FP's experiments discussion

Quote from kirkshanahan

Szpak, et al took a video of hot spots on an electrode under the electrolyte, claiming they were ‘mini-nuclear explosions’. I added that they could as easily be chemical. Why do you think this is unprovable, and even, not already proven?

Hydrogen finds its way into the grain structure of the transition metal lattice where it accumulates in a defect in that lattice structure. The chemical bonds forming the lattice compresses the hydrogen as the amount of hydrogen atoms increase. Phonon vibrations also contributes to increasing pressure on the aggregation of hydrogen atoms confined within the lattice.

When the density of hydrogen atoms increases to a transformative level catalyzed by an increasing level of pressure, a change in state occurs in the cluster of hydrogen atoms where that cluster transforms from a gas into a metal. This solid hexagonal crystalline nanoparticle is then coated with Surface Plasmon Polaritons(SPP) which provides superconductivity together with the meissner effect. Such a transition has been experimentally observed by Miley, Holmlid and Hora.

After its formation, this hydrogen crystal erupts from the lattice and forms a crater most often marked by a melt of high temperature resistant metal lattice material mushrooming from a central exit cavity. The LENR reaction that produces this eruptive event results in a copious generation of alpha particles that are broadcast from the lattice in a spherical pattern whose density is governed by the inverse square law. The energy produced by the emergence of the hydrogen crystal from the lattice is captured and stored on the surface of the hydrogen metal particle and magnetically reinforces its structural integrity. The hydrogen crystal is now independent of the lattice and proceeds to catalyze more LENR reactions. Sourced by the metal lattice, the eruptive event most generally is surrounded by transmutation products derived from the lattice metal and other lattice surface material coverings that are then broadcast from the eruptive event.

So :

Shanahan: ".....the change was systematic, indicating real chemistry. I further suggested that would occur if recombination occurred at the electrode."

So now we are talking, "CCS" hypothesis is relying on recombination on the cathode.

But:

Firstly, Fleischmann and Pons calculated and proved recombination represented a Max Value of 1%.

Secondly, for closed cells, recombination is what you want to achieve. If it happens in the gas phase above (catalyser) or in the water phase does not matter. The whole thing is immersed in the calorimetry bath, so where heat is originating from inside the cell does not matter, since energy is measured accurately by the calorimetry Anyhow.

And CCS can therefore not explain excess energy of 11 to 50 % over extended time when also recombination is included in the budget.

In my view, LENR is caused by a long sought after effect that has not yet been found by professional science involving monopole magnetism. Science has predicted all the effects seen in LENR that do in fact exist in the presence of a monopole. This includes disruption of subatomic particles including protons and neutrons within the nucleus. The production of mesons which involve the strange nuclear property is clear proof of proton decay.

Holmlid has produced up to 12 billion kaons in his experiments from the excitation of metalized hydrogen using a single low power laser pulse. This is unambiguous proof that proton decay is occurring in LENR.

Quote from axil

Holmlid has produced up to 12 billion kaons in his experiments from the excitation of metalized hydrogen using a single low power laser pulse. This is unambiguous proof that proton decay is occurring in LENR.

OK, Axil, great. But, I see a positron exiting the system (diagram that does not seem to paste out for me, proton on the left pion [kaon?] on the right with positron above). What is to become of the likely terrestrial annihilation gamma decay from that? Is this the reason W-L or others postulate a gamma shield? And what about quark conservation, if you will excuse my ignorance.

Thanks, Longview

"Firstly, Fleischmann and Pons calculated and proved recombination represented a Max Value of 1%."

This is based on a raft of assumptions, and IT IS FOR ELECTROCHEMICAL RECOMBINATION. Not what I am talking about.

"Secondly, for closed cells, recombination is what you want to achieve. If it happens in the gas phase above (catalyser) or in the water phase does not matter. The whole thing is immersed in the calorimetry bath, so where heat is originating from inside the cell does not matter, since energy is measured accurately by the calorimetry Anyhow."

So you have been asleep... The CCS is for closed cells too. Your conclusions above are wrong.

"And CCS can therefore not explain excess energy of 11 to 50 % over extended time when also recombination is included in the budget."

No, it can quite easily. See my recent post on this...

Quote from Longview

OK, Axil, great. But, I see a positron exiting the system (diagram that does not seem to paste out for me, proton on the left pion [kaon?] on the right with positron above). What is to become of the likely terrestrial annihilation gamma decay from that? Is this the reason W-L or others postulate a gamma shield? And what about quark conservation, if you will excuse my ignorance.

Thanks, Longview

The energy transfer path between the disturbed nucleus and the metalized hydrogen nanoparticle is mediated by entanglement with a bose condensate on the surface of the nanoparticle through a magnetically establish transfer path. All excitation energy is relieved in this energy transfer process. Without latent nuclear post reaction excitation energy, there exist no gamma or subatomic particle formation activity possible. There is no Gamma and positron formation nuclear based energy available to support post reaction energy release. The exception is alpha particle release which happens at the time of nuclear disintegration.

It is interesting and informative to look at the Holmlid experiment where large numbers of alpha particles are produced together with the generation of a comparable amount of neutral molecular fragments moving outward with high kinetic energy. Even in this environment where high kinetic energy interactions between both these types of particle clusters would be expected to produce gamma radiation from the release of kinetic energy produced by the impact with these fast moving particles with the structure of the experiment, this high energy radiation is not produced. This leads to the possibility that the entire experiment is enclosed in a bose condensate based entanglement environment where nuclear level energy is absorbed into the EMF surface bose condensate on the surface of the metalized hydrogen.

Through entanglement with the BEC, because all nuclear level based radiation is thermalized implies that BEC based radiation transfer and absorption is an integral component of all LENR reactions.

Abd wrote:

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No, what is needed, ordinarily, and even with something like cold fusion, is preponderance of the evidence. It is not necessary to prove every detail, and unless one has unlimited funding, it is probably impossible.

A preponderance of evidence is a legal term, but used descriptively, presumably it means that, based on the evidence, someone judges something to be more likely than not. You are saying, presumably, that in your judgement, the evidence indicates cold fusion is more likely to be real than not. But you are not in a position of authority to make such a judgement for anyone else. You don't have a science degree or any experience in scientific research. Moreover, you have admitted that your advocacy has been paid for.

Those who do have relevant expertise and experience, for the most part, are not convinced cold fusion is real, so that means that, in their judgement, the preponderance of evidence fails to make cold fusion more likely to be real than not. Such experts are of course considering the copious and consistent and reproducible evidence from a century of nuclear physics that collectively suggests strongly that nuclear reactions would not happen in the context of cold fusion experiments. Next to this, the erratic, marginal, inconsistent, and irreproducible results associated with such experiments are far more plausibly explained by artifacts. Which is to say, in the mainstream view, the preponderance of evidence points to artifact, and by a vast margin.

Of course, absolute proof of anything is not possible, but something like cold fusion could surely be proved to arbitrary certainty if it were real, much as high temperature superconductivity was not doubted by any experts after the first publication became available. It is almost inconceivable that an energy density a million times that of dynamite, accessible at ordinary conditions could not be made obvious in 27 years, but it is completely plausible that artifacts producing a variety of confounding effects that look like cold fusion if you squint would be too elusive to be nailed down in 27 years.

Abd wrote:

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I have written about circumstantial evidence, such as uncorrelated heat and nuclear products. So there are many who find heat, say. Could there be some systematic artifact? Sure. However, if the various experiments use different protocols and approaches and calorimetric methods, the chances of this are reduced.

Not if most experiments do not produce apparent heat, and the ones that do are all over the map, showing no consistency with any sort of measurable parameters, and more importantly no progress. 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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There are indications that there is no such systematic error, such as the development of treated palladium that is more successful. The ability to improve results in this way is an indication of a real effect. But it's all relatively vague and difficult to assess definitively.

But the reports in the literature have become more scarce and more modest, showing the opposite of improved results. Indeed, the electrolysis experiment is hardly being performed anymore. I'm not aware of a single refereed publication of excess heat in an electrolysis experiment in more than a decade (other than secondary reference to conference proceedings or the like in review articles).

Abd wrote:

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However, heat/helium is another story. In this case, even if there were only one protocol, there would need to be two systematic errors that correlate.

It's not so unlikely that systematic errors might correlate. But when the correlation is as weak as the one observed, when it is challenged in the literature, and when it is not reproduced in the literature, even the existence of a correlation is in doubt, which is why, in spite of the fact that you are so enamored of the results, almost no one else is.

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Further, with additional protocols and additional precision, the results tightened.

This is not accurate. Miles claimed a very weak correlation, in which results changed by an order of magnitude between interpretations, in which 4 control flasks also had helium, in which most of the controls were performed after the fact in a different experiment, when maybe their exclusion of helium had improved, and in which one experiment that produced substantial excess heat but no helium was simply ignored. And if the quantitative correlation with the amount of heat was weak when the glass flasks were used, it was essentially absent when the experiment improved and metal flasks were used. Tightening up the experiment made the results looser, not tighter.

Miles results were challenged in the refereed literature, and after that no quantitative correlation met the modest standard of peer review.

Indeed, 4 years after Miles, Gozzi published a careful helium study under peer review and admitted that "the low levels of 4He do not give the necessary confidence to state definitely that we are dealing with the fusion of deuterons to give 4He". After that his experimental activity in the field seems to have stopped.

And of the other (mainly unpublished) groups Storms cites that reproduced Miles, two groups (Chien and Botta) did not measure heat, and so could not have observed a correlation; two groups (Aoki and Takahashi) report results that suggest an anti-correlation; another group (Luch) has continued experiments until recently, but stopped reporting helium; two groups (Arata and DeNinno) do not claim a quantitative correlation, but in one case (Arata) the helium levels seem orders of magnitude too low to account for the heat, although extracting information from his papers is difficult, and in the other (DeNinno) the helium level is an order of magnitude too high.

The only results since Miles that Storms has deemed worthwhile (i.e. cherry-picked) to calculate energy correlation come from McKubre's <b>unrefereed</b> experiments, which include experiments described in the 1998 EPRI report, where McKubre himself is initially negative about, saying "it has <b>not been possible</b> to address directly the issue of heat-commensurable nuclear product generation". His confidence in the results seems to have grown since then, but Krivit claims to show (with considerable evidence) that he manipulated the data to support his thesis.

This is the sort of evidence you regard as confirmation. This is what passes for conclusive in the field of cold fusion. This is good enough that no measurements of helium-heat in the last decade entered Storms' calculations.

You make a big deal about the absence of skeptical papers in the literature in the last decade, suggesting it means skepticism is dead. Well (apart from the fact that there are more negative papers than new claims of the excess heat) there are no first hand papers in the refereed literature reporting correlations for *20* years. There are reviews that cite conference papers reporting old results, but being cited in a review is not the same as undergoing primary review of the original experiment.

Real scientists obsess about details, especially in critical experiments like this. Any real scientist thinking there is anything to cold fusion would not rest until the helium question was nailed down. Millikan's experiment was not accepted as good enough, but was repeated endlessly. Scientists are still toiling to reduce the limit of error on measurements of Einstein's time dilation, and improve the value of the gravitation constant, and so on. But in cold fusion, the last refereed paper on a quantitative helium correlation was in the 90s, and it was challenged in the literature.

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At this point, in the field, the controversy is only over the ratio.

Sure, but "in the field", people are convinced about cold fusion without the helium correlation. And as it happens, the correlation is not a particularly active topic at all, let alone controversial. If it were, some researchers would have been actively trying to measure it with better accuracy.

Abd wrote:

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Where does this "most scientists" come from? What scientists have reviewed this work? This is the function of peer-reviewed reviews.

It comes from 17 of 18 experts enlisted by the DOE to examine the best evidence. And it comes from peer reviewers for the best journals and the funding agencies who have largely rejected cold fusion. That's why cold fusion papers appear only in low impact journals, and why helium correlations can't even manage that, and why the ACS rejected an entire volume recently. You yourself call it the rejection cascade, and others like Hagelstein and Boss complain about the difficulty in getting into good journals. So, peer reviewers are rejecting cold fusion with regularity.

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There is Storms in Naturwissenschaften (2010).

This is a review by an editor of the journal. Such things are not reviewed for the content, but only for the accuracy with which they reflect the existing literature, which in the case of the helium correlation is almost all conference proceedings.

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McKubre was retained from the beginning to investigate this, originally by the Electric Power Research Institute, then by various defense agencies, customers who want to know reality, not fantasy.

Right. And McKubre published modest excess power of a few percent in the early 90s, claiming a high reproducibility. But then in 1989 he admitted that "with hindsight, we may now conclude that the presumption of repeatable excess heat production was premature, and that this has limited the progress achieved…”

He did not publish his correlation results in refereed literature, and EPRI cut his funding, and he abandoned his own experiment saying he got tired of trying to "science cold fusion", essentially an admission that he had failed.

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And he wrote a recent review in Current Science, covering the state of the field.

... a journal with an impact factor less than 1, that published a special issue on LENR, for which they *invited* reviews from the major researchers. They can't reject invited papers, so that means that friendly reviewers had to be used. This issue indicates there is an editor or two on the board that is sympathetic to cold fusion research, but little more than that.

In any case, conspicuously absent from McKubre's paper (which is titled "Cold fusion: comments on the state of scientific proof) is any mention or citation of his helium correlation work. Evidently he no longer regards it as integral to the evidence for cold fusion.

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Then there is Robert Duncan, again retained by CBS News, who studied the calorimetry and came up with a conclusion that it was sound.

He studied one experiment (at Energetics) for a few days -- a more casual review than the DOE review. And it's an experiment that has not been published under peer review, and neither have Duncan's conclusions about it. In fact the successor to that organization (SKINR) has not published any results under peer review in several years of operation, and the results reported so far at ICCF fall far short of the claims made by Energetics. Once again, with improved experimentation, the claims become more modest.

Abd wrote:

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No, the only scientists who are arguing against cold fusion are those who don't know the field, with very, very few exceptions.

It's true there are few scientists *arguing* against cold fusion, but then there are even fewer arguing against phlogiston. That doesn't mean they accept the phenomenon as real. It means they are ignoring it because they are nearly certain it is not real.

The best scientists make it their business to be informed about relevant new results, which is why the subject was given such an enthusiastic welcome back in 1989, and why scientists all over the world went to the lab to get in on the revolution. None of them wanted to be left behind. So, I don't think you can know whether or not current skeptics are sufficiently informed to justify their skepticism. It's probably not a coincident that all the smartest scientists are skeptical, like Nobel laureates Gell-Mann, Weinberg, Glashow, Lederman, Seaborg, and also distinguished scientists like Close, Lewis, Koonin, Garwin, and Park.

Essentially all scientists working in the energy field (or advocating alternative energy) have rejected cold fusion implicitly. These people include Stephen Hawking and Brian Cox, who advocate hot fusion research, Frank Close, who (like Cox) is passionate about science and society, and Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia, who has in fact given cold fusion an audience, and was involved in cold fusion experiments (including helium correlation measurements), but is now working on sub-critical thorium reactors.

Now, I know the response to this is always that these poor laureates don't have the benefit of having seen those all-important web sites and blogs, which hold the secret to utopia. But that's unlikely, because we all know what would happen if the evidence studied in as much detail as you please were persuasive to even a small fraction of qualified experts. We saw it in 1989. It would be an exponential explosion of interest. Because some scientists *do* see the data, and it is their nature to tell others -- many, many others -- and for a subject like this, to become involved themselves.

Apart from the many referees that are called upon to review cold fusion manuscripts and routinely reject them, and the two DOE panels who have rejected it, scientists like Ekstrom and Thieberger and Motl and Eriksson and Pomp have all been involved in the ecat debate, and will have looked at those all-important web sites. Ekstrom, e.g., has been active on some Swedish forums, and was involved in an exchange with Krivit, and wrote a critique of the Levi paper, so you can be sure he's seen much of the evidence. Thieberger wrote a rebuttal to the WL theory, so he is likely informed. Other scientists have written recent rebuttals to the WL theory (Cuiche et al and Tennfors), so they're clearly aware of the activity. Garwin was interviewed in 2009, so you can be sure he was made of aware of the claims up to then.

Duncan is an example of someone who was convinced by the evidence, and look at the exposure he's given it, with colloquia at Missouri and even a conference at Missouri, and the establishment of two institutes. Other physicists could not miss this exposure, and yet, the subject fizzles instead of explodes. Missouri had to issue a correction when Duncan claimed sponsorship. They were embarrassed instead of convinced. Much like the physics department at Bologna, which could not have escaped the publicity of Rossi's ecat, but instead of the belief spreading through the department like a virus, they had to issue statements denying formal support.

And there are also peer reviewed papers that are negative about cold fusion.

An Italian group published a rebuttal to neutron emission claims, and offered some plausible CR-39 artifacts that may have caused spurious effects (Faccini et al., Eur Phys J. C 74 (2014) 1).

Tennfors (Eur Phys J Plus 128 (2013) 1 ) and Ciuchi et al. (Euro Phys J C 72 (2012)1) published rebuttals to the WL theory. <i></i>

Dmitriyeva et al. (Thermochim. Acta 543 (2012) 260) debunked the Arata gas-loading claims, which are just about the only excess heat claims in the last decade in refereed literature.

A little further back, Kowalski published a negative article about CR-39 (Eur Phys J Appl Phys 44 (2008) 287).

And there are at least two analyses of the publication record, which show that the cold fusion publication record is distinctly different from real fields, and closely resembles that of other pathological sciences: Bettencourt et al, Journal of Informetrics 3 (2009) 210–221, and Ackermann, Scientometrics 66 (2006) 451.

And there's a comparison of cold fusion with phlogiston in an essay about trying to prove a negative (Labinger & Weininger, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 44 (2005) 1916.

And all these are in spite of the fact that most skeptics simply ignore the field. It hardly seems worth the trouble to refute claims that no one of any stature takes seriously anyway.

Scientific literature reflects the view of scientists. Any subject that is not fringe science appears in refereed journals. A subject like cold fusion would appear thousands of times a year if it were viewed as anything but pseudoscience.

And yet, not counting the special issue, there have been *zero* claims of excess heat in the literature in the last 6 years (according to the Britz bibliography 2010 - 2015), and *zero* papers on the helium correlation in more than 15 years. Even if you include the special issue, it mainly represents reviews of work from before 2010.

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In 2004, with a relatively casual review, the DoE review was evenly split between evidence for anomalous heat being conclusive, and not conclusive.

That's not accurate. The summary report says: "Evaluations by the reviewers ranged from: 1) evidence for excess power is compelling, to 2) there is no convincing evidence that excess power is produced when integrated over the life of an experiment. The reviewers were split approximately evenly on this topic." Compelling is not conclusive. And considering only one reviewer considered the evidence for nuclear reactions conclusive, 17 of 18 felt a non-nuclear explanation for the observed heat was plausible.

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And most of the reviewers clearly misunderstood the heat/helium evidence. (That was blatant. Dead wrong as to how they described the reported work.)

So, you're suggesting that experienced scientists couldn't explain something, which is obvious to a lay observer like you, to a group of other expert scientists, even when there was so much at stake. That sounds a little implausible to me.

But if the misunderstanding was so blatantly obvious, couldn't it have been straightened out afterward? Instead, in the dozen years since, not only has no improved explanation been accepted by the DOE, but no further experimentation has taken place on the subject of the helium correlation.

A few years ago, you were proposing to come to the rescue of Hagelstein and McKubre and approach the DOE with a better explanation than they had been able to write. But now you're instead proposing to (finally) do more experiments, essentially conceding that the weakness was in the evidence, not in the explanation.

Abd wrote:

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that was more or less the situation 27 years ago. It's was not inherently complex, but it was not yet into "specific ability to predict observation." This was the original problem in the field. However, it simply is not that way any more. The "unknown reaction" or "new nuclear mechanism? isn't vague and more, it's specific, that is, what it does is specific.

It converts deuterium to helium and heat, leading to this very clear prediction: if the FP heat effect is set up, using any of a number of protocols known to work with reasonable reliability, and anomalous heat is measured, and de novo helium is measured, and all the helium reservoirs are included (i.e., retained helium is released) the heat generated will be close to 23.8 MeV/4He.

And yet, that prediction has not been borne out in a single refereed publication since Miles (other than by secondary reference in literature reviews). Indeed, Gozzi explicitly said the contrary (under peer review): "the low levels of 4He do not give the necessary confidence to state definitely that we are dealing with the fusion of deuterons to give 4He"

And as I said in detail above, Storms' other references don't support the prediction either. Even McKubre contradicted the prediction initially when he said "it has <b>not been possible</b> to address directly the issue of heat-commensurable nuclear product generation".

Abd wrote:

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Given the apparent absence of radiation that doesn't end up as heat, and other nuclear products in significant quantities, that figure is thermodynamically necessary. There is nothing revolutionary so far. The mechanism is not known, and therefore it is not known if new physics is required. My personal impression is that, no, new physics is not required, only the application of known physics to a very unusual physical condition.

