NASA partners with Global Energy Corporation to develop 10kW Hybrid Reactor Generator

Quote from H-G Branzell

Take a strong electric field like 10E6 V/m. The size of a uranium nucleus is around 15E-15 m. The voltage drop over the nucleus will be less than 1.5E-7 V, probably much less because the electron cloud will shield the nucleus from most of the electric field.

Just an example of what might be needed which is not inconsistent with this: a slight distorting of the electron cloud surrounding the nucleus might alter the screening a small but appreciable amount. The Gamow barrier calculation is extremely sensitive to minute changes in barrier width, so not much of a change would be required. There could also be an outsize effect from transient asymmetries in this screening across the nuclear volume.

Quote from Shane D.

If LENR becomes established, your references may at best buy a footnote in the history books: "After the announcement, there were a few weeks when FPs results were generally accepted by the science community".

I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t agree that general acceptance ever existed. Serious scientists are much too cautious for that. I would say that there were a few weeks when the possibility of cold fusion was enthusiastically welcomed.

Quote

Especially so after that footnote is weighed against the many lost years, and cost to humanity, their shortsightedness, and in many cases avarice, caused.

The question remains: why did this short-sightedness and avarice take 5 weeks to kick in? Did they forget how corrupt, greedy, and self-serving they were for a short time, until someone reminded them? What changed?

The only plausible explanation for the change in their judgement is based on examination of the evidence. And expressing one’s judgement based on evidence is what scientists are expected to do.

But yes, if LENR were to be vindicated, its disparagement (even if based on evidence) would be embarrassing to many people. The same can be said about any pseudoscience, like the ecat, astrology, creationism, perpetual motion, or homeopathy.

Quote from Louis Reed

What part of the “first few weeks after the press conference” don’t you get?

I know what transpired in the first few weeks after the press conference. I know what happened in the first day after the announcement. Influential scientists at MIT and elsewhere not only disparaged the work, but they declared it fraud and they called the arrest and imprisonment of Fleischmann and Pons in the mass media. As Beaudette describes, Fleischmann predicted this would happen, and he was right. He understood the dark side of human nature, because his father was killed by the Gestapo, and his family fled to England.

It is true there were supporters and some excitement after the announcement. There still are supporters. This is not surprising. The effect was replicated at high signal to noise ratios in 180 major laboratories (listed by Storms). The only opposition is due to academic politics. There is not a single credible paper describing technical reasons to doubt any major replication. Technically, by late 1989 there was no doubt whatever that cold fusion was real, but the opposition, the attacks, and the kind of distorted history that you believe in was already prevalent by that time.

You quote an account:

"A day after the public announcement, work was under way at LANL … People were quickly organized … with a speed that is no longer possible at LANL. Everyone scurried off to find palladium and heavy-water before the limited supplies were snatched up by someone else…"

—

"Excitement was building as more people heard about the “discovery” and wanted to get in on the action. If real, such an important discovery hardly ever happens during a scientist’s career, … "

Perhaps you should add that by October 1989, three groups at LANL replicated, including one with Jalbert, who was arguably the world's top expert in tritium. So, the excitement was justified. See the NSF meeting transcript. This is the actual history of cold fusion, not your invented version.

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/EPRInsfepriwor.pdf

Quote from Louis Reed

The question remains: why did this short-sightedness and avarice take 5 weeks to kick in? Did they forget how corrupt, greedy, and self-serving they were for a short time, until someone reminded them? What changed?

It "kicked in" instantly. As I said, the day after the announcement many scientists not only disparaged it, they said that Fleischmann and Pons should be arrested. Later, they threatened scientists with deportation, they fired them, and in one case rumor has it they dumped manure onto an experiment. Here is a sample of what they said; there are thousands of similar quotes in the mass media and in places such as Scientific American and Wikipedia:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MalloveEclassicnas.pdf

Nobel laureate Schwinger described the attacks made on him: "The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science." He resigned from the APS in protest. If that is how they treated a Nobel laureate, how do you think they treated ordinary professors and graduate students? If you do not believe his account, backed by his actions, who will you believe? You have bought into a false narrative used by opponents to justify their attacks against academic freedom and science.

Quote from Louis Reed

The only plausible explanation for the change in their judgement is based on examination of the evidence. And expressing one’s judgement based on evidence is what scientists are expected to do.

Okay, if that is a plausible explanation, then what are the technical reasons for this doubt? What papers show mistakes in cold fusion? Who published them, and where are they? Which scientists changed their minds, and where did they publish their opinions and reasons for changing their minds? You wave your hands and say this is the "only plausible explanation," but you present no evidence for it. If you know this is what happened, you must know why these scientists changed their minds. Show us!

