'Melvin Miles on the Cold Fusion Now! podcast'.

Good interview. What a contrast when listening to such a true electrochemist as Melvin Miles, as compared to some our more amateur enthusiasts working out of their garages. By that I do not mean Alan, Russ, Magic/MFMP and others...who are very professional, and experienced in their approach, but more the me356, Suhas, and Lion's.

Miles talks mostly about his early (post FPs) paper, which proved "rate of excess heat under typical conditions, fits closely to fusion of D in Pd systems", and his many attempts to get it published. A very frustrating experience for him obviously. From the sound of it though, he is still trying to get it published in Nature, Science and on down the line, so that it can have the proper review it deserves. After ICCF21, he plans to continue that effort, and will keep us informed of every rejection.

So why is he successful where others -even well qualified and equipped labs, fail? He attributes much to his careful attention to detail; keeping things clean, uncontaminated, assuring the electrodes are symmetrical. Also, and maybe of most importance, he limits as much as possible the O2 in the Pd. To accomplish that, he uses Boron. At China Lake in 1997-98, this method resulted in 7 of 8 successful excess heat events. This approach also led to his success in Japan.

According to him, Fleishmann accomplished the same (restrict O2) by having Johnson Matthey prepare that special batch of Pd (Type A): "under a blanket of ammonium". We are well aware how dearly FPs valued their specially prepared Pd. For good reason as it's success rate was much higher than any other prepared Pd. In fact, I think Biberian just analyzed one sample given him by F long ago. All these techniques together, up the chances of "activating the electrodes" he says.

My take: Clearly, this is not a field where a rank amateur...no matter how smart, well intended, or equipped, will have much chance of success.

Looks like Miles will be presenting some new positive results at the ICCF21 next month:

Excess Power Measurements For Palladium

- Boron Cathode

Melvin H. Miles

One of the major goals of the U.S. Navy cold fusion program (1992-1995) was to produce our own palladium cathode materials at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). However, none of these Navy palladium metals and alloys were successful in producing the Fleischmann-Pons (F-P) excess power effect during the first two years. This all changed with the NRL preparation of palladium

-boron (Pd-B) alloy cathodesin 1994. Seven out of eight experiments using these NRL Pd-B cathodes produced significant excess power in calorimetric studies at the Navy laboratory at ChinaLake, California(C/L).

The one failure was related to a folded over metal region which acted as a long crack on the electrode surface. This success with Pd-B alloys made by NRL came too late to prevent the closure of the U.S. Navy cold fusion program in 1995, but these results are documented in a Navy report [1].The author had the opportunity onceagain to work on cold fusion in 1997-1998 at the New Hydrogen Energy laboratory (NHE) in Sapporo, Japan. Three F-P Dewar calorimeters were available for this work, and a new Pd-B cathode from NRL was included in these experiments.Significant excess power for Pd-B was again observed [2]. The computer data from this experiment was also later carefully processed by Martin Fleischmann and publishedin a detailed NRL report [3]. The excess power was verified throughout most of this experiment and increased to nearly 10 watts during the boil-off of the cell contents. A significant new observation for this Pd-B cathode was the very early appearance of the excess power effect within the first two days of this experiment [3].

Last year (2017), this same Pd-B cathode was tested again using a different calorimeter at Ridgecrest, California (R/C). Excess power was observed, although the effect was considerably smaller than found at the NHE laboratory in 1998.Nevertheless, the excess power of 70 mW was clearly above the experimental calorimetric error of ±3 mW.In summary, 9 out of 10 of my experiments using NRL Pd-B cathodes have produced excess power in six different calorimeters. Selected examples are shown in Table 1. The calorimetric results for all ten Pd-B experiments will be present

ed, and possible important properties of these Pd-B materials will be discussed. The effects of boron added to the palladium include a much greater hardness of the metal, a much slower

rate of deuterium escaping from the cathode, the fact that boron acts as an oxygen getter, and that the Pd-Bis a two-

phase material.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

In 1998, 10 watts excess power. In 2018, 79mW. Progress?

We all had more power when we were younger.