LENR FAQ (for Newcomers)

Quote from Bruce__H

You are asking whether any here, on this site, is willing to say that a fundamental theory ... is wrong whereas I am asking about whether the community will say it is wrong.

Actually my emphasis is on claims rather than theories. Claims come first, theories follow.

For example, consider the many theories that have been published in order to explain the Rossi's claims.

In one of the many documents aimed at explaining LENR, two authors from University of Budapest wrote (1): "The electron assisted neutron exchange processes in pure Ni, Pd and Li−Ni composite systems (in the Rossi-type E-Cat) are analyzed and it is concluded that the electron assisted neutron exchange reactions in pure Ni and Li − Ni composite systems may be responsible for recent experimental observations." – This specific theory is accompanied by many graphs and 103 formulas. May be all of them are formally correct, but if its purpose is to explain the Rossi's results, this theory is useless, it has nothing to do with reality. Why? Well, because Rossi's claims are wrong, so no theory is required to explain them.

The same holds for the BSM-SG model presented by a member of Canadian university (2), and for many other theories and models aimed to explain the Rossi's claims.

Now, look at this presentation by MIT (3). The first two rows in the table at page 44 report some claims of the major LENR researchers. Rossi and friends are not included, of course. We all know why: their claims about LENR are unreliable. But the list starts with F&P. Problem: are their claims more reliable than Rossi's? The answer can be easily obtained by looking carefully at their own documentation on the "1992 boil-off experiment".

However, and this is the basic question, are anybody here willing to look carefully at this documentation, thus questioning the F&P reliability?

(1) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.01474.pdf

(2) http://gsjournal.net/Science-J…e%20Physics/Download/4805

(3) https://arpa-e.energy.gov/site…orkshop_Metzler_Final.pdf

Quote from Wyttenbach

This only holds for P&F style experiments. What we do costs a few $ to replicate and always works. So things have changed now.

Big claims, no data.

Quote from THHuxleynew

My point was not about proving LENR real (or not).

Good experiments such as McKubre's prove it is real. It is case closed. Bad experiments prove nothing, and should have no effect on anyone's opinions.

You deny this, but you have not found a single error in any of the leading experiments. Not one. Your assertion that the results might not be true has no scientific basis. It resembles the antivaxxer's claims that mRNA vaccines change people's DNA. Anyone with knowledge of science knows that cold fusion is as certain as the laws of thermodynamics, which are the basis of calorimetry, which proves that cold fusion is real.

Quote from THHuxleynew

If LENR is science then it matters which experiments are delivering false positives, because that will push theory in the wrong direction.

That is an entirely different and unrelated issue. It has nothing to do with whether cold fusion is real or not.

I do not recall any false positives offhand. Bad experiments don't work, because the researchers do not follow protocols. At best, bad experiments produce marginal results that I assume are noise, but some people think might be a positive result. I recommend you ignore marginal results when speculating about theory. That solves your problem.

Quote from THHuxleynew

These are clever guys, coming at the field afresh and highly motivated to get results.

It is not clear to me whether they are motivated to get positive results, or negative results. Perhaps they are motivated to get positive results, but anyone can see the editors at Nature want a negative result. Perhaps they are responsible for the low quality and negative attitude of the paper. I wouldn't know.

Quote from THHuxleynew

t would be interesting to know what they meant by that and what was their reason for that belief.

They told me they did not believe Storms. When I asked whether they followed the protocols in the papers by Fleischmann, Cravens and Storms, they said no. It was a brief conversation. That is about all they said.

Let's call these protocols the FCS method (Fleischmann, Cravens, Storms). They involve things like polishing the metal, and loading slowly at first. You can read about them in the reference I posted above.

I have no idea what protocols the Google people followed. All I know from their paper is that they never achieved high loading in the bulk Pd-D experiments, so whatever they did, it didn't work. Some of the Google people know a great deal about electrochemistry, so perhaps their methods might have worked, with a little more luck, or the kinds of materials FCS recommend. Since I do not know what they did, I cannot judge.

Here's the thing though. The electrochemists I know, such as Bockris and Mizuno, used FCS. They did this before they heard from Fleischmann. Because these methods are common knowledge. They are used for similar experiments, such as Mizuno's studies of hydrogen embrittlement that he did before cold fusion. It is possible another set of procedures will also work. They might even work better. But offhand, I doubt that, because there is usually only one way to do something like this correctly. Or a narrow set of similar methods. To make a soufflé that does not collapse, a cook has to do certain things and not others. There is not a wide range of methods. (This is not a trivial example; baking a soufflé is a complicated chemical experiment that takes a lot of skill and knowledge.)