This is science. You can't just wave your hands and say there is an invisible unpublished technical problem that is your little secret. You have to show your hand. If you cannot point to one or more technical problems that caused people to doubt these results, you have no case. Making up fake history and ascribing unnamed, unsupported opinions to imaginary scientists are not valid arguments in a scientific context.

In fact, there are no valid technical reasons to doubt the major cold fusion replications. There are only a handful of papers that even attempted to find them. The most important one is here:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf

I invite you to read it. Tell us if you think it has any technical merit. Would you change your mind based on this?

The papers by Shanahan have no merit, for the reasons discussed in this forum and here:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MarwanJanewlookat.pdf

Quote from Louis Reed

Of course, we all know that Lewis and Koonin brought everyone back down to earth about a week later,

Do we know this? What else do "we" know about Lewis? How about the fact that he probably observed excess heat but he made a glaring error and overlooked it? See:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJhownaturer.pdf

Regarding funding, Congress did not fund cold fusion, but the state of Utah did. They established the National Cold Fusion Institute. Do you know what the institute accomplished? It published irrefutable proof that cold fusion is real. Proof that should have instantly convinced every scientist on earth. So I think it was money well spent. What do you think? Let me guess. I suppose you have never heard of the institute and you have no idea what their results were or where these results were published. Here:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/WillFGreproducib.pdf

Quote from H-G Branzell

It [the Gamow barrier calculation] has nothing to do with possible influence from an external electric field on an atomic nucleus.

The Gamow theory of alpha decay can be used to estimate the spontaneous fission cross section, as the process is very similar to alpha decay. The Gamow theory of alpha decay has as one of its variables the Coulomb barrier width. The Coulomb barrier width is a function of electron screening from the bound electrons. The shape of the electron cloud surrounding an atom and nucleus depends in part upon the external electric field, so your conclusion does not (necessarily) follow.

>>> "The Coulomb barrier width is a function of electron screening from the bound electrons. ..."

Quote from JedRothwell

Okay, if that is a plausible explanation, then what are the technical reasons for this doubt? What papers show mistakes in cold fusion? Who published them, and where are they? Which scientists changed their minds, and where did they publish their opinions and reasons for changing their minds?

I realize that demanding specifics and supporting evidence takes all the fun out of the discussion. The thing is, this is history. It really happened. You can't just make stuff up, or quote some random document or a press report that itself has no basis. If you claim an explanation is "plausible" you have to show why it is plausible. Step one is to show documentary evidence such as letters and papers. This is a scientific dispute with two authoritative books and more than 4,000 original source documents, including hundreds uploaded to LENR-CANR.org. You need to go through this literature and show us where, how and why your version of history happened.

Of course, history is not one unified event. Many things happened at the same time, some pointing in one direction, others pointing in a different direction. I am right that there was extreme political opposition, and you are right that there was also positive excitement in 1989. That excitement was justified, given the fact that dozens of major labs such as LANL replicated in a few months. But you are completely wrong when you ascribe "plausible" causes that do not exist to explain events that did not happen! No scientist ever changed his mind after finding errors in the papers because no such error has been found or published. You might as well expect to find an error in the laws of thermodynamics, which are predicated on calorimetry, and which are the bedrock basis for cold fusion.

If this were an unsolved murder, an ancient event such as the Battle of Hastings, or a literary dispute over whether Hamlet was actually insane or just pretending to be, then your opinion would be as good as any other. But that does not work with history. Show us facts or you have no case. That does not work with thermodynamics or calorimetry, for that matter. You say Lewis brought people back to earth. Why do you say that in light of the fact that he made a mistake? Were you aware of this mistake? If not, you need to rethink your assertion. If you knew about it, do you claim this was not a mistake? You will have to address the nitty-gritty details of his paper the way Fleischmann, Miles and the others did, as I described here:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJhownaturer.pdf

Perhaps you feel that Fleischmann et al., are wrong. Okay, show us why. You cannot just say "I disagree." You cannot just claim that "Lewis brought people back to earth." That did not happen. Yes, it appeared to happen, and many press reports and unreliable sources such as Wikipedia and Nature describe it that way, but a close reading of the Lewis paper coupled with knowledge of calorimetry shows it did not happen. Do you disagree? Write a paper, the way I did. Make your case. I will upload your paper to LENR-CANR.org and let the readers decide. If you are not willing to do your homework and make your case, I suggest you have no business forming an opinion.

@Louis

Jed wrote:

Quote from JedRothwell

The papers by Shanahan have no merit, for the reasons discussed in this forum and here:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MarwanJanewlookat.pdf

This is incorrect, as been discussed many times here and elsewhere. In a quick summary, the paper referred to by Jed poses a strawman representation of my argument, and as is typical with strawmen arguments, proceeds to prove it wrong. The only problem is that, as is typical with strawmen arguments, they critique something other than what I said. Ergo, they have never addressed the problems I raise in this manuscript.: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/ShanahanKapossiblec.pdf Please note that the listing in Jed's library is incorrect in that the document there was a manuscript submitted in 2000, while the paper was finally published in 2002 with a different title. The journal ref that Jed gives is correct. The correct title is "A systematic error in mass flow calorimetry demonstrated". I will not engage with Jed on this again, which is much to the relief of the forum participants I suppose...

