FP's experiments discussion

Oystla wrote:

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If LENR where a 1% effect, then we could question accuracy of calorimetry. But it is NOT.

Most of the scientific community still believes that the effect reported is small, so that the existence of the effect is still in question because per cent level effects are presumed hard to measure.

This statement is inconsistent with the 20x or greater excess power observations of Fleischmann and Pons in their early experiments

The early work with open cells claimed high excess power, and there are anecdotal claims of high power surges, but the last from P&F was around 1993. They worked another 5 years in a much better lab with much more funding, and never published at that level (or any level) again in the refereed literature. Then Toyota shut the lab down and Pons abandoned the field. It's pretty hard to base the evidence for cold fusion on claims the authors themselves were unable to confirm with improved experimental protocol.

When McKubre and others used much more reliable calorimetry, he was down in the percent level. That's why in 2001, Jed Rothwell, an active advocate for cold fusion, 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."

So when it comes to the sort of published claims that advocates can get behind, it is a small effect in the range of a few per cent. And this is evident in this exchange as well, where Lomax falls back on McKubre's result of a fraction of a watt at a few percent of the input.

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and it is inconsistent with more recent work. There are a great many reports of subsequent observations of excess power bursts where the excess power is 50% to 300% of the input power, as well as a smaller number of reports of excess power events with very high power gain between 1000% and 3000%.

True, there are some claims of high power gain, and even some with infinite power gain, and some with relatively high absolute power. But these are not in peer-reviewed literature, and most are from companies looking for investment. Advocates tend to emphasize peer-reviewed papers in their advocacy, but claims of *any* excess heat in the refereed literature in the last decade are scarce indeed. And the few that exist claim on the order of a watt of power or less, representing a small fraction of the background chemical or input power, and well within the range of calorimetry artifacts. Indeed, the excess heat claimed in Arata-type experiments around 2009 has been examined by Dmitriyeva et al., who found it was attributable to chemical, and not nuclear effects.

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Thomas has raised the spectre of confirmation bias. Maybe only positive experiments are being reported. Miles reported all his experiments.

On this thread I prominently raised the two matters of systematic error, and selection bias (of experiments). You will see how these do apply to Miles, and contaminate "preponderance of evidence" even when all results are reported. Those spending serious money to investigate LENR will choose whatever seems most likely to give positives. Unfortunately that cannot distinguish between unrecognised systematic error positives, and "real" positives.

I expect what Abd says here is factually correct. I'm sure I've also raised the possibility of confirmation bias at some time. That is however in addition to these two other issues. You can see how when arguing this matter you can easily appear to make good points, and be strictly truthful, while in fact entirely missing the point.

Abd: this is the second time when (perhaps inadvertently) you have avoided consideration of systematic error. the first instance was when you substituted "random" for "systematic" when replying to Shanahan.

Abd wrote:

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Helium is being produced, and the only way to produce helium is through a nuclear reaction.

Helium is being *observed*, and since helium exists in the atmosphere at sufficient levels to explain the observations, it is not proof of a nuclear reaction.

Basically, the only quantitative evidence in peer-reviewed literature is 20 years old, and that was (by your own admission) crude, where Miles "eyeballs" peak intensities, and guesses at the detection threshold, which changes by an order of magnitude over time. When that's the case, a little confirmation bias is all that's needed.

And when Miles improved the experiment, replacing glass flasks with metal ones, the positive quantitative correlation pretty much vanished (except for the binary correlation), and he measured a helium level of 2.8 ppb above a background of 5.1 ppb, fully 3 orders of magnitude below the atmospheric concentration of 5 ppm. The excess power in that experiment was 60 mW.

But again, don't take my word for it. Here's Miles himself: "The production of helium-4 in these experiments is a very difficult concept to prove since there is always the possibility of atmospheric helium contamination. More studies reporting helium-4 production will likely be required before our helium results become convincing to most scientists."

McKubre was also cautious writing: "we cannot rule out the possibility that He-4 was sourced ... or that the measured helium represents a hold-over from helium previously dissolved in D2O or PTFE."

And "Definitive statements will be difficult to make about He-4 production in this or future experiments unless or until it is measured at several times the ambient background level."