Note that I am only talking about the original bulk Pd-D experiments that require high loading. Based on reports from Takahashi, Storms, Mizuno and others, the FCS methods probably do not apply to more recent experiments. Storms discussed this at length.

Quote from JedRothwell

Good experiments such as McKubre's prove it is real. It is case closed. Bad experiments prove nothing, and should have no effect on anyone's opinions.

You deny this, but you have not found a single error in any of the leading experiments. Not one. Your assertion that the results might not be true has no scientific basis. It resembles the antivaxxer's claims that mRNA vaccines change people's DNA. Anyone with knowledge of science knows that cold fusion is as certain as the laws of thermodynamics, which are the basis of calorimetry, which proves that cold fusion is real.

That is an entirely different and unrelated issue. It has nothing to do with whether cold fusion is real or not.

I do not recall any false positives offhand. Bad experiments don't work, because the researchers do not follow protocols. At best, bad experiments produce marginal results that I assume are noise, but some people think might be a positive result. I recommend you ignore marginal results when speculating about theory. That solves your problem.

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I am more interested in "which bits of CF theory or experimental evidence are more reliable?" than "is CF real?".

Also, on this site, debates over "is CF real" tend to be counterproductive.

Whether, on balance, you tend to think CF is probably real (in your case certainly - but such certainty is not given to us all), or on balance, probably not real, is an integrative judgement based on many bits of disparate information. It is difficult to debate it for that reason.

Which CF experiments are more reliable, and which are less, can be of interest to anyone unless you are 100% believer or 100% skeptic. 100% believer is not an option unless you think Rossi's experiments are reliable, which most do not. 100% skeptic is also not an option because of the interesting electron shielding data - although you might argue that is not CF and therefore some people would be by your definition 100% skeptic.

• I look at this in terms of science versus politics. In politics you have a clear view: and you advocate it, try to convince others, etc.
• In science you have questions, and you try to find new answers to them

The two mindsets are quite different. Although many people - both believers and deniers of CF, are interested in the politics, personally I find this less interesting - I guess every bit of it that I can process I have done (excepting new experiments and theories of course).

Whereas the science - asking questions about the large body of CF-related experiments and theoretical ideas, remains for me interesting, and it is that regardless of my belief (or not) in whether CF is "real".

In fact, even that question, is CF "real" requires a lot of clarification before it can be properly defined. In some versions of the question "are there solid-state low temperature systems in which fusion rates are both measurable and millions of times higher than expected?" it has been proven in a way that everyone would accept.

Jed: you know me quite well on this site and continue, I think, to misunderstand me. I can get political (e.g. over antivaxxers where nearly all that they claim is transparently a falsification and also very harmful). I much prefer not to be political and ask questions: things I do not know interest me more than things I do. Believe it or not, that applies, for me, about CF/LENR.

Best wishes,

THH

Your assertion that the results might not be true has no scientific basis. It resembles the antivaxxer's claims that mRNA vaccines change people's DNA. Anyone with knowledge of science knows that cold fusion is as certain as the laws of thermodynamics, which are the basis of calorimetry, which proves that cold fusion is real.

Lots of people who have knowledge of science would not agree with that.

In any case it is helpful to understand the differences here:

• antivaxxers make false positive claims with certainty (vaccine death rates are high, etc), or claim many people are corrupt.
• I do not make any positive claims with certainty. I also do not claim that many people are corrupt. I do not even think the antivaxxers (a very small minority of scientists who however occupy an enormous slice of internet attention) are corrupt. They are in some cases just wrong - scientists are as capable of being stupid and wrong as others, in other cases not really scientists but people doing political advocacy
  

I have, when looking at specific experiments, made many arguments, some of which have turned out to be just wrong. I have accepted correction, or continued with reasons to assert my argument, when challenged.

The difference between you and me is that when you cannot see an obvious error in an experiment you become very confident that its interpretation is correct. I don't, unless that interpretation makes sense.

I have a higher bar for assorted facts that don'rt make sense than I do for assorted facts that do make sense,

Example. Suppose we did not have law of gravity. One person gives me a set of experimental results which show clearly that acceleration in gravity is nearly constant. Another person shows me a set of results where acceleration is very variable, no clear pattern.

I would accept the coherent results - except for the ones that had non-g acceleration. I would be suspicious of the other ones because I did not understand them. I would be clear that something anomalous was happening but I would not accept any non-quantitative explanation such as "God likes those objects and so is pulling them up to heaven by an amount that depends on exactly how they have been prepared".

