The Industrial Heat Answer

Quote from THHuxley

Jed, the work you describe is indeed complex, and by its very nature impossible to validate. Leaks are complex things, and proving some unconsidered class of leak cannot happen under different conditions, or some considered class of leak cannot happen in a different way under different conditions, is a tough call.

Rather than rest extraordinary conclusions on such inherently problematic foundations, much better to do an experiment without such an artifact, or with the artifact directly controlled. Until then you will I think not find many objective observers convinced. It is a very basic matter of methodology.

There is a problem here. Jed has been reading this material for two decades or so. I have studied heat/helum for about six years, as I realized, early on, that this was the only direct evidence that the FP Heat Effect was real and nuclear in nature. It was important, and Huizenga saw that immediately from the 1991 announcement.

Speaking from a position of familiarity with the evidence, leakage as an explanation simply doesn't fly. It so much doesn't fly that attempting to create helium above ambient, in the Texas Tech/ENEA work, I do not expect to be a major goal. They might do it. They might follow the ENEA protocol used by Violante, which does not exclude ambient helium. But as with all cold fusion work, they first have the task of creating the effect. That isn't simple for anyone, including people who have done it many times. The really cool thing about heat/helium is that reliability of the effect is not necessary. With an unreliable effect, the no-heat cells become accurate controls!.

Those who propose leakage commonly look at the helium results as if they were stand-alone. They are not. They are correlated with anomalous heat. Very well correlated. In the work there are many control cells with no heat and no helium. Everything the same as the cells with heat and helium. Trying to explain this with leakage is very difficult. In some experiments, helium release is time-correlated with the heat. That's even stronger.

Doubts persist, obviously, they have been expressed many times over the 25 years since heat/helium was discovered. It's time to nail this, don't you think? Crush the tests.

To crush the tests, we cannot rely on the unreliable. If producing helium above ambient is not reliable, we cannot depend on that. It's obviously desirable. It is possible that they will use the Violante (Apicella) protocol, but that is one experiment, unconfirmed. Still, it seems to be in the "family." (There is a problem with cold fusion that there may be multiple effects. Storms attempts to explain everything. I don't think that is particularly wise. If one major effect is explained and that is confirmed, then it is obvious to look at others. But constraining the explanation of one effect by what could, in fact, be unrelated, is creating obstacles without necessity. For Storms, it works, because he sees it all as connected, But ... this is what the brain does. It invents connections. Many of them turn out to be illusory. It will come out in the wash.)

As to "off-topic."

By the way, we can easily do what responsible moderation might do, move off-topic posts to a thread created for them or otherwise on-topic. If we cooperate, or even if we don't. We can edit our posts and replace them with a link to the new location.

Quote from axil

JedRothwell:I understand how you can deliberately set up a flowmeter or some other instrument to produce fake data, and an exaggerated COP. I understand how you can accidentally set up instruments to give the wrong answer, because I have done that myself.

What you are implying is that the ERV and NI engineers intentionally defeated the flow meters and become co-conspirators in a fraud. The motivation and/or reward to do such a crime is just not there. The ERV and NI would not risk their reputations to help these inventors commit fraud.

The ERV may have. He'll have his day in court, if he shows. There is no information here about NI engineers, who may not have gotten involved at all or at the level necessary. Accusing Jed of implying NI engineer fraud is beyond the pale, utterly inappropriate. He is implying no such thing, and that is obvious. Instruments can be set up improperly, deliberately or in error, as he wrote. The ERV -- which is a Rossi-speak term -- has a long-term involvement that has always been a bit suspect.

IH may have named him as a cross-defendant because this gives them greater legal access to him, and if he doesn't show, it also could make it impossible for Rossi to establish the ERV report.

The legal technicalities drive Planet Rossi crazy. UNFAIR! THEY SHOULD PAY SAINT ROSSI! But do remember who took this relationship into the legal arena. Any sane attorney would have told Rossi to avoid this like the plague, it can easily backfire and this response was more or less predictable.

Did Rossi tell Annesser the full story? I can imagine Annesser, naive, seeing the demand for patent assignment and then the refusal to pay and thinking WTF? These guys want a patent assignment and then claim there is nothing worth patenting? The crooks! Annesser, remember, likely knows very little of the history, and if you just listen to Rossi, my, my, what a story, the snakes!!!!

Quote

I would prefer to think that Defkalion was not a total con. Maintaining that preference is difficult because they never came clean, admitted a problem, trusted the truth, but simply made a bad smell and disappeared. Hadjichristos, the voice of DGT to the research community, disappeared. They left everyone in the lurch. Kim had egg on his face. Etc. Anyone who supported them, like Peter Gluck, became increasingly frustrated. This crap does damage.

What you would prefer has nothing to do with what actually exists. Every bit of evidence about John Hadjichristos suggests that he is an arrogant, unpleasant liar and nothing whatever redeeming. If you doubt it, review the forum he ran. Archives exist though I don't have the links at hand at the moment. The forum alone is ample evidence of gross and deliberate misstatements intended to deceive investors.

For example, Defkalion said that world renown companies had vetted and tested their Hyperion and they said unequivocally that they would release the tests in April, what was it? 2014? They never did because there were no tests-- only lies. Defkalion deliberately falsified results by premeditated, calculated and certainly tested misuse of measurement tools and instruments. At conferences, Defkalion claimed grandiose results which were pure fabrication. First they tried to cheat Rossi by stealing his invention. Then when they discovered that there probably was no invention, they decided simply to cheat investors first and finally their distributors who of course, like Rossi's, never received anything to distribute!