In a field where excess power levels in the range of watts (and higher) have been claimed, it doesn't make sense that the only peer-reviewed heat-helium ratios come from experiments with 60 mW of excess power, and ppb levels of helium. In the ERAB double-blind exercise, they determined that one watt for one month would produce enough helium (in the Pd) to swamp the instrumentation. One becomes suspicious that maybe the results with higher excess powers don't fit the expectations, and are quietly ignored.

So, what about replications? For such an important experiment, you'd think others would want to reproduce, but no replication has risen to the modest standard of peer review. Instead, a refereed paper by Gozzi, with more careful measurements admitted the helium measurements were not definitive. Interestingly, Gozzi seems to have got out of the field after that.

McKubre wrote a detailed (unrefereed) report on helium measurements for the EPRI, concluding (initially) "it has not been possible address directly the issue of heat-commensurable nuclear product generation".

And isn't it an amazing coincidence that of all the possible products of nuclear reactions, the only one claimed to be commensurate with heat is the only one that is present in the background at levels compatible with contamination? All the more plausible products that can be detected easily at levels orders of magnitude lower, are found, surprise, surprise, at orders of magnitude lower. Nature is toying with us.

Abd, you will I hope forgive me for saying this, but you are on this thread not reading carefully, or else not reflecting on what you read. here I have a second example of you misunderstanding a clearly stated argument from me. I agree that the matter of argument is subtle - but you are a subtle and sophisticated debater - I'd expect you to catch these matters.

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You wrote what I was responding to before I wrote the comment about "one hydra with many tentacles." That was about a different hydra. Your usage of hydra is an artifact. There are an infinite number of possible artifacts. The idea that there is only one possible artifact, which you have attributed to me and to others, is a straw man argument, and remains so. I have never thought or believed or stated that CCS was the only possible artifact. Refutation of any single artifact such as CCS does not prove cold fusion.

This is false in three ways.

(1) There are not (could never be) an infinite number of artifacts. There are, a priori, an arbitrary (unknown) but finite number, the number to be discovered through careful critique. Typically I'd expect it to be quite low - for any given experiment typically 3 major issues with more subdivisions for details.

(2) My usage is not "hydra = artifact" it is "hydra head = artifact of given experiment". Big difference.

(3)

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The idea that there is only one possible artifact, which you have attributed to me and to others, is a straw man argument, and remains so.

This is a subtle misstatement. I said that you argue as though there is only one hydra. Specifically, you argued above that

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Thomas has raised the spectre of confirmation bias. Maybe only positive experiments are being reported. Miles reported all his experiments

. I took you to task because my argument was different anyway - but you are also making the one hydra mistake.

I suggest that positive results might be reported more than negative ones, and this affect could color the corpus of LENR evidence. You argue that in one specific case this does not happen. You can see how that argument is bust unless the same effect must universally apply - one hydra, lop off the "reporting bias" head for one experiment and you need never consider it. But there is a separate hydra for each experiment, with its own to be determined number of heads.

So

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I have never thought or believed or stated that CCS was the only possible artifact.

That is no doubt true, but you have argued something that would only be true if there was one possible hydra, which was my complaint about your logic.

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Refutation of any single artifact such as CCS does not prove cold fusion

Not directly wrong, but it could be misleading. You cannot refute an artifact. All you can do is show that in a specific experiment the given artifact does not significantly affect the results. I suppose you could argue that "refuting CCS" would be arguing that Shanahan's statement of it, as a potential mechanism for artifacts, is inconsistent. But that is clearly not the issue here, since no-one has seriously attempted that.

Abd wrote:

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Heat could be produced in many ways. The anomalous heat found was considered to be probably nuclear because the apparent energy density was quite high, and there were no known chemical mechanisms to explain this.

There were also no known nuclear mechanisms to explain the heat. So, it's either new chemistry, new nuclear physics, or artifacts. Given the erratic and irreproducible nature, and the failure to make progress for 27 years, artifacts is the most plausible by a vast margin.

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do helium measurements - or helium correlations with excess heat - show extraordinary evidence?

Yes. Absolutely.

That's a matter of judgement, and experts disagree.

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That is, if confirmed. They have been confirmed. There is practically no contrary experimental evidence.