BTW - both sets of results (the simple constant g ones, and the all-over-the-place ones), are experimentally possible. It depends how you do the experiment what you get. And, with better understanding of air resistance, electrostatic charge, maybe a few other things I would be able to understand all those variable results as well as the simple ones. Maybe also, there would be some results, and some whole experiments, which were just wrong telling me nothing meaningful about the acceleration of objects subject to gravity. I might expect that, when these were outliers not fitting the other coherent results, but I would never be sure of it. And in this example it would not generally be true: feathers in air would be non-understandable but also indeed true results.

In CF, pretty well every result is an outlier in that sense. (The electron shielding ones, which I sort of believe becasue they have coherent theory validated in other ways, are also outliers because exact values are still pretty variable and not easily determined by the theory).

THH

Quote from THHuxleynew

Whether, on balance, you tend to think CF is probably real (in your case certainly - but such certainty is not given to us all), or on balance, probably not real, is an integrative judgement based on many bits of disparate information.

Nope. There is no "information" supporting the claim that cold fusion does not exist. Any such information would also prove that the laws of thermodynamics are wrong, and that Lavoisier and Curie were wrong. It would prove that calorimetry does not work.

Your claim that there is doubt has no supporting information, and no scientific basis, any more than flat-earth claims do, or the claim that mRNA vaccines change DNA.

This has nothing to do with an integrative judgment because you have judged nothing. You have looked at nothing. You refuse to look! You have not given a single reason to doubt McKubre, Storms, Miles or Fleischmann. You have not done this because it is not possible -- there are no valid reasons to doubt them. You pretend there are such reasons, and you evade all actual scientific debate and all established facts and laws of nature. It is all handwaving.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Jed: you know me quite well on this site and continue, I think, to misunderstand me.

Perhaps I understand you better than you understand yourself. You are posturing. You are pretending. If not, tell us why you have never even tried to find an error in any major paper. Tell us what could be wrong in the calorimetry described by McKubre, for example. Here:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHisothermala.pdf

There is no doubt you are capable of honest, rational rational scientific analysis, but when it comes to cold fusion, you don't even try. You give fatuous reasons to doubt it, and you refuse to discuss any technical detail from any experiment, or give a single valid reason for your so-called doubts.

What you apparently believe is that all of the researchers made mistakes. Thousands of positive results have been observed, but every single one of them was wrong. Because if even one of them was right, that means cold fusion exists. You have never cited any actual mistake, and I am sure you don't know of any, but I gather you are convinced these invisible mistakes explain away all results. That scenario is not possible. Hundreds of experienced researchers and experts in calorimetry have reported results, often at very high signal to noise ratios. Some of these people were world-class experts in calorimetry brought in by Bockris and others to confirm the results. If they could all be wrong, the experimental scientific method itself would not work, and we would still be living in caves.

A person can be rational about one subject, and irrational about another. Fair about one thing, and hopelessly biased about another. A person can be blind to such faults, as you are.

Quote from THHuxleynew

In fact, even that question, is CF "real" requires a lot of clarification before it can be properly defined. In some versions of the question "are there solid-state low temperature systems in which fusion rates are both measurable and millions of times higher than expected?" it has been proven in a way that everyone would accept.

That is a grotesque violation of the scientific method. "A way the everyone would accept"? Really? Everyone? That's your standard?!? Do you seriously think science is a popularity contest? You think the opinions of ignorant fools make a difference? No skeptic has ever published a valid reason to doubt any major cold fusion experiment. Not one! You are saying that such people must come to accept results they refuse to look at before the question is settled. People like Morrison have to "understand" and "accept" things when they don't even know the difference between power and energy, or temperature and heat. Look at the reasons given by the 2004 reviewers to reject cold fusion. They are all violations of common sense and the scientific method:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJresponsest.pdf

Apparently you take this kind of idiotic slop as a counter-balance to science published by people like McKubre. The 2004 reviewers spouted nonsense and rejected the laws of thermodynamics because they were determined to reject cold fusion. They would never "accept" anything.

Apparently you know nothing about the history of science. Countless facts and laws of nature have been discovered which no one believed at first. Such as the periodic table. Townes described opposition to the maser:

One day after we had been at it for about two years, Rabi and Kusch, the former and current chairmen of the department—both of them Nobel laureates for work with atomic and molecular beams, and both with a lot of weight behind their opinions—came into my office and sat down. They were worried. Their research depended on support from the same source as did mine. "Look," they said, "you should stop the work you are doing. It isn't going to work. You know it's not going to work. We know it's not going to work. You're wasting money. Just stop!"

