze it to see what it is telling you, definitely an armchair activity. Then you may need to refine your experiment, so go back to the start and do it again better. Or you may have been ‘successful’, and it’s time to write it up, another armchair activity. There’s more, but you all get the drift.

What is being done here is another ad hominin attack. The image being called up is of an unqualified couch potato watching an (American) football game and criticizing the coaches’ or quarterbacks’ play calls. They just know their ideas would have won the game! A and A seem to feel that an opinion from someone who has not actually run the experiment is the same as our armchair quarterback, and is invalid because of some perceived lack of credentials. But you can see from the first paragraph that actual ‘experimentation’ involves a lot of armchair activities. Bottom line, I had the data from the actual runs and all I did was examine that from a different perspective. I have all the qualifications need for that, and in fact I routinely do the same thing in my professional work. So A and A, cut out the ad homs please.

On another front, I believe it was Abd that claimed checking out the CCS idea was cost prohibitive. Not really. If you have an F&P cell, replace the electrodes with another Joule heater. Make sure 1 of the two you now have in the cell is in the gas space. Now you can run each independently and presumably simulate the split between ohmic and recombination heat. And all it costs you is another resistor and some time to hook it up (you can borrow a power supply to run the other resistor).

And finally you’ve all seen that Abd has missed it again. He thinks you can pull a ‘signal’ out of the ‘noise’ in the heat-helium correlation plot. That of course assumes the heat signals are real. The working assumption in this discussion Abd is that NONE of the apparent excess energy signals is real. That’s what ‘fictitious’ means. The excess heat numbers are an artifact of a CCS. No real heat there, ergo, no LENR or anything else that might have introduced new heat sources to the cell.

But for those of you who understand the futility of trying to correlate to an integrated error, there is one point to mention. When you have process data as a function of time, and two measures (A and B) seem to correlate, you need to keep in mind that it may be that ‘A’ is rationally time-dependent and so is ‘B’, thus time may be the key. In the heat-He correlation, time works in on heat because the heat ‘produced’ is just an integrated error (integrated over time). Likewise, with He levels well below background (NOT 5 ppm recall please) an increasing He signal with time is expected for a leak. The magnitude of the heat error and the leak rate will define the apparent correlation constant.

As a further speculation, the CCS mechanism is based on little mixed H2 and O2 bubbles exploding in the electrolyte. They produce shock waves, and since you have a large number of them, the upshot is what looks like macroscopic vibrations. In the tritium business it is a well-known fact that vibrations can loosen connections and cause leaks. So, if they are strong enough in aggregate, the little exploding bubbles from the Fleischmann-Pons-Hawkins Effect can cause 4He to appear in the cell via an air leak. One of the things the Clarkes did was to look for other atmospheric gases in the samples given to them, and they found lots. I wonder how much N2 one might find in those samples apparently containing 4He…

oystla wrote:

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Regarding the F&P work in France:

Please note that Fleischmann retired from IMRA-Europe in 1995, and moved to England.

But 1992-1995 was busy years, and Fleischmann published several papers:...

I'd like to see a definitive time-line for this, but:

The experimental papers are all 1993 or earlier, which almost certainly means the work was done before the IMRA lab was opened in 1992. The 1994 paper is a theory paper.

Fleischmann went to England in 1995, but he remained active in the field longer than Pons. IN any case, Pons remained active there until 1998, and did not publish any claims in the refereed literature.

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According to interview, Fleischmann revealed they achieved increasingly higher power densities in the electrolytic cells in France comparable to "fast breeder reactors" as he ones said.

I've seen the interview, and I don't recall that those power levels were achieved in France. They are in the 1993 paper, and I think that is for work in Utah. In any case, it is for work pre-1993. Why was it not matched in the next 5 years?

And the power density of nuclear reactors is lower than that of chemical combustion, because the fuel has to be kept below its melting point. The thing that distinguishes nuclear energy is its *energy* density.

In any case, if those claims had had merit, the experiment would have been reproduced and improved upon, instead of seeing smaller effects over time, and eventually abandoned.

Just the fact that your advocacy of cold fusion involves 20 year-old experiments shows the lack of progress in the field.

Large excess heat production in Ni-H systems - Piantelli

Headlines: long data collection period (300 days), high temperatures, claimed 100W in 170W out over long period.