They have not been confirmed under peer review. And I would say that several of the references Storms uses represent contrary evidence. Some are orders of magnitude different in the value of the ratio and some show anti-correlation. See my previous post.

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Huizenga knew that Miles' findings were extraordinary, and wrote so.

Definitive evidence of helium correlation would be extraordinary, but that's not what Miles reported.

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Then he predicted that Miles would not be confirmed

... and so far he's right. None of the helium results, published or not, rise to the level of definitive. Even the authors express caution. And the complete absence of any attempt in the community to improve the situation suggests there may be some unreported failures.

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He believed that helium production must be accompanied by a very hot gamma ray. With ordinary d-d fusion, he's quite correct, it is required by conservation of momentum.

No, it's required by the conservation of energy and the quantum mechanical predictions of decay of an excited alpha particle. Momentum is much more easily conserved if there are two products, which is why the single product is so rare, and why neutrons or tritium are expected. But when a single product is formed, it must be excited, and the only known way to de-excite is by emission of a gamma ray.

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However, there are possible reaction pathways that don't generate that gamma.

In 27 years, theorists have been unsuccessful in finding one.

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Huizenga, in his book, essentially assumes that cold fusion must be like hot fusion, the same reaction, and therefore it was a mistake.

This is a convenient rationalization, but it is quite meaningless scientifically. Just saying cold fusion is different is not an incantation that allows anything to happen that tickles your fancy. Cold fusion catalyzed by muons has identical branching ratios to fusion produced by energetic reactants. Once you form the He-4, how does it now how it got formed? Why would it decay differently?

I'm not saying surprises are not possible. I'm just saying that this would be an extraordinary surprise, whereas artifacts in experiments like this are utterly common. And whether or not skeptics can identify a specific artifact, it's plausible. Advocates can't identify a specific nuclear mechanism either, and that doesn't stop you from believing it is nuclear. So, between the two unspecified mechanisms, artifacts are far and away the most plausible.

In the spirit of harmony, let me note that we can all agree that strong evidence for Helium/ excess heat correlations at the correct level (approx 24MeV per He4) would be an LENR prediction that was subsequently found true. That would be real and highly interesting evidence for LENR.

Personally I'd hope Abd does his experiments, and hope that they are more carefully analysed and set up than his analysis here of the validity of other He / heat correlation results would indicate.

Tom

Abd wrote:

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With heat/helium, some experiments show heat and some show no heat and both are valuable. Some experiments show helium at a level, and some show no elevation of helium above background. That data is collected, and the helium is often collected blind, i.e, the lab measuring the helium has no idea what the activity of the cell from which the sample was taken was.

For one thing, the blinding was done without any oversight, so it is really meaningless. For another, peaks were "eyeballed" as small medium and large, and assigned seemingly arbitrary intensity. Surely a more objective method could have been used. For another, the controls were run in a different experiment, so some sort of bias could have been at play in how he ran the controls. The quantitative correlation is not at all convincing in Miles' results, and completely absent when metal flasks were used. Only the binary correlation has any value to my eyes, and that is possibly subject to systematic bias, particularly since he ignored one inconvenient result.

The paper is criticized in detail in the refereed literature, so it is clear that something better is needed. And yet nothing subsequent meets the modest standard of peer review. That says it all.

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The skeptical rants here could not get published in a mainstream scientific journal.

That's a good thing. What's the point of publishing polemics about something with which the mainstream already agrees? Criticism of Miles has already been published. It doesn't make sense to publish rants about work that itself has not been published.

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Some of those 34 papers are basically news of activity of certain kinds, but some are experimental and scientific analysis.

Again, a sub-1 impact journal with a special issue of invited review articles does not flatter the field.

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I wrote the heat/helium paper to encourage the kind of work that is now being planned, having been announced at ICCF-19.

It's odd they should need encouragement from you. It seems like the most obvious experimental work in the field, and yet in a decade, no one has worked on it, even while you have spent 6 years arguing about it.

One other comment about the helium measurements.