Then Defkalion disappeared with no traces. There is nothing to suggest that this was anything other than a stupid, artless con by a bunch of slime bags. If you have evidence to the contrary, I'd be delighted to review it. Links please if possible.

Quote from THHuxley

(1) Data selection. For example, a cell that showed He higher than that expected might (correctly) be viewed as leaky - given that lab atmosphere He content can be high and requires more care than was mostly exercised to control. It would then (obviously) be corrected and any results from it before correction discounted. A cell with no He might be regarded as not working and, again, discounted. These two effects can give "expected" results from random data

It could. That is why the Miles helium testing was blind. He did not reject cells because of leakage (I think there was one control measurement where the was an obvious massive container failure, a solder joint failed and the helium results were utterly out of range. He was running well below ambient, so an actual major leak like that would stand out. And it did. That control measurement is not included in what I'm saying as being a clear outlier). He took 33 samples. Analyzed later, 12 shown no helium and no heat. 18 showed heat and helium that was greater when the heat was greater. 3 cells showed heat and no helium. WTF? Well, Miles considers this in his estimate of the significance of the correlation. He did not exclude these obvious outliers. They are excluded in estimates of the ratio, though. What happened? One cell experience a failure that easily could have affected the heat measurement. It's beyond me that he included this sample, but he may have decided to go ahead. A better designed protocol would anticipate those contingencies, which can damage the results. But ... he did not exclude. He included and reported. The other two samples were from a Pd-Ce cathode, a new idea.

In a well designed protocol just for heat/helium, the cathode would not be allowed to vary like that. However, this was 1990 or 1991. At that point, everyone was desperate to "improve results." So he tried something. What happened? We don't know, What can be suspected was that PdCe somehow traps all the helium. These are all details to be eventually cleaned up with controlled experiment. The exploratory work made much of this impossible, because workers kept changing the experiments and there were few exact replications, since everything was considered inadequate. MORE HEAT! WE NEED MORE HEAT! That is one of the side-effects of the rejection cascade and the community response to it.

Do realize that the heat/helium correlation has over a dozen confirmations. I generally present the heat/helium correlation as a preponderance of the evidence conclusion. I'm fully aware of the weaknesses. This is all in addition to the enormous pile of circumstantial evidence that Jed will generally assert. Tritium. A boatload of heat findings that correlate with conditions as expected from a real effect. But the weakness, very obvious from the first days, what is the ash? How can there be fusion without a product? Well, there is, apparently. For the FPHE. We know practically nothing about product from NiH. If it is deuterium, as Storms thinks, this is going to be difficult to measure, worse than helium.

(2) He correlation with experiment time, excess heat correlation with experiment time. Most have obvious causes - since leakage and heat both scale linear with time - at least when cell He concentration is lower than immediate ambient.[/quote]
Miles collected gas samples for a fixed evolution volume. Because there was a range of electrolytic currents, it was not a fixed time. If someone wants to, they could go over this data looking for a time correlation. But we already expect some correlation between current density and heat, that is fairly well established. This, however, would lead to an expectation of more helium with less time, if the effect was significant. I suggest learning the Miles protocol, if you are interested.

McKubre did different work, in that work, accumulated helium was measured, so leakage would have produced a cumulative effect. The heluim was measured at different points within that cell history. Then he attempted to "flush" the helium by "sloshing the deuterium back and forth", to use the technical terms... Part of that was anodic reversal, commonly used to accelerate deloading. McKubre also made an error in the original publication for EPRI, in the experimental volume, which, of course, must be used to translate helium concentration in samples to absolute helium. Krivit jumps all over him for this, but stuff happens. What he came up with was 104% of the expected helium, using 23.8 MeV/4He as the ratio. That is a stunning result, crying out for confirmation. His stated error is +/- 10%. That is obviously seat-of-the-pants, but from an expert.

Violante (Apicella et al, 2005) measured accumulated helium in the headspace, with ambient helium not excluded, so they were measuring increase. Not leakage. If that work were to be redone, which is quite possible, Violante is on the team, they would use anodic reversal on all the runs and we could expect that this might improve precision to better than 10%. What I'm hoping for is many more experiments, many more data points.

Quote from Wyttenbach

Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
So, maybe it will take 20 years.

Is that (20 years) the allowed time (for the shine up of LENR) of the behind the doors scenario??

I was glad to see agreement on some other points, but ...
There you go again, looking for proof of some conspiracy. No. 20 years is a recognition that it has already been 27 years since the PF press release, 32 years since the effect burned a hole through their lab bench. I consider the lost opportunity cost of delay to be about a trillion dollars per year. Cold fusion is considered a "disruptive technology" but the smart way to deal with disruptive technology is not to try to stop it, but to prepare for it, factor for it, and foster it, if it is positive. I know of no "behind the scenes scenario" except what I see on Sifferkoll's blog, which spins a huge tale out of almost nothing.

A more optimistic forecast would be 10 years and it could even be sooner if we get lucky. That means "time to useful commercial devices," i.e., more than lab curiosities or even investigational devices (there is are some possibilities that could become available very quickly.) This would include, though, niche markets, such as a space-flight power system.