The Industrial Heat Answer

    Quote from Hermes

    THHuxley wrote:


    That is correct, it is the collection of experiments and correlation analysis, and that does not establish "direct causal link," but rather likely common cause.


    Quote

    I agree. There is a weak correlation. In some cases that correlation is also correlated in time. This is why I think it such a waste to pursue such inconclusive speculation. Even if there existed some deuterium reaction which created helium, it is unlikely to be significant in light hydrogen systems. And in the event you believe in some form of fusion, then surely the proton, with its reduced mass is going to dominate ALL possible fusion reactions! If 23.8 MeV is expected, it is expected only by non scientists!


    This is bizarre. Heat/helium is only asserted and found in deuterium experiments, not hydrogen. The statement about non-scientists is simply crazy and belied by what actual scientists have written about this.


    Helium was not expected in 1989, the largest reason being that the gammas believed to be necessary (from d+d -> 4He, the rare branch) were missing. Pons and Fleischmann had found some helium in the outgas and that was announced early on. Then they shut up about helium and actually tried to stop the publication of the Morrey collaboration results. Essentially, those results contradicted their idea of what was happening and they were spooked. It was a very bad decision. They had apparently measured helium in experimental rods, early on, those results were promised, but never released. That is what led Park to be such a skeptic! At least that is what he claimed.


    A few theoreticians suggested the helium might be possible. My sense of early cold fusion theory was that it was a collection of valiant attempts to come up with some explanation other than "error."


    It was not until Miles announced the correlation in 2001 or 2002 that serious evidence existed. Yes, 23.8 MeV/4He heat would not be expected from d+d-4He. Rather from that branch, besides being so rare, a 23.8 MeV gamma would be expected.


    But this is what accumulated as evidence: No ash identified and correlated with heat except helium. No major radiation. If we assume the fuel is deuterium, which is certainly plausible! -- and they did do hydrogen controls and saw little or no heat -- then 23.8 MeV/4He does become the expectation from the laws of thermodynamics, which are mechanism-independent.


    This is all well-known in the field, accepted by almost all the researchers -- very few exceptions -- and ... is now the subject of a careful effort to measure with increased precision.


    Heat/helium is only found in heavy hydrogen systems. The very existence of light hydrogen results is not well established. The ash is not known. (Storms thinks it is deuterium, which requires a more complex reaction, ie.., p + e + p -> d. Or something like that. Storms then proposes a mechanism which supposedly works for protium and deuterium.)


    But this is my basic point about cold fusion. Theory is not terribly useful, yet. The actual reaction is a mystery. What is needed is more data, to feed theory formation. And that is going to take money.

    Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax

    And what are the movie rights worth?


    Unfortunately the movie rights are not going to be worth much. The plot is too far-fetched. People would lose interest at the point in the screenplay where in July 2015 IH's representative is not permitted to travel to the facility where the GPT is supposedly taking place, and only finally gains entry in February 2016. People would roll their eyes when the raw data for the test are withheld and think that the story is too unrealistic. The screenplay might be suitable for a B movie on the USA Network, perhaps as a Roger Corman production.

    Quote from Eric Walker

    The plot is too far-fetched.


    Well, they might take some liberties.


    And you have not factored in the love interest. Rossi's family rejected him, but he plays tennis with his beautiful wife.


    Rossi is, by all accounts, engaging and likable. So how could someone like that do what he did? What, in fact, did he do? How has he kept the trust of, say, Mats Lewan?

    Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax

    This is bizarre. Heat/helium is only asserted and found in deuterium experiments, not hydrogen.


    The bizarre part is that nobody attempts to measure helium in light hydrogen systems. If you close your eyes you won't see anything of course. If you don't carry out obvious control experiments with light hydrogen then one wonders why. All these Q/4He experiments suggest the researchers are simply trying to verify only their pre-conceived ideas, so it's not surprising this is the result they find. This is not a proper way to do science.