Quote from kirkshanahan

This is incorrect, as been discussed many times here and elsewhere.

You think it is incorrect, but authors and I think it is correct. I encourage readers here to look at your papers and the Marwan paper, and decide for themselves.

Also, you think that a bucket of water will evaporate overnight in ordinary room temperature conditions; you think that people cannot tell by sense of touch that a metal object is ~100°C, and you think that a 20 kg metal object heated one day will remain hot three days later, so you have many peculiar and unscientific beliefs. So I do not think the reader should trust your evaluations. Either you believe these peculiar things, or you are trying to convince the readers here they are true. Either way you are not to be trusted.

Quote from JedRothwell

I know what transpired in the first few weeks after the press conference. I know what happened in the first day after the announcement. Influential scientists at MIT and elsewhere not only disparaged the work, but they declared it fraud and they called the arrest and imprisonment of Fleischmann and Pons in the mass media.

Could you provide a citation for the call for the arrest and imprisonment of P&F on March 24, 1989? I don’t believe it happened.

I am aware of the publication in the Boston Herald, in which MIT scientists accuse P&F of fraud because of the changing energy of the neutron peak. That article was published on May 1, 5 weeks after the press conference, and importantly *after* the MIT scientists had a look at P&F paper. There was no mention of arrest or prison in the article.

You still don’t seem to get it.

I have no doubt that some scientists were skeptical from the start, and some may have been vocal, but that’s not point. Storms’ book shows with detailed justification that the dominant narrative immediately after the press conference was one of excitement: “a huge bubble of enthusiasm”. That demonstrates a willingness to give cold fusion a chance, at the very least. The sentiment changed after the evidence became publicly accessible.

In my own limited exposure to a half dozen universities at the time, there was not a physics or chemistry lab that was not in some way kicking the tires of cold fusion. You can dismiss these efforts as meaningless from the point of view of challenging the reality of cold fusion, but I cite them only to show that the overwhelming sentiment ranged from welcoming enthusiasm to giving the benefit of the doubt.

Quote

As Beaudette describes, Fleischmann predicted this would happen,

Beaudette describes how Fleischmann says after the fact that he expected it. I have not seen a prediction from Fleischmann at the time that this would happen. Indeed, in the interviews at the time of the press conference, he was beaming with pride.

Quote from JedRothwell

The effect was replicated at high signal to noise ratios in 180 major laboratories (listed by Storms).

You’re changing the subject. I cited the well-documented reaction of the mainstream in 1989 to show that the possibility of cold fusion was initially welcomed. This statement of yours has no bearing on that, but since you bring it up,

You’re wrong! You’re making things up.

There are only about 180 entries in Storms’ table, and Miles accounts for 9 of them, Zhang and Arata another 9, Eagleton and Bush for 7. There are at least 7 authors (or author groups) with 5 or more entries, and 28 others with 2 to 5. That brings the number of affiliations to about 60 or less, which incidentally, is rather close to your own tally of replications published *later* in 2009, in which you identify 51 affiliations.

Such a cavalier misrepresentation of the contents of your own papers kind of destroys your credibility with respect to the rest of the cold fusion literature.

Quote from JedRothwell

The only opposition is due to academic politics.

And this political influence was absent for the first few weeks during the “huge bubble of enthusiasm”?

And somehow the publication of the claims and the lewan/Koonin presentations coincide with the revival of academic political opposition. Scientists around the world were herded into board rooms, and told, “you can’t be excited about cold fusion anymore. Don’t you know that scientists are supposed to be corrupt, greedy, and short-sighted? We can’t allow this horrible free, clean, and abundant energy to become a reality. What will our children think if we shirk our responsibilities as mean and nasty ogres?”

Yea, that’s what happened. Or how do you explain the sudden onset of academic political opposition?

Anyway, the only political interest in suppressing cold fusion would be the loss of funding for hot fusion scientists. But every other physicist and scientist would benefit enormously from the funds freed up, from the new science to explore, and from the obvious benefits of clean and abundant energy that benefit the entire planet. In fact, it is precisely these interests that account for the “huge bubble of enthusiasm” to begin with. And those interests did not change from the first week to the fifth.

Quote from Louis Reed

Could you provide a citation for the call for the arrest and imprisonment of P&F on March 24, 1989? I don’t believe it happened.

I don't have any published threats, but Pons, Bockris and others told me this. Take it or leave it. There were countless accusations of fraud, such as the one you cite below. What would be the punishment for fraud? If there were Federal funds involved, a conviction might well include time in prison, so the accusation itself implies that is what the opponents were demanding.

The State of Utah spent $10 million on the NCFI. Using this money, Will and others published definitive proof that cold fusion is a nuclear effect. Many people at that time accused them of fraud. I am sure that publishing fake results using $10 million of state money is a crime. I know little about the law, but I think that would be at least a Class B misdemeanor, punishable with 6 months in jail:

https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title76/Chapter6/76-6-P5.html

https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Titl…6-6-S507_1800010118000101

So, the accusation is tantamount to demanding a jail sentence. Whereas if you accused them of making mistakes or being incompetent scientists, you would not be saying they should go to jail.

Quote from Louis Reed

I am aware of the publication in the Boston Herald, in which MIT scientists accuse P&F of fraud because of the changing energy of the neutron peak.

There were many other similar accusations, not just about the neutron peak. For example, Park accused them of fraud in the Washington Post.

Quote from Louis Reed

Beaudette describes how Fleischmann says after the fact that he expected it. I have not seen a prediction from Fleischmann at the time that this would happen.

Chapter 11, quoting Fleischmann:

After the press conference, Dr. Caldwell came up to us and said, “Well, when my grandfather proposed electrolytic disassociation, he was dismissed from the University. At least that won’t happen to you.” I said to her, “But you are entirely mistaken. We shall be dismissed as well.”

He was definitely not beaming at the press conference. He dreaded the outcome, and hated the whole thing. That is what he told me and many others over the years. He wanted many more years to study this effect quietly, without anyone else knowing about it. He tried to arrange that with the DoE, as you see in the Miles correspondence and elsewhere. I told him I was glad he was forced to go public even thought it ended up destroying his career. Of course I have mixed feeling about it!

Quote from JedRothwell

There is not a single credible paper describing technical reasons to doubt any major replication.

Again, this is a different subject, which has no bearing on the reason I cited the enthusiastic if brief welcome that cold fusion received.

In any case, the problem is that there is not a single credible paper describing technical reasons to think LENR is happening. All of the observations are far more plausibly attributable to artifacts, experimental error, chemical effects, and a large dose of confirmation bias, than to unprecedented, unidentified, radiationless, nuclear reactions that have no commensurate reaction products.

As McKubre says in the latest ICCF abstract: "Nearly 30-year old anomalies should have grown to adult maturity and self-sustainability or been buried and forgotten. By various factors we have been heavily constrained from pursuing and accomplishing the one thing that would make anomalies go away: correlation, preferably multi-correlation"

In other words, nothing in cold fusion scales. The heat does not scale with fuel or with reaction products. The claims are not replications at all but erratic claims of a wide variety of effects never quantitatively reproducible, and invariably becoming smaller when the experiment is improved. This is characteristic of pathological science.

Quote

Technically, by late 1989 there was no doubt whatever that cold fusion was real

You can only know your own mind. You may have had no doubt, but then you had no doubt about Rossi either. But you cannot know that others had no doubt in 1989. Certainly, the DOE panel reported having doubts. They concluded “that the present evidence for the discovery of a new nuclear process termed cold fusion is not persuasive.”

Quote from Louis Reed

There are only about 180 entries in Storms’ table, and Miles accounts for 9 of them, Zhang and Arata another 9, Eagleton and Bush for 7.

The two tables in his first book list 180 institutions. I helped write the book and I have the tables in spreadsheet formats that allow me to count the number of items. Fritz Will counted 92 groups in 1990. There were a lot more by the time Storms wrote his book. See:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/WillFGgroupsrepo.pdf

Quote from Louis Reed

You can only know your own mind. You may have had no doubt, but then you had no doubt about Rossi either.

That is incorrect. I expressed many doubts about Rossi. I said, for example, that any businessman would run from the room. I reported again and again that Rossi refused to allow me to visit and measure the temperature and flow rate with my own instruments. That is very suspicious behavior! I reported again and again that he threw out the people from NASA when they showed him the device was not working and it was on the verge of exploding. There is no way I would say I have no doubts about someone who does things like that.

Regarding mainstream results:

1. No one has discovered an error in any major study. If you know of one, tell us what it is. Where was it published?

2. There are hundreds of studies, and thousands of positive experiments, especially if you count all the ones at IMRA. They conducted 16 tests at a time, many times, nearly all positive.

Any widely replicated, high sigma experiment is real, by definition. There is no other definition of being real in experimental science. There are no other criteria. Most opponents claim that cold fusion violate theory, but that is not a valid reason to doubt a replicated experiment. If there is actually a conflict, that can only mean the theory is wrong.

This is not my opinion, or my "mind" as you put it. This is fundamental to the scientific method. If you do not accept that replicated, high sigma results are real, you are not doing science. You have no standards and no way to judge whether any claim is real.