The problem was that I was still an outsider to the field of molecular beams, as they saw it. . . . I simply told them that I thought it had a reasonable chance and that I would continue. I was then indeed thankful that I had come to Columbia with tenure. (autobiography, p. 65)

This went on long after he proved that masers exist.

Sometimes doubts continued for decades, or even centuries. In the U.S., most of diary industry in New York refused to believe Pasteur, and it refused to pasteurize milk from the 1860s to 1917, when Uncle Sam finally passed a law mandating pasteurization. During those 50 years, contaminated milk killed hundreds of thousands of infants and small children, including one of my great-grandmother's babies. But pasteurization was not proven in a way that everyone would accept, so I guess it didn't work. Right? COVID vaccines have not been proven to work in a way that everyone accepts either, so I guess they don't work.

Quote from JedRothwell

Perhaps I understand you better than you understand yourself. You are posturing. You are pretending. If not, tell us why you have never even tried to find an error in any major paper. Tell us what could be wrong in the calorimetry described by McKubre, for example. Here:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHisothermala.pdf

There is no doubt you are capable of honest, rational rational scientific analysis, but when it comes to cold fusion, you don't even try. You give fatuous reasons to doubt it, and you refuse to discuss any technical detail from any experiment, or give a single valid reason for your so-called doubts.

If by "major paper" you include the one you first showed me - the F&P from simplcity to complexity back to simplicity paper, then I have tried (and succeeded) in finding many potential issues in their analysis. Basically, things where their assumptions can be questioned, and also things where their write-up can be questioned (too much not precisely stated).

For McKubre you are right, I have not found any errors. But this was a long sequence of experiments with variable results. The analysis is complex and except in one or two cases (that could be something gone wrong) the excess heat is small. Just because I cannot see an error in the setup - and I do not for one moment consider any intentional falsification from McKubre a possibility - that does not mean there is no such error. Estimating calorimetry errors in setups like that one is difficult. Am I sure McKubre's estimate are correct? No. Do I suspect those results are real? With a few exceptions - yes. But (I vaguely remember this, and maybe would need to go back and check) with a few exceptions the results do not show nuclear level effects. There are other possible (interesting, but not so useful in engineering terms) effects.

McKubre's experiments are from my POV about as good as it gets (other than electron shielding stuff which is arguably not CF).

They are for me not enough to say there are nuclear reactions.

For you, these are fatuous reasons. For me, they are sane understanding that everyone makes mistakes, experiments are difficult, systematic mistakes possible, and if McK's results were nuclear activity it is v disappointing we do not by now have anything better.

Best wishes, THH

Quote from JedRothwell

Hundreds of experienced researchers and experts in calorimetry have reported results, often at very high signal to noise ratios.

I jotted down some comments from the USNavy HIVER PM Oliver at the ICCF. He said DARPA (who funded the project), set the threshold for success as 5 reproductions, at Sigma6 for XH, and Oliver said: "we did it".

Looking forward to those videos coming out.

Quote from THHuxleynew

If by "major paper" you include the one you first showed me - the F&P from simplcity to complexity back to simplicity paper, then I have tried (and succeeded) in finding many potential issues in their analysis.

No, you have not found any errors, potential, actual or imaginary. Don't kid yourself. If you think you have found any, list the most significant ones.

No one else has published a paper finding any errors in it either, even though Morrison, Lewis, Huizenga and others dearly wanted to find a problem. In some cases they thought they found a problem. Here is a look at what they claimed, starting on p. 23:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJreviewofth.pdf

Quote from THHuxleynew

Basically, things where their assumptions can be questioned, and also things where their write-up can be questioned (too much not precisely stated).

Basically you are saying calorimetry doesn't work and the laws of thermodynamics are questionable. Basically. With no specifics, of course.

Anything can be questioned. People question whether COVID vaccines work. They question whether the world is round or flat. The questions raised about F&P are as plausible as flat earth theory.

Quote from THHuxleynew

For McKubre you are right, I have not found any errors. But this was a long sequence of experiments with variable results. The analysis is complex and except in one or two cases (that could be something gone wrong) the excess heat is small.

Incorrect.