    Quote from Hermes

    The bizarre part is that nobody attempts to measure helium in light hydrogen systems. If you close your eyes you won't see anything of course. If you don't carry out obvious control experiments with light hydrogen then one wonders why.


    Furthermore, there's already evidence against a Q/4He connection to fusion of deuterium in the experiments that have already been done, in the form of the the Pd-Ce/D system, where excess heat was seen but no helium (Miles) and a very similar result that was found at SRI. The response given is that perhaps the helium is being trapped in those cathodes, and I suppose this is an interesting detail to examine. But this should be enough to make people speak much more tentatively about the whole thing. But instead they talk about "preponderance of evidence" and so on. Incautious generalization by people attempting to bring LENR to a larger audience can be a big distraction that one must inure oneself to.

    Quote

    Rossi is, by all accounts, engaging and likable. So how could someone like that do what he did? What, in fact, did he do? How has he kept the trust of, say, Mats Lewan?


    and others...


    My suggestion: Mats is, I believe, a people person. Although he has some technical training, as a journalist, he trusts character, motive, etc more than he trusts hard science facts. He enjoys the fluidity of infinite possibility promised by future science, and does a decent job of reporting this. Rossi is good at manipulating anyone who does not rate science above character - and that includes everyone who feels their grasp of the science here is flaky. Why that should be - beats me - from his public persona he would be my number one "do not trust" individual.

    Quote

    Furthermore, there's already evidence against a Q/4He connection to fusion of deuterium in the experiments that have already been done, in the form of the the Pd-Ce/D system, where excess heat was seen but no helium (Miles) and a very similar result that was found at SRI. The response given is that perhaps the helium is being trapped in those cathodes, and I suppose this is an interesting detail to examine. But this should be enough to make people speak much more tentatively about the whole thing. But instead they talk about "preponderance of evidence" and so on. Incautious generalization by people attempting to bring LENR to a larger audience can be a big distraction that one must inure oneself to.


    Yes. the evidence for any He connection is flaky. But, as I've already said here, the big merit of a hypothesised 4He connection to excess heat is that it is definite and disprovable. Personally, while I think all the LENR stuff is fun, I view it as futile and non-scientific (in fact pseudo-scientific) except where it makes definitive statements that can be tested by experiment in such a way that there is a possibility the statements can be disproved. Until then it is just playing with artifacts.


    The only other example of this I've noticed was Kim hypothesising LENR BEC's working better at low temperatures. A reasonable idea given theory, but which turned out not to be true when tested.


    You could argue that the various "excess heat is correlated with ...." stuff constitutes such statements. The trouble is that it is post hoc. It validates certain correlations, but does not determine why those correlations exist. Since the systems here are complex artifacts can generate such correlations as easily as some new but too indefinite to make predictions nuclear theory.


    Regards, THH

    Quote from THHuxley

    You could argue that the various "excess heat is correlated with ...." stuff constitutes such statements. The trouble is that it is post hoc. It validates certain correlations, but does not determine why those correlations exist. Since the systems here are complex artifacts can generate such correlations as easily as some new but too indefinite to make predictions nuclear theory.


    Would you go with more specific hypotheses, along the lines of:

    • When platinum is used as an anode in an electrochemical experiment, helium is correlated with excess heat, but not necessarily in a constant ratio.
    • When platinum is electroplated onto palladium and electrolysis is used, helium is correlated with excess heat, but not necessarily in a constant ratio.

    Seems to me that, although annoyingly general, these statements are specific enough to test using a large set of trials if a promising protocol surfaces. And if somehow a way is found to get two orders or more magnitude excess heat above the noise threshold, that should be enough to demonstrate an interesting scientific phenomenon, whether or not one buys that there is something nuclear going on.


    I also like Hermes's suggestion of looking for radiation (and very short-lived radioactivity) when a theory predicts it. Do you not think that experiments along these lines could potentially be tightened up enough to show something interesting? I will caution that someone with strong opinions might stomp in here at this point and say something definitive like, "there is no radioactivity in LENR apart from occasional, minute levels of tritium, and that's the way it is." One is safe to ignore them with prejudice, for they're overgeneralizing.