Well this would be amazing and set the world alight except that the claimed output power is not based on good calorietry. The system used could suffer large calibration drifts from:

(1) radiant surface change due to H ingress and damage
(2) thermocouple drift due to H contamination
(3) other things I don't know about

They did not recalibrate the system (as far as I can see on very brief reading) after the experiment to test for drift.

As evidence - were these eye-catching figures real they could easily be validated by better calorimetry (Piantelli has had lots of time to do this) and he would obtain a Nobel prize.

But I have not taken the time to examine this - and others may have more informed comment.

EDIT - reading a bit more these cells are sealed throughout the long experiment. But the heat transfer from inner reactor to outer cooled surface is through the gas in the sealed cell, where vapour pressure will surely change due to chemical reactions. In such a system the thermal resistance depends on the vapour pressure.
Note the pressure changes noted in the paper. Piantelli does not consider the mundane explanation, nor calibrate against pressure, nor note pressure throughout the 300 day experiment!

So that aspect alone makes this data useless for purpose of establishing extraordinary excess heat.

"... for example chemical heat (from sudden recombination) can achieve arbitrarily high power density."

I suspect this is incorrect. I suppose the most powerful chemical explosions will give a value in the neighborhood of the practical upper bound on chemical power density.

oystla wrote:

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Regarding the Focardi 1994 paper: [...]

CERN noted "anomalous heating during hydrogen loading". But Focardi et. Al had anomalous heating AFTER loading and triggering of excess heat.

What they both measured was an increase in temperature during loading, and the increase remained after loading. Focardi interpreted the increase in temperature as excess heat, but CERN showed it was due to a change in thermal properties, and that excess heat was not generated. From the abstract: "we have observed all the effects discovered by Focardi et al., but our results imply that there is no production of power associated with the absorption of hydrogen by nickel."

The problem was that Piantelli simply measured isolated temperatures on a device unpredictably cooled by ambient air, rather than insulating the experiment and performing proper calorimetry.

Indeed, when Piantelli repeated the experiment with an additional temperature measurement, they admitted that their earlier interpretation was a factor of 2 too high. In other words, they agreed that the experimental procedure was seriously flawed, but then instead of performing actual calorimetry, they just measured an additional isolated temperature.

oystla wrote:

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the fact that the highest claims of excess heat seem to be connected to Nickel hydrogen systems, is why I believe the focus on wet Pd deuterium systems where a dead end.

The performance of Ni-H does not affect the performance of Pd-D, and either one could be used to investigate the mechanism, but no answers have been discovered in either case. The more plausible reason that Pd-D was abandoned is because the results became weaker when the experiment improved.

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To The 1998 paper Of professor Focardi, Gabbani, Montalbano, Piantelli and Veronesi.

Paper Title: "Large excess heat production in Ni-H systems"

Published in the Peer reviewed Italian physics Journal "Nuovo Cimento" in 1998.

I have not found any criticism (Peer reviewed or not) of this paper.

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The criticism of the paper is the same as that of the 1994 paper -- no calorimetry. They themselves showed the weakness of their method, but neglected to make significant improvement. It is understandable that CERN was not interested in making the same point again.

In addition, the level of heat that was claimed was substantial, and it was presumably triggered by heat. If it had been real, simple insulation would have been enough to maintain the necessary temperature for the device to sustain itself, but that never happened. And in fact, they have not published excess heat claims for that configuration since.

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The authors also made a paper in 1994, mentioned in above post, which was critizied by physcists at CERN. CERN was not able to trigger any excess heat, they saw only excess heat during loading of hydrogen. I've read their paper and it's clear they did not try any trigger mechanism to "turn on" the Ni-H LENR, so they concluded no excess heat other than during Hydrogen absorption in lattice.

You're mistaken. They saw the same temperature increase that Focardi saw, but were able to attribute it to something other than excess heat.

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And the Reasons why I think this paper is strong evidence of anomalous heat in Ni-H systems are:

1. Power input and excess output in the 10's of watts, not milliwatt regions, i.e. Easier to measure outside error margins

But not measured with calorimetry. Only isolated temperatures of an unpredictably cooled device are used.

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2. Simplicity of their system. No complicated calculations or complicated calibrations required. The calibrations show what temperatures to Expect for certain input heat power, regardless If heat comes from electrical or possible LENR

Wrong. Because the temperature depends on the way heat *flows*, and the device is simply in ambient air, it depends on thermal properties, which are affected by hydrogen absorption.