The correlation value is based on measurements of helium in the gas in the headspace, instead of in the solid Pd. Detection of helium in the gas is much more susceptible to uncertain contamination from the atmosphere; leaks, outgassing, permeation, and so on, all complicate the interpretation. This is especially the case if you want to contain the gas and send it to different laboratories for independent testing. Interference from D2 is more severe and more difficult to mitigate in the gas. Measurement of helium in the Pd requires no increase in the complexity of the cold fusion experiment itself, since the Pd is analyzed off-line. This means one can take advantage of existing facilities, which already have the means for accurate helium detection with D2 suppression. One can wait until a highly successful cold fusion experiment is claimed, and then analyze only those rods, after the fact, in comparison to suitable controls. Partitioning solid samples of Pd for measurements at multiple independent labs is much easier, and less prone to error, than partitioning gas samples.

Abd has argued that early searches of helium in the Pd were negative because the helium is implanted near the surface, but this objection does not apply to most of the analyses, which *did* look for helium near the surface. In fact, in the cases where controls were used, the helium was implanted within 1 micron of the surface, and produced extremely strong signals.

The more error-prone measurements of helium in the gas fit the needs of cold fusion scientists, who rely on confirmation bias for positive results. Even there, it should be easy to produce helium levels orders of magnitude above ambient, based on some claims of excess heat, but so far the reported levels are mostly below or near ambient levels.

Joshua:

Regarding Mckubre "being down in the percent level".

That seems to be a litle pessimistic asessment. This is what Mckubre said of his results:

"The SRI results typically yielded 5 to 10% excess power with a maximum of 28% excess power; the excess power was 1-5 W/cm3 "

Considdering the lack of understanding what triggers LENR reactions this was not bad.

http://dspace.mit.edu/openaccess-disseminate/1721.1/71632

But it may well be focusing on wet Deuterium - Palladium systems was not the best option. Professor Focardi had much higher yield in his gas loaded Nickel reactors.

Thomas & Branzell,

at least Hagelstein thinks the correlation seems to be found in experiments:

- Excess energy and 4He measured in SRI M4 experiment
•About 2/3 of 4He seen in off-gas
•Consistent with other results
•Effort made to scrub out residual 4He
•Total 4He measured consistent with 24 MeV/4He
•One experiment carried out at ENEA Frascati with similar result

It's the experiments that should guide us to the thruth, not what theories say is possible or not.

ref.
http://coldfusionnow.org/wp-co…gelstein-Talk-09-2015.pdf

Abd wrote:

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In the first year, negative papers outnumbered positive; by the second year, positive outnumbered negative.

Right. Both have approached zero asymptotically ever since. It stands to reason that once most of the world is satisfied that there is almost certainly no effect, that negative papers would decrease more quickly, while believers would continue to publish.

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There never was a definitive, controlled experiment disconfirming the Pons and Fleischmann findings on heat

There never was a definitive, controlled experiment disconfirming the disconfirmations of P&F.

But let's not worry about disconfirmations of the disconfirmations of the disconfirmations. That's just silly.

The burden of proof is on those making the bold claim, and the essential point is that in the judgement of most experts, there has never been a definitive, controlled experiment confirming the existence of the phenomenon (or phenomena) referred to as cold fusion. Two panels of experts enlisted by the DOE came to this judgement 15 years apart. The absence of any reports in any high impact journals, and the very fact that you complain about a rejection cascade proves this.

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and later review of their calorimetry concluded it was sound.

Someone somewhere may have drawn that conclusion, but that was not the conclusion of most scientists. Indeed, in the review of the best evidence up to 2004 by the DOE panel, at best half considered the evidence for excess heat compelling, and only one in 18 found the evidence for nuclear origins conclusive.

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However, as we all know, it became very difficult to continue the research.

And yet, the argument in favor of cold fusion always involves the great deal of continued research that occurred. P&F in particular were given a posh lab and more funding than either of them had seen in their careers. Dozens of others continued to work on it, and Storms estimates something like $500M has been spent on the research.

So, difficult or not, it happened. You can't use the absence of research as an excuse for the lack of progress, and at the same time use the great amount of research as evidence of its veracity.

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The rejection cascade grew until only relatively few researchers could afford to risk their reputations, with anything positive or even considered to be looking for results. The field was abandoned by the mainstream, based on reputation, not science, and that is a classic cascade.

That is a classic fringe science excuse. But the *reason* reputations suffered for working on cold fusion is *because* of the low quality of the science. It's abundantly clear from the enthusiastic welcome cold fusion initially received, as documented by Storms, that the world, including mainstream science really wanted it to be true. Many of those involved were in precisely because they wanted to bolster their reputation, or as Storms said, "many of us were lured into believing that the Pons-Fleischmann effect would solve the world's energy problems and make us all rich." It was the failure of the evidence to stand up to scrutiny that led to the "rejection cascade".

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By about 2004 or 2005, publication rate (almost entirely positive) had reached a nadir, at roughly six papers per year (in mainstream peer-reviewed journals).

This is not accurate. 2004 was not the nadir.As your own wiki page shows (last time I looked), there was only one paper in 2011 (according to the Britz database), and only 3 in 2010, not counting negative papers.

According to the Britz bibliography, the number of papers in 2004 was 8. The numbers per year (excluding papers in the LENR Sourcebook, which is not a mainstream journal) for the 10 years after 2004 are:

7,8,9,8,8,3,1,5,10,4

for an average of 6.3 per year, *lower* than in 2004.

Even if you include 2015, with the 34 papers in a special issue, where review papers were invited, and could not have been rejected, the average is still only 8.8 per year. And then of course, the increase started in 2015, not 2005.

But if you examine the content of the papers, the situation for cold fusion looks even worse. If negative papers and peripheral papers are excluded, where by peripheral I mean papers about helium in volcanoes and Mills' hydrino type papers, then 2004 had 7 papers, and the following ten years had"

4,5,5,5,6,2,1,5,10,4

for an average of 4.7 per year.

Finally, if you only consider experimental positive claims, 2004 had 2 papers, and the following 10 years had

2,0,2,1,3,0,1,2,1,0

for an average of 1.2 per year, and many of those are the dubious CR-39 papers from Boss et al.

In the past decade, there have been only 2 or 3 new claims of excess heat in the refereed literature, no claims of excess heat in electrolysis experiments, and you have to go back 2 decades for the last claim of a quantitative heat-helium correlation in the refereed literature.

Pretty hard to deny an asymptotic approach to zero there, and the 34 reviews and status reports invited for a special issue in a journal with an impact factor less than 1 is not going to change that image for anyone.

oystla wrote:

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Regarding Mckubre "being down in the percent level".

That seems to be a litle pessimistic asessment. This is what Mckubre said of his results:

"The SRI results typically yielded 5 to 10% excess power with a maximum of 28% excess power; the excess power was 1-5 W/cm3 "

I would regard 5 to 10% to be consistent with the % level. Excursions to 28%, without any additional experimental background (such as the duration) are not particularly persuasive in such experiments. And when he showed the experiment to independent eyes (Garwin), the apparent excess was only 3%.

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Considdering the lack of understanding what triggers LENR reactions this was not bad.

Considering the far higher claims from P&F, the fact that nuclear energy density is a million times higher than chemical, and that he could not increase that over the following 5 years, it was bad enough to attract essentially no interest.

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But it may well be focusing on wet Deuterium - Palladium systems was not the best option. Professor Focardi had much higher yield in his gas loaded Nickel reactors.

Right, but he made those claims without doing calorimetry. And when CERN repeated the experiment, they showed they could reproduce the temperature anomaly, but that it was not due to excess heat, but to changes in thermal properties on absorption of hydrogen isotopes. Focardi and Paintelli subsequently repeated their experiment, and confirmed that their earlier work was flawed, but then neglected to take necessary measures to remove the flaws (by using calorimetry). Instead they simply measured more isolated temperatures of an apparatus cooling unpredictably in ambient air.

If their claims had had validity, a commercial product would have been easy to design, but as we know, in spite of more than 15 years of continued efforts, they have made no progress on that experiment at all, and have not published any new claims for more than a decade.

oyster wrote:

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at least Hagelstein thinks the correlation seems to be found in experiments:...

Maybe his views depend on his mood. A couple of years ago, in an essay in Infinite Energy, he wrote: "aside from the existence of an excess heat effect, there is very little that our community agrees on"

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It's the experiments that should guide us to the thruth, not what theories say is possible or not.