    @Eric,


    More specific statements of correlation are well worth collecting, because they can drive definite hypotheses, but they do not themselves distinguish between artifact (which can have a specific mechanism) and nuclear LENR. He correlations are a bit different because they (may) imply transmutation and that is sure evidence of something nuclear. You'd need the evidence of transmutation rather than some other artifact to be strong. The correlation would not necessarily do because there are artifactual correlations between He measured and both temperature and length of time. What would impress is if you controlled for identical temperature and length of time, and material profiles, observed excess heat (even if marginal), and found a correlation between this marginal excess heat and He. If NAEs are as variable as LENR advocates think that variability would remain with other parametrs controlled and if it correlated with He that is quite strong evidence. (Alas not yet knock-out evidence. There could be some material difference that similarly effected a calorimetry artifact an He artifact. Still, that is quite a coincidence.)


    The strongest experimental evidence against LENR is the prevalence of marginal excess heat results. You'd expect a broad range between say 10,000% and 0.01%. Too low or high would not be detectable but then you would still expect (depending on conditions) 10-1000%. Only marginal, over a range of conditions, exactly complies with artifact and is not what you'd predict from any NAE nuclear mechanism because the NAE density would be very variable and anyway the sensitivity of calorimetry to given NAE activity is also very variable over different methods.


    Finally radiation would of course be the most easily detected and sensitive measure of unexpected nuclear activity. If detected reliably it would imply LENR. Radiation detetcors suffer glitches and artifacts as MFMP have found, so it is not enough for some guy to claim they have seen radiation. But, if there is any real effect, validating a radiation measurement on multiple setups would be by far the easiest thing to do.

    Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax


    Well, they might take some liberties.


    And you have not factored in the love interest. Rossi's family rejected him, but he plays tennis with his beautiful wife.


    Rossi is, by all accounts, engaging and likable. So how could someone like that do what he did? What, in fact, did he do? How has he kept the trust of, say, Mats Lewan?


    It is always shocks me when people say Rossi is likable in person. While I of course have not met the man, I have watched numerous videos of him, and he seems 180 degrees off from a likable or pleasant character. He comes off as a cranky angry jaded egotistical idiot savant who is being inconvenienced by the very presence of plebeians around him.

    Quote from THHuxley

    The strongest experimental evidence against LENR is the prevalence of marginal excess heat results.


    This is not a discussion whether the glass his half full or half empty. If in a Pd-D-D reaction You measure He well (10x) above ambient then it's LENR...


    Our old LENR denier THC of course always first looks for the way out of his dilemma.


    Fleischmann, in 1989, already measured He well above ambient, but he didn't believe it.


    What we need is a receipt (for a reactor) to produce heat at a reasonable high COP, with a reliable LENR system, that does need no intervention for at least one month.


    We need no experiments to convince THC, this is just a waste of time...

    Quote


    This is not a discussion whether the glass his half full or half empty. If in a Pd-D-D reaction You measure He well (10x) above ambient then it's LENR...Our old LENR denier THC of course always first looks for the way out of his dilemma.Fleischmann, in 1989, already measured He well above ambient, but he didn't believe it.What we need is a receipt (for a reactor) to produce heat at a reasonable high COP, with a reliable LENR system, that does need no intervention for at least one month.We need no experiments to convince THC, this is just a waste of time...


    (1) You are innacurate - you mean THH


    (2) You are also innaccurate. The post you dislike was showing the careful skepticism that LENR needs, and denying nothing.


    (3) I said transmutation evidence is strong. But, when ambient He levels are very low and also very variable in alab, how can you be sure that your measurement is actually 10X the local ambient? It is possible, certainly, but it has never yet been done with any safety.

    Quote from THHuxley

    The post you dislike was showing the careful skepticism that LENR needs, and denying nothing.


    THH: Skepticism is something that LENR investors (like IH, urgently) need!