If they wanted it to be simple, they could have insulated it and used flow calorimetry.

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3. Two parallell cells to increase confidence of results.

Does not address the above.

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4. Thermometer registrering total heat, regardless of it's origin (heater or LENR)

Wrong. It registers temperature. Heat must be deduced based on assumptions not in evidence.

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5. Small variations in room temperature would not affect the results, because of the high power regions.

Room temperature should be irrelevant if they used calorimetry.

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6. The long test period of excess heat (280 - 320 days), securing accuracy and confidence of results. Indicates longevity of the LENR reactions, as also later Ni-H cells have shown.

It just shows that the error they interpret as heat persists. Namely the change in the thermal properties.

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7. Excess heat of 70 watts at less than 100 watts input. Easy to read from calibration curve - far beyond any possible calibration errors.

And yet, they admitted half the observed heat in 1994 was caused by artifact. The leap from half to all is not implausible in an experiment without calorimetry.

And to me the high level of claimed heat makes it even less plausible, because if LENR were producing a continuous 70 W of heat for the better part of a year, it's inconceivable that (1) they would be unable to identify the reaction (2) they would be unable to make it self-sustain, and (3) they would be unable to exploit the effect. But none of these have happened, and they have not even published since then.

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8. For cell B a new calibration curve when Nickel is in "excited state" shows clearly higher temperature even for the temperature sensor placed the furthest away from the core.

Heat flow is a bitch to predict and describe, and the question is why bother? Why sit around for a year watching the thing instead of getting off their sofa and insulating the device and plumbing some coolant through it to do proper calorimetry?

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And how can we scale this up and get more energy? Well, why not try more surface area, i.e. Nickel Powder.....ooops someone is allready onto that one

You know of course that it is 18 years later, and none of those who are onto that have published, or developed a product. 18 years to try increasing the surface area. Sounds kind of too long, no?

Quote from joshua cude

To initiate a nuclear reaction requires either screening the nuclear charge, and without exotic particles (which require high energy to make) takes energy to sufficiently confine electrons ... All of those processes involve focusing very high energy onto individual atomic sites. That's revolutionary. It's the first miracle.

Would it be revolutionary for electric arcing between insulated metal grains, or surplus electrons on a grain, to alter the charge density significantly for a brief period of time? Only a small change in the Coulomb barrier is needed to alter the tunneling rates for the decay of alpha emitters.

Quote from joshua cude

The release of nuclear energy entirely by heat, with almost undetectable radioactive signatures, is also unprecedented, particularly in reactions that produce helium from deuterons. There are radionuclides (like Pu-238, Po-210) that decay by alpha emission, which is easily shielded. These are used in radioisotope thermoelectric generators, but even in these cases, the low level radiation is unmistakeable if you look for it. That's why the Russian's who poisoned Litvinenko with Po-210 could be traced weeks after the fact. That's the third miracle.

If the decay rates were increased by something controlled in the experiment, it would not be surprising for them to die down shortly afterwards.

This is not to argue that we would not have two "miracles" here. But no one familiar with the history of the experimental investigation of alpha decay would argue that modifying the decay rates will have been something that was unanticipated, even if the present feeling is that it is effectively impossible beyond a trivial amount.

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Would it be revolutionary for electric arcing between insulated metal grains, or surplus electrons on a grain, to alter the charge density significantly for a brief period of time? Only a small change in the Coulomb barrier is needed to alter the tunneling rates for the decay of alpha emitters.

Things like pyroelectric fusion have been observed, but yes, it would be revolutionary in the context of cold fusion experiments to produce that kind of effect, and simply changing the Coulomb barrier, as we know from muon catalyzed fusion has no effect on the nature of the nuclear reaction.

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If the decay rates were increased by something controlled in the experiment, it would not be surprising for them to die down shortly afterwards.

What do you mean by die down? Changing the decay rate (also a miracle, as you say) does not change the nature of the decay. It means the gamma emission rate would be slower, not less energetic.

"Things like pyroelectric fusion have been observed, but yes, it would be revolutionary in the context of cold fusion experiments to produce that kind of effect, and simply changing the Coulomb barrier, as we know from muon catalyzed fusion has no effect on the nature of the nuclear reaction."

To be clear, I'm not suggesting fusion. I'm suggesting induced alpha decay. I think you could get that from simply changing the Coulomb barrier. Am I wrong?