1. The excess heat was large in many instances, not one or two. Even the smaller ones had large signal to noise ratios, which is the only metric that counts. The smaller heat does not magically cancel that larger heat. You cannot look at the small results and ignore the large ones. This is like looking at the many failed rockets in the late 1950s such as the Vanguard rockets, and declaring that Sputnik and the U.S. Explorer 1 satellites were never launched. Or looking at the first 1000 failed attempts to clone a sheep and concluding that Dolly never existed.

2. Yes, of course the results varied. Anyone can see that. That is what you expect from a poorly controlled physical effect. That fact has no significance. It has NEVER been a principle of science that negative results, or the difficulty of replication, or variable results prove an effect does not exist. Or cast doubt on its existence. Many experiments were extraordinarily difficult and variable at first. Early transistor commercial production was so variable, entire batches of devices would fail for reasons no one understood. It took rocket scientists years to keep rockets from exploding the way Vanguard did, and rockets are still unpredictable, despite billions of dollars in R&D. (The most recent explosion was the SpaceX rocket in July 2022.) No one claims that plasma fusion does not exist because they are having such trouble making ITER, and it is so complicated and expensive. You have made up an arbitrary standard: that something must be controllable and consistent or it may not exist. You apply this standard to cold fusion, and cold fusion alone. You would never apply it to any other scientific claim.

3. Results may have varied, but it was the same instrument the whole time. If there was a problem with it, it was the same problem the whole time. So what is the problem? Why didn't it show up in the calibration? Why have you never told us about any problem? Why has no skeptic ever published a problem with this instrument? Tens of thousands of similar flow calorimeters have been used. Why doesn't the problem show up in them? For that matter, all boilers and all air heating and cooling systems are tested with the same flow calorimetry methods, so show us why they don't work.

Quote from THHuxleynew

They are for me not enough to say there are nuclear reactions.

So you think that a chemical reaction can produce thousands of times more energy than any known chemical reaction, with no chemical fuel and no chemical changes. Got it. What else do you believe? Astrology? Do you have any rational basis for such an extraordinary claim? No, of course you don't. You would have told us years ago if you did!

Oh, and you don't think that tritium, or helium in the same ratio to the heat as D-D plasma fusion, are proof of a nuclear reaction. Got it again. You don't believe anything, no matter how convincing, no matter how many times it is confirmed, no matter how many researchers confirm it. This is the Groucho Marx school of science.

I don't know what they have to say
It makes no difference anyway
Whatever it is, I'm against it
No matter what it is or who commenced it
I'm against it

Your proposition may be good
But let's have one thing understood:
Whatever it is, I'm against it
And even when you've changed it or condensed it
I'm against it

Quote from JedRothwell

So you think that a chemical reaction can produce thousands of times more energy than any known chemical reaction, with no chemical fuel and no chemical changes. Got it. What else do you believe? Astrology? Do you have any rational basis for such an extraordinary claim? No, of course you don't. You would have told us years ago if you did!

Oh, and you don't think that tritium, or helium in the same ratio to the heat as D-D plasma fusion, are proof of a nuclear reaction. Got it again. You don't believe anything, no matter how convincing, no matter how many times it is confirmed, no matter how many researchers confirm it. This is the Groucho Marx school of science.

I don't know what they have to say
It makes no difference anyway
Whatever it is, I'm against it
No matter what it is or who commenced it
I'm against it

Your proposition may be good
But let's have one thing understood:
Whatever it is, I'm against it
And even when you've changed it or condensed it
I'm against it

Display More

Your comments here are requiring me to be political. I'm not. And I am not going to be.

Why does "not enough for me to say there are nuclear reactions " turn into "against nuclear reactions".

My statements is one of uncertainty, because I do not understand that cohort of results. Nuclear reactions (of a very surprising kind, because of the absence of high energy reaction products) are one possibility.

Since then the lack of corroborative evidence is as I have said disappointing. You require certainty, and I do not. That is also the case over vaccines, where while we are in agreement about the poisonous lies of the antivaxxers, I am a good deal less certain about what is known than you are.

Now: over CF/LENR. Either there are nuclear reactions (enough to generate that excess heat) or not. It is a binary answer. But I see no merit in assuming the answer is yes because the LENR community has been doing that for a long time and has not explained those reactions.

It is unfortunate that the non-LENR community is just not interested enough in those reactions to put enormous effort into replicating and understanding them: that would either surprise them (evidence emerged in line with the initial CF assumptions - nuclear activity confirmed) or they would find some reasons for those experiments to give unusual results - various have been proposed as you know.

Revisiting old debates...