No one has disagreed with this since at least the time of Descartes. But theories are based on experimental evidence, and they are used to guide experimental research (you know, standing on the shoulders of giants and all that). And so, one has to be careful in blindly accepting a desirable interpretation based on relatively weak evidence, when that interpretation is contrary to the results of far more robust and reproducible and copious experimental evidence. This is especially the case when alternative, plausible explanations exist that do not contradict robust results.

Abd's teacher and hero Richard P Feynman put it like this:

"The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines. ... They overlook the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we know. ... We can't allow ourselves to seriously imagine things which are obviously in contradiction to the known laws of nature. ... One has to have the imagination to think of something that has never been seen before, never been heard of before. At the same time the thoughts are restricted in a straitjacket, so to speak, limited by the conditions that come from our knowledge of the way nature really is."

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Thomas & Branzell,
at least Hagelstein thinks the correlation seems to be found in experiments:- Excess energy and 4He measured in SRI M4 experiment•About 2/3 of 4He seen in off-gas•Consistent with other results•Effort made to scrub out residual 4He•Total 4He measured consistent with 24 MeV/4He•One experiment carried out at ENEA Frascati with similar result

It's the experiments that should guide us to the thruth, not what theories say is possible or not.

I agree, the experiments should guide us. But this is Hagelstein's summary, not the experiments, and as Josh who has looked at this matter whereas I have not has pointed out, the evidence is very weak and even Hagelstein says it is contentious amongst the Cf community.

Joshua,

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:
Fleischmann M., Pons S., et al. Calorimetry of the Pd-D20 System: The Search for Simplicity and Accuracy, Proc. ICCF4 1, (1993), p 23 www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/EPRIproceeding.pdf

Fleischmann M., Pons S. Heat After Death, Proc. ICCF4 2, (1993), p 107 www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/EPRIproceedinga.pdf

Fleischmann, M. and S. Pons 1993, Reply to the critique by Morrison entitled 'Comments on claims of excess enthalpy by Fleischmann and Pons using simple cells made to boil, www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf

Fleischmann, M. and S. Pons. 1992, Calorimetry of the Pd-D2O System: from Simplicity via Complications to Simplicity, www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf

Fleischmann, M., S. Pons, and G. Preparata 1994, Possible theories of cold fusion, www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanpossibleth.pdf

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.

Joshua

Regarding the Focardi 1994 paper:

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/l…HeatNi-H-NuovoCimento.pdf

And the Critics from CERN:
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/l…estigationOfAnomalous.pdf

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

Joshua,

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. Ref.brullioun, Focardi, Piantelli, Rossi, all have one common factor, Nickel and hydrogen.

It's a pitty F&P did not pursue Ni-H, since they actually did include Nickel in their patent from 1989.

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. 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.

One of the remaining mysteries is what excactly is the trigger mechanism. It's more than pure heat. In the 1998 Focardi et. al paper some trigger mechanisms is mentioned.

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
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
3. Two parallell cells to increase confidence of results.
4. Thermometer registrering total heat, regardless of it's origin (heater or LENR)
5. Small variations in room temperature would not affect the results, because of the high power regions.
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.
7. Excess heat of 70 watts at less than 100 watts input. Easy to read from calibration curve - far beyond any possible calibration errors.
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.

There are also similarities with F&P wet cells with Palladium cathodes, that is worth noting:
- need to load the core material with hydrogen ( Faster than F&P, may be same time span as with CO-deposition of Pd Wet cells)
- The difference between cell A and B also indicate that this is a surface phenomenon, same as indicated for F&P wet cells with Palladium.

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

And with 900 000 KJ of excess energy you could heat 2,7 m3 of water from 10 degC to 90 degC....some serious amounts of excess energy.

Paper reference :
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/FocardiSlargeexces.pdf

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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.

The original claims, robust if the calorimetry is done properly, were for excess energy beyond chemical. You'd expect this if FPHE is real.

Moving from this to high power density is weak - for example chemical heat (from sudden recombination) can achieve arbitrarily high power density.

Take home for those not following the details. High power density means nothing extraordinary, whereas high energy density does, and makes the start of a case for something nuclear.