    Any researcher that works in a lab should be skeptical (= carefull) about everything he does and further he should work in a team. This has nothing specific to LENR.


    THH, if you like to help, then make a proposal, how we can get a cheap instrument for reliably measure He.

    Quote from Wyttenbach

    THH, if you like to help, then make a proposal, how we can get a cheap instrument for reliably measure He.

    "Cheap" and "reliably measure He" may be oxymoronic. The topic here is Rossi v. Darden, and helium is only relevant to palladium deuteride reactions. It has not been reported as an ash from nickel hydride (the Rossi approach), and is not expected as a primary ash.


    There Nikita Andropov is working on cheap helium detectors, though. This was 2013: http://www.quantumheat.org/ind…35-real-time-gas-analysis

    Quote from stephenrenzz

    It is always shocks me when people say Rossi is likable in person. While I of course have not met the man, I have watched numerous videos of him, and he seems 180 degrees off from a likable or pleasant character. He comes off as a cranky angry jaded egotistical idiot savant who is being inconvenienced by the very presence of plebeians around him.


    Yet, I am telling you what people who have actually spent significant time with him have said to me (or to others I trust, conveyed to me confidentially). People who are not naive and who understand the situation, which they consider tragic.

    Quote from Hermes

    Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
    This is bizarre. Heat/helium is only asserted and found in deuterium experiments, not hydrogen.


    The bizarre part is that nobody attempts to measure helium in light hydrogen systems. If you close your eyes you won't see anything of course. If you don't carry out obvious control experiments with light hydrogen then one wonders why. All these Q/4He experiments suggest the researchers are simply trying to verify only their pre-conceived ideas, so it's not surprising this is the result they find. This is not a proper way to do science.


    The bizarre part is that people say things about the experimental record without having studied it. Hydrogen controls have been included in experimental studies. Off the top of my head, Miles and McKubre (Case). With hydrogen, no anomalous heat and no elevated helium.


    In other words, you made up a defective experimental record that you then reject as poor science, a straw man argument. The lack of hydrogen controls was an early objection to Pons and Fleischmann's work.


    What Fleischmann said about that was that they did not get a "clean control" with hydrogen. I personally fault them for not reporting work that they did not understand and especially not reporting "failures." They are not the only cold fusion researchers to do that.


    Others have used light water as a control, i.e., hydrogen. One of the most famous experiments is SRI P13/P14, a truly beautiful and clear comparison between two cells, P13 (hydrogen) and P14 (deuterium). The cells were in series, so they each had exactly the same electrolytic hisory, and they showed similar loading ratio (SRI measured that, routinely). What they did not emphasize and should have is that they ran this pair through the same current excursion previously, twice, with no anomalous heat showing up. The third time, strong heat.


    I gave a brief presentation on P13/P14 at MIT a few years ago, I said that the chimera of cold fusion walked into the lab, licked McKubre in the face, and then left.


    Exact same conditions, different results. But, of course, the conditions were not exactly the same. The material evolves with repeated loading and deloading. The surfqce cracks from stress, among other things. It is a "friggin complicated mess."


    Generally, there have been heat results with PdH, but at substantially lower levels, questionable.

    Quote from Eric Walker

    Furthermore, there's already evidence against a Q/4He connection to fusion of deuterium in the experiments that have already been done, in the form of the the Pd-Ce/D system, where excess heat was seen but no helium (Miles) and a very similar result that was found at SRI. The response given is that perhaps the helium is being trapped in those cathodes, and I suppose this is an interesting detail to examine. But this should be enough to make people speak much more tentatively about the whole thing. But instead they talk about "preponderance of evidence" and so on. Incautious generalization by people attempting to bring LENR to a larger audience can be a big distraction that one must inure oneself to.

    I don't know about the "similar result at SRI." Citation, please.


    The "reason" is not known. Miles reported all his cells and I would have much preferred that he not include speculative cathodes with a different material. The reaction could be different. Eric, the "preponderance of the evidence" that I write about includes those results. There are actually three anomalous results out of 33 samples.