Thread

[SPLIT]Older LENR Experiments were bad, good... in general

[…]


The problem is that no LENR researcher wants to sit down repeating an experiment and getting rid of all the artifacts. That is exactly what MFMP did initially. I notice now that although they do repeat experiments they do not summarise the results - positive and negative, comparing with original. Instead, they highlight any anomaly (e.g. the Signal) and remain quiet about its lack of reproduction. I'd like a balanced summary say every 6 months of what they have discovered for a given setup.…

THHuxley

Aug 14th 2016

(Jed R)

This is projection on your part. I am not outraged at all. A little annoyed, but not outraged. I am similar to a third grade teacher with 30 years of experience who has seen the same stupid mistakes made by 30 groups of kids. I am resigned to people making stupid mistakes about recombination. I know that however many times I say, "recombination is easy to detect and prevent" Mr. Huxley will insist that I did not say that at all, but I said "recombination is impossible." Once people get that sort of idée fixe, you can never persuade them they made a mistake.

I could say in hundred different ways, a hundred times: "recombination is perfectly possible; in fact it is easy to trigger, but an electrochemist always knows it has happened, so it never causes false excess heat." I guarantee that Mr. H. will then come back and say, "Ha! You said it is impossible!"

For example, here, guarantees are small. The differences between one interpretation and another are subtle. Here Jed concludes that ATER could not occur in those experiments because it was at the time a known problem which electrochemists would not miss.

That is true, and false. Shanahan (and I) can imagine specific characteristics of these very unusual experiments that would make ATER a problem there in ways unexpected by electrochemists. In fact, an experienced electrochemist, exactly because recombination is a known problem, might easily assume these cells behaved like all the other known experiments and therefore make incorrect assumptions relating to it.

My view from that thread is that ATER was one possible explanation for those anomalous results. While it did not seem likely for all of them, because it could generate unexpected temperature distribution inside the cell (and would do that differentially between D and H) it could change calibration. Another possible explanation for (some of) those results is simply getting the errors wrong: which undoubtedly some people did. The "calibration constant shift" effect in these cells is real and again it just is not expected in electrochemistry where you do not normally have power in >> signal out, so even though it is "obvious" it is also easy for experienced electrochemists not to consider it when calculating error bounds. Experience is a benefit - but also a curse, when something is unusual.

Re-read the whole thread

THH

Quote from JedRothwell

Oh, and you don't think that tritium, or helium in the same ratio to the heat as D-D plasma fusion, are proof of a nuclear reaction. Got it again. You don't believe anything, no matter how convincing, no matter how many times it is confirmed, no matter how many researchers confirm it. This is the Groucho Marx school of science.

I remember that there was real money going into a more careful set of experiments establishing whether those same ratio results could be replicated. There were some questions about them, and they were difficult experiments due to lab air leakage.

Does anyone know what the replications found?

The LENR charlatans have poisoned the well of actual science, and because of the willingness to receive “any” LENR theorists into the fold, the poisons in the well shall remain for lifetimes; the false facts have long lives.

Нужен другой lenr

Quote from THHuxleynew

Why does "not enough for me to say there are nuclear reactions " turn into "against nuclear reactions".

The evidence for nuclear reactions is overwhelming. When similar evidence was presented by Curie for radium nuclear reactions, no one questioned it. Your claim there is "not enough" is irrational. The evidence includes:

Heat thousands of times beyond the limits of chemistry, with no chemical changes. This in itself is irrefutable. It was enough to convince everyone that Curie was right.

Tritium production at levels tens to thousands of times above background.

Helium production at 24 MeV per atom, confirmed by many laboratories.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Since then the lack of corroborative evidence is as I have said disappointing

The corroborative evidence is irrefutable. You have not refuted it. You didn't even try to refute it. You declare it does not exist.

Quote from THHuxleynew

remember that there was real money going into a more careful set of experiments establishing whether those same ratio results could be replicated.

That never happened. You are describing an imaginary event.

Let us summarize the reasons you reject cold fusion:

1. You declare that most results are at low levels. That is not true. It is not even false; "low" is not a meaningful metric. You are ignoring the signal to noise ratio, which is the only applicable metric. J. P. Joule could have measured most cold fusion reactions in 1841 with high confidence. In what sense are these reactions "low" or questionable given that any competent scientist in the last 181 years could have measured them with a high signal to noise ratio?

2. You apply imaginary low levels and declare that most results are negative. Therefore cold fusion does not exist, or it is questionable. No one in history has ever said this about any other scientific discovery. No one claims that the prevalence of failed rockets mