How much money was invested in LENR research since F&P

Quote from JedRothwell

I have heard estimates ranging from $50 to $100 million. That includes the NHE project which I recall was around $20 million. It was largely a waste of money. I never saw detailed financial information on any project so I wouldn't know the totals.

It has to be higher than $100 million. There are a series of projects to look at. Listing some of them:

• U.S. DoE spending in 1989 (and maybe some later). This was said to be, for a time, more than half the discretionary research budget. Maybe millions of dollars per month, for a time.
• SRI funding from EPRI and other agencies.
• The Utah project.
• IMRA in France (Pons and Fleischmann).
• The Japanese NHE project.
• Many individual researchers and companies such as Energetics Technlogies.
• SKINR.
• Texas Tech (budgeted $12 million, apparently, but this likely has not been spent yet.)
• Projects in Russia and India and China, and others.
• Industrial Heat (at least $11.5 million, but perhaps $20 million or so total with Rossi, and now more, ongoing, funded at $50 million).

Quote from JedRothwell

Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
IMRA in France (Pons and Fleischmann).

No idea, but it couldn't have been that much. It was a small facility with 6 or 8 people I think.

The number of employees does not establish the funding.

http://engineering.missouri.ed…ppened-to-cold-fusion.pdf

gives an estimate of 12 million pounds. At an exchange rate at that time of perhaps $1.60 per GBP, this would translate to almost $20 million, which seems about right.

I read the idea of "over half the U.S. discretionary research funding" being devoted in what may have been ad hoc programs attempting to confirm/disconfirm cold fusion, somewhere in my early study of cold fusion. I remember another statement somewhere of as much as several million dollars per month for the U.S. effort, but, again, don't recall where. This was not necessarily DoE funding. However, who paid for all those labs involved in the Morrey collaboration?

My general sense of cold fusion spending is that it was not necessarily focused and effective, in terms of what would more soberly have been research priorities. However, SRI did do much of the research on which our understanding of today stands, it was a massive effort, even though by a small research group.

Look at the Utah effort. Given as a major result was tritium. Tritium confuses the hell out of skeptics. It was never correlated with heat. It seems to have been thought that if some tritium could be found, this would "prove" cold fusion was real. Yeah, if the work is done and published in certain ways. It would show that something unexpected was happening.

But "something unexpected" does not readily translate to "cold fusion." Tritium is, all indications are, a rare side-effect of whatever is happening in the cell. Much of the early research focused on these rare effects (.e., tritium, transmutation, neutrons). The main show was heat, and it was essential to discover the ash, the reaction product, and tritium was not the reaction product, the elephant in the living room. It was helium. So what if IMRA had measured helium in the PF cells? Did they? Fleischmann apparently, one time I've seen, claimed that helium measurements were too expensive.

Too expensive compared to the eventual shutdown and effective failure of the program? In fact, the helium results contradicted what P&F thought was happening, i.e., a bulk reaction, and some of that idea still lives on in a few researchers. It was said at ICCF-20, if I may be allowed to toot my own horn, as was done for me .... I wasn't there.

Quote

In his review of helium-4 and heat correlations in 2015, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax[10] states: “Miles was amply confirmed, and precision has increased. While there are outliers, there is no experimental evidence contradicting the correlation, and only the exact ratio remains in question. In this, we have direct evidence that the effect is real and is nuclear in nature; the mechanism remains a mystery well worth exploration”. For an experimental result of earth shattering importance, first reported publicly in 1992, it took until 2015, 23 years, for this conclusion to be stated with such clarity and conviction? And even now not every researcher in the CMNS world would agree that helium-4 is the primary product, or even a nuclear one!

This is that review: http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/108/04/0574.pdf

It took me about six years of study and writing and training to come to the point of being able to write that paper.