"What do you mean by die down? Changing the decay rate (also a miracle, as you say) does not change the nature of the decay."

Sorry -- I meant to say revert back to the natural rate.

Thomas,

Power density has a point, when you connect it with energy density. You would use both to Compare sources.

We woul like to know how much energy is available, and how quickly that energy can be delivered.

Example from my calculation of the Mcubre paper:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHisothermala.pdf

- We have 153 KJ excess energy in the P14 test ( and correcting for 50mW of uncertainty according to Mckubre)
cathode dimensions: "experiments were performed using 0.3 cm diameter × 5 cm length Engelhard palladium cathodes of 99.9% purity. "

Which equals 0,35 ml cathode volume, (as known Cathode is where LENR occur)

Therefore:

- Power density: 1 watt (ca. Max excess Value) gives 2,9 KW/liter cathode.

- 153 KJ divided by 0,35 mL gives 437142 KJ/L, i.e. A source of almost 12 times higher than one of the densest chemical fuels based on volume density.

Or Pr weight unit: Palladium density of 12 g/cm3 gives 4,2 gram cathode. Energy density will then be 36428 KJ/kg or 10100 WattHrs/kg. Power density will be 0,24 KW/kg or 240 watt/kg

Based on weight density, This is half of plutonium 238 power density, and 3-4 times more than gasoline energy density.

Ref. http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHisothermala.pdf

Joshua

Haha, you did not read the papers.

CERN "discovered" excothermic absorption of hydrogen in Nickel, a well known phenomenon. But Nickel can only absorb a certain amount, and after that, no more absorption excess heat. And the absorption period is only lasting for hrs, the period used in CERN. Not for a whole year, which was the period used by Focardi.

CERN did not achieve the same temperature respons as Focardi. Which is easy to see from the temperature respons curves.

Which mens CERN did not achieve triggering of LENR.

In the 1998 paper Focardi did a better documentation of the setup, temperature respons, how to trigger LENR, etc.
lenr-canr.org/acrobat/FocardiSlargeexces.pdf

CERN only had this going for a few hrs, while Focardi had it going for a year.

If CERN hade perfomed a longer test they would have noticed a fall off temperature when excothermic Hydrogen loading period was over, since they did not achieve triggering of LENR.

1994 paper.
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/l…HeatNi-H-NuovoCimento.pdf
And the Critics from CERN:
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/l…estigationOfAnomalous.pdf

Interesting walk down memory lane.

I wonder how CCS can apply to Brillouin claims of:

- Ratios of thermal energy out to electromagnetic pulse power energy in of greater than 4:1
- Continuous reactor operation for weeks at a time
- Power output for a single reactor core up into the hundreds of watts

Quote from Abd

When I say that the preponderance of the evidence shows reality, I mean that researchers can walk into an agency and present evidence with a straight face that is not simply circumstantial, weak, close to noise, like Cude imagines, but that is statistically of high significance, that is direct, and that is already confirmed by multiple labs.

I've been asking people here to post such evidence, with no luck so far. Do you mean perhaps that you are privy to hidden evidence not generally available? that would seem unlikely.

Also would you like to elaborate on the "statistical" bit? Given your previous incorrect statements about systematic errors (the hydra stuff documented above) I think I'd want to check what you judged was statistically significant. All of which is possible, of course...

One final point. "Statistical significance" of results is only valid if the interpretation of the experiment is correct and all systematic and random errors considered. We have a long history of LENR experiments in which that is not the case. So you would need this evidence to be from experiments well critiqued, that survived that process in the real world (not just amongst people strongly biassed one way).

If you are saying that is what you want to obtain - great! A worthy if difficult ambition. If you are saying it exists then please give details - I'm pretty sure when given them I or others here will be able to explain why you are wrong.

Quote from Mats

Interesting walk down memory lane.I wonder how CCS can apply to Brillouin claims of:- Ratios of thermal energy out to electromagnetic pulse power energy in of greater than 4:1- Continuous reactor operation for weeks at a time- Power output for a single reactor core up into the hundreds of watts

The problem is this. They are using high power EMPs to "trigger" the reaction. Unfortunately such EMPs also trigger a whole load of subtle issues in instrumentation that can result in apparent temperature changes caused by rectification of hf electric or magnetic fields.

