CBCNews Canada: Why the controversial science of cold fusion is getting hot again

It's a horrible article, full of errors. The author complains about how difficult it is to sort this out on the internet.

Apparently it never occurred to him to read scientific journals, where the pro cold fusion side will be presented with some gravitas. I.e, like the February 25, 2015 issue of Current Science. Then he could look for academic criticism of all that work. And, yes, discover that it's completely missing. That is a story in itself. He talks about Rossi as an entrepreneur, which was correct. Then he calls him a physicist, which is completely off. The guy has no idea what these words mean, apparently.

He just wanted to write a column as quickly as possible. He does not mention Rossi v. Darden. The occasion of the story is:

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Today, the U.S. House of Representatives committee on armed services is set to be presented with a bill outlining the potential of cold fusion — a technology that used to be the poster child for scientific hoaxes.

Except that this is apparently incorrect. It's not a "bill," it would be a report.

I'd like to be happy that he wrote about cold fusion without dismissing it. But cold fusion is really a HUGE story, and he treats it as some odd curiosity or something. Not worth much of his time.

His headline:

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Why the controversial science of cold fusion is getting hot again

Okay, why? Nice question! Except he didn't state it as a question, this is written as a lead in to an explanation of why, but he doesn't know why, so how could he possibly explain it?

His description of cold fusion is incorrect. He describes hot fusion. and then assumes that cold fusion is hot fusion, only cold, which, quite simply, doesn't work. It's something different. He has:

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The [Pons and Fleischmann] experiment proved to be completely irreproducible

He states that as a fact. That is the central myth of the rejection cascade. He is not even aware that it is controversial, that there is massive confirmation covered in scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. Yeah, we'd want more, but, then, funding and all the problems of how the field is presented. He really makes the rejection cascade look reasonable. After all if nobody could reproduce it, anyone still believing in it is obviously a fanatic.

He presents a snippet of Widom-Larsen "not fusion" theory -- basically not an explanation -- and gets it totally wrong ("chain reaction"? what?) and then says:

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That's why the House of Representatives was presented with an LENR proposal — because this could be a massive disrupter for traditional energy sources.

The implication is that it happened because this genius, Lewis Larson, came up with a theory. But wait, what about "no reproduction"? Why would that issue go away just from someone coming up with some idea of how it might happen without "fusion"? Would there not need to be some kind of -- what do you call it? -- .... experimental evidence?

From Ethan Siegel:

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"When you say it's theoretically possible, that depends on what theory you're listening to," said Siegal, "the way we understand [physics] today, no, that shouldn't be possible."

The problem is that what "shouldn't be possible" is not specified. well, cold fusion, supposedly, but what is that? Yes, the way his guy describes it, it is probably impossible.

The author completely misses that cold fusion is heating up because, in fact, there is a growing body of experimental evidence that shows there is an anomalous heat effect, the effect found by Pons and Fleischmann. There is very substantial evidence that this is converting deuterium into helium, which could be called fusion, but which might have a quite different mechanism than imagined. The evidence is under review, and the project to do that appears to have been well-funded, and public evidence indicates that this was done by Bill Gates to the tune of $6 million, with $6 million in the State of Texas matching funds. Reputable scientists are running this project. This would be real news. But he has no clue that this is going on because he did very, very shallow research.

It's our fault. We did not feed him with a coherent press release. You don't expect journalists to do real work, do you? Where is APCO when we need them?