    All 12 samples taken with no heat showed no helium, which suggests that leakage is not a problem. There would be, in a more thorough replication, many more samples from many more cells.
    There were then 18 samples which showed heat and proportional helium.
    And 3 samples with heat and no helium. Miles says that with one cell, the deuterium level was allowed to run low and so there may have been calorimetry error. Once again, redoing this work, the protocol would consider that contingency in advance. But because he didn't have that in place, he reported all his results. He did not cherry-pick, and that is important to know.


    And then there were two samples taken from the only PdCe cell in the work, and they showed no elevated helium. And, yes, we can make up a possible explanation, but the important thing is the correlation exists without discarding that data.


    Once again, I'll repeat it: the preponderance of the evidence is that in the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect (which would exclude that PdCe cell as related but not identical), heat and helium are correlated at a value with is experimentally consistent with the expectation of thermodynamics for a reaction generating helium from heat with no radiation leakage and no other known ash at significant levels.


    This is a consistent picture. Then we may well wonder about PdCe. And I hope that someone answers this question, it may not be difficult. There are limited resources. What comes first?


    The reason for verifying heat/helium with priority is that this is direct evidence of a nuclear reaction, not merely circumstantial evidence. If verified with increased precision, this would establish beyond a reasonable doubt the reality of the effect, and then funding further research will become less difficult. This is "crushing the tests," to use Darden's term.

    Quote from Eric Walker

    I also like Hermes's suggestion of looking for radiation (and very short-lived radioactivity) when a theory predicts it. Do you not think that experiments along these lines could potentially be tightened up enough to show something interesting? I will caution that someone with strong opinions might stomp in here at this point and say something definitive like, "there is no radioactivity in LENR apart from occasional, minute levels of tritium, and that's the way it is."


    Thanks Eric! On another thread I noted:-

    Quote from Hermes

    Bush R., Eagleton R. Evidence for Electrolytically Induced Transmutation and Radioactivity Correlated with Excess Heat in Electrolytic Cells With Light Water Rubidium Salt Electrolytes, Proc. ICCF4 3, (1993), p 27 lenr-canr.org/acrobat/EPRIproceedingb.pdf .


    So massive radio-activity was found. When I first read this paper I saw what appeared to me to be 3 issues, but now I am much more sympathetic. I've changed my mind. I wonder what other people think? What theories predict this result and why?

    Quote from nobody

    Parent co. made loads of investment capital on the hype, no?

    Classic confusion of "attracting investment capital" with "making money," i.e., profit. "Hype" is here imaginary. No hype has been pointed to that actually shows IH engaging in it.


    I do not know IH Holding Interenational's financials. In theory, the managers of IHHI could collect management fees as, say, the managers of Woodford, I'm sure, collect fees. I'm sure that Darden is paid by Cherokee.


    The purpose of IH was apparently not purely profit, but was environmentally motivated (like Cherokee). I do not expect this work to generate actual profit in the short term, and it may take many years before the potential of profit appears. Anyone investing in commercial LENR should know how risky it is.


    What IH has done is to develop exposure to the technology. I know that there is work going on that nobody is openly talking about. IH is involved with some of that. The idea of investing at this time is to develop expertise, to be ready to move when true profit opportunities appear. Woodford may have that in mind. They decided to support IH in this, so that they could participate in it. Thus Woodford was able to visit the Doral plant and see for themselves.


    And I think what they saw is becoming fairly obvious. If they wanted to invest in Rossi technology, they would have invested in IH itself, if they trusted IH, or in Hydro Fusion, perhaps, or they would have approached Rossi directly.


    Instead, I infer, they saw what was going on and drew their own conclusions from it. No hype involved.

Subscribe to our newsletter

It's sent once a month, you can unsubscribe at anytime!

View archive of previous newsletters

* indicates required

Your email address will be used to send you email newsletters only. See our Privacy Policy for more information.

Our Partners

Supporting researchers for over 20 years
Want to Advertise or Sponsor LENR Forum?
CLICK HERE to contact us.