In this case none of their published papers (to my knowledge) have addressed this issue and it is a difficult one. Also they have a very strong commercial imperative to show positive results. It makes their claims less plausible than those of a disinterested scientist.

As always though there may be other issues, that is just the one I am aware of.

This is a classic case where if, like Abd (it seems from the above) you think there is just one hydra, you will take the fact that maybe CCS does not apply to Brillouin as an indication that is does not apply elsewhere. Of course that is not true, and equally it is not true that CCs is the only potential error mechanism not considered by excess heat experiments in CF research.

Abd wrote:

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Cude is, as usual, and as expected for his age and culture, rude.

Well, I've never called anyone a lying sack of s***, as you have.

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Liar, liar, pants on fire.

Ah, it's good to see the rules here have tempered your crudeness. At least I think that's a step up from a sack of s***. But no, it's not a lie. In fact , you implicitly concede the truth of it when you complain about the rejection cascade, and why the field receives too little funding etc.

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What is the "relevant experience and expertise?

How can you be so certain it's a lie, when you consider the terms of the claim subjective? Relevant experience and expertise in this context means anyone active in research with some post-graduate interest in and training relevant to energy and or nuclear reactions.

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And Joshua calls my credentials into question. What are his?

Yours are relevant because you are making unsupported assertions. Mine are not, because I cite easily verifiable observations, and simple logic, and when I appeal to expert judgement, it is not mine (or not only mine) but that of credentialed experts.

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Evidence that this is not just a vague claim?

This is supported in great detail in my posts. The simplest is of course the judgement of the expert panels enlisted by the DOE, but also the absence of the subject in high impact journals, and the complaints from the likes of Hagelstein and Boss about how difficult it is to publish in such journals, indicating that peer reviewers for such journals generally reject cold fusion papers.

We saw in 1989 what the world would be like if scientists only *thought* there might be something to cold fusion. For it to be ignored as it is now is only consistent with a judgment that the evidence indicates it is almost certainly not real.

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Heat/helium is reproducible.

No, it's not, which is why no quantitative replication of Miles has met the modest standard of peer review, and why the mostly unpublished results Storms cited as replications are in fact all over the map, with some showing anti-correlation, and some failing to observe definitive helium. I've covered this in some detail in previous posts, which presumably you haven't read yet, and maybe never will, and in even greater detail over on ECN.

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That is, in fact, the opinion of experts, as covered in peer-reviewed journals, which is how we know what "scientists think."

But helium replications are not published under peer review, except by secondary references in reviews of conference proceedings. And there haven't even been conference reports of heat-helium experiments in more than a decade.

Abd wrote:

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An assessment of "preponderance of the evidence" is accompanied by an actual study of evidence, not by what is said to a newspaper reporter who calls up some random nuclear physicist for an opinion, when said nuclear physicist has certainly not looked at the evidence.

I was not referring to a random nuclear physicist called by a reporter. I was referring to the DOE panel, which did actually study the evidence, and to peer reviewers for journals and granting agencies, who do the same.

But really, the evidence you fall back on is Miles, which was challenged in the literature, and for which replication has failed to meet the modest standard of peer review.

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The evidence for cold fusion does not involve the tools of nuclear physics.

Calorimetry and mass spectrometry are both common tools of the physicist. And physicists are certainly sufficiently educated to understand them, having been exposed to them a good deal more than you have.

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Standard pseudoskeptical rant. If it's real, how come it's not in Home Depot yet? Well, perhaps because the effect is not understood,

That was not my rant. It was merely that the phenomenon should be obvious. Superconductivity, HTSC, and fire were all perfectly obvious decades or centuries before they were understood.

And nuclear reactions, with its high energy density and the ability to detect products at trace levels, should be more obvious than most phenomena. They were identifying nuclear reactions a century ago, when scarcely anything was known about the nucleus, let alone understood.

But cold fusion is not just non-obvious, there is no progress at all. The results are all over the map, showing no consistency with any sort of measurable parameters. Real effects invariably become more manifest with a search of parameter space and improvement in technique, even if no mechanism is identified. Artifacts become less so. The history of cold fusion fits the latter more closely.

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beyond what I've been saying here, and without knowing exactly how to create reliable reactions,

But that's what I refer to. No progress has been made in knowing exactly how to create reliable reactions. It is inconceivable that scientists would not learn this whether it was understood or not, just by searching parameter space. And for a nuclear reaction to go unidentified for 27 years, 50 years after Rutherford is similarly implausible. It fits artifacts far more plausibly.

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that also continue reliably, the design of what would produce what Cude demands (high heat, reliably)

No, one watt reliably would produce reaction products that could not be mistaken, and would result in a Nobel prize. But even that small demand eludes the field.

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requires major research,

You're making that up because there has been no success with the research so far. But if cold fusion is not real, then major research will not be enough.

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whereas even the modest research recommended by both DoE reviews wasn't funded,

The DOE did not recommend modest research. If it had done that, then it would have allocated funds for the purpose. The panel was formed to decide whether special funding should be allocated for the field. They were unanimously *negative* on this question.

Here's what the 2004 panel wrote: "The nearly unanimous opinion of the reviewers was that funding agencies should entertain individual, well-designed proposals for experiments that address specific scientific issues relevant to the question of whether or not there is anomalous energy production in Pd/D systems, or whether or not D-D fusion reactions occur at energies on the order of a few eV. These proposals should meet accepted scientific standards, and undergo the rigors of peer review. No reviewer recommended a focused federally funded program for [lexicon]low energy nuclear reactions[/lexicon]."

It is the mandate of funding agencies to entertain proposals for research. That recommendation does not mean they recommended research -- only that if good proposals could be generated, funding agencies should consider them. It was a sop to the applicants.

If anything the first DOE panel was more sympathetic, writing: "The Panel is sympathetic toward modest support for carefully focused and cooperative experiments within the present funding system."

But still, "within the present system", means proposals should be submitted, not funding should be provided.

And anyway, isn't the lack of funding you complain about an indication that the mainstream considers the preponderance of evidence to suggest cold fusion is not real.

Abd wrote:

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The position that Joshua can express so confidently, hiding behind anonymity, could not get published in a mainstream peer-reviewed journal.

And that's a good thing. Scientific journals are not about expressing skepticism about an essentially moribund field. What would be the point? The field has been largely ignored since the early 90s when most scientists were well aware of it, and judged it to be almost certainly without merit. For it to be considered again, will require some new evidence, not just the sort of repeated arguing about 20-year old results that you are so fond of. But in the last decade or more, the refereed literature about which you have such a high regard, has reported essentially no progress in the field.

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When I say that the preponderance of the evidence shows reality, I mean that researchers can walk into an agency and present evidence with a straight face that is not simply circumstantial, weak, close to noise, like Cude imagines, but that is statistically of high significance, that is direct, and that is already confirmed by multiple labs.

And yet, when they did that with the DOE, they were rejected. And the evidence was weak, erratic close to the noise, and irreproducible. That's why so little of it was published.

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So there is Plan B. Plan B is to go ahead and do that basic recommended research. Plan B, then, has two phases.

Phase I is to confirm, with increased precision, the heat/helium ratio. This is a classic test.

Agreed. The only thing odd about it is why it has taken so long. It's abundantly clear that the DOE was not buying the claims, and yet no one has tried to improve the results to at least the level that it gets published. That alone wouldn't be enough, but it is not a difficult hurdle.

But more than an improved ratio, a more definitive helium level would help, as both Miles and McKubre have said. And as the ERAB panel showed, one watt for one month would produce enough helium in the palladium to swamp detectors.

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Phase II work then studies the phenomenon that has been confirmed by prior work, or by Phase I research.

If phase 1 were to succeed, someone would be talking about it from a podium in Stockholm, and you'd be trampled by researchers and flooded with money. I would not start worrying about phase 2 until that happens. It would open a whole new perspective, but I am nearly certain it will never come to that.

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Cude focuses on the mystery of the reaction happening at all, whereas we know it happens, so that is all old misghegas.

I like how your goal is to prove LENR is real, which is an admission that the proof does not yet exist, and yet you are certain in spite of its absence. That's why LENR looks so much like a religion to skeptical scientists.

What happens if 10 years from now, the field is in the same state it is in now, which is the same state it was in when you jumped on board in 2009, and the same state it was in 2 decades ago? Will you be as confident as you are now?

I am happy to tell you that if solid evidence comes along in the form of unequivocal nuclear reaction products, or unequivocal energy density (from a self-sustained experiment) a hundred times higher than chemical, I will celebrate the new energy source along with the rest of the world. I already did that once, but it was a false alarm.