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, overcoming the Coulomb barrier, or making neutrons. All of those processes involve focusing very high energy onto individual atomic sites. That's revolutionary. It's the first miracle.

Whatever reaction is happening, it is completely unprecedented. The production of helium as the main product of deuterium reactions has not been previously observed, and is contrary to theoretical predictions based on copious experimental evidence obtained in all phases of matter at a wide variety of energies. And that includes copious experimental work done with palladium deuteride for military and commercial purposes, and the observed reactions -- the branching ratios -- are the same as observed in vacuum, plasma, gas, or liquid. That's the second miracle.

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.

So, you're mistaken. Cold fusion would be revolutionary, if real, and that's why the world reacted as it did in 1989. But don't take my word for it. Hagelstein wrote: "such an effect is not consistent with condensed matter physics, and also not consistent with nuclear physics. In essence, it is impossible based on existing theory in these fields. There is no question as to whether this is true or not (it is true);"

Abd wrote:

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The phenomenon as described is quite simple, merely originally quite unexpected.

Well, it's simple to say deuterons join to form helium and release heat. It's not simple to explain how that is possible, and it is not just "quite unexpected", it is considered miraculous based on what's known about nuclear physics.

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Everyone had assumed that certain approximations held, that it wasn't necessary to address many-body physics, that 2-body analysis was good enough.

These were not assumptions. They were experimental observations. Nuclear reactions -- fusion in particular -- have been extensively studied in palladium deuteride. You can buy neutron sources off the shelf that are based on fusion in palladium, and the reactions follow exactly the theoretical predictions. There are no surprises. The range of nuclear forces is something like 0.1 million times smaller than the atomic spacing in palladium, so it is not surprising that the solid state environment has little influence on nuclear reactions.

And in nuclear weapons (based on fusion), palladium is used to filter deuterium, and solid lithium deuteride is used as fuel, so they have studied nuclear reactions in solids with great motivation.

In any case, chemical effects on nuclear reactions are not new to physicists. There are cases where the chemical (atomic) environment can influence nuclear reactions -- such as the isomer effect observed by Mossbauer spectroscopy -- but these effects are extremely small, and fit theoretical predictions. After P&F in 1989, many physicists *did* consider the effect of palladium on cold fusion, and came up empty. It would still be a miracle x 3.

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Pons and Fleischmann suspected that the solid state would have an effect, but also expected it would be too small to detect, but decided to look.

This is not consistent with what P&F said in interviews in 1989. They *expected* that the absorption of deuterium in palladium would bring them close enough to cause conventional fusion. Simple calculations show that is completely wrong. The idea of the palladium performing miracles came after their naive ideas were shown to be wrong.

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They were not looking for cheap energy, as has often been claimed. They were doing basic science.

Can you provide some documentation to prove this? That is, something written before they claimed to see cold fusion? Because this is completely inconsistent with what they themselves said even after the announcement. They said they *were* looking for abundant energy.

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And then the thing melted down. They got a bit excited, eh? Still, five years later, they were not ready to announce, but events overtook them. And they were wrong about a lot.

But their calorimetry was good.

But they claimed tens of watts with large COPs from the beginning. This has not been readily reproduced by others. And the most reliable work usually cited as replication is McKubre's fraction of a watt, with a COP of 1.05 or less. That's why in 2001, Rothwell wrote: "Why haven’t researchers learned to make the results stand out? After twelve years of painstaking replication attempts, most experiments produce a fraction of a watt of heat, when they work at all. Such low heat is difficult to measure. It leaves room for honest skeptical doubt that the effect is real."

That would suggest that P&F's calorimetry was not good, given that painstaking efforts were not enough to reproduce it.

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LENR researchers are not (generally) nuclear physicists because the experimental methods are not -- at all -- those of nuclear physics.

Apart from the fact that one has to understand the subject of the investigation, and not just be familiar with the tools, calorimetry is certainly an experimental method used by physicists, including nuclear and particle physicists. Joule, after all, was a physicist.

And if the phenomenon were accepted, and there were tools or methods needed to investigate it, then those in the relevant field would avail themselves of the necessary expertise. Scientists don't simply ignore results and phenomena critical to the understanding of their own field because they involve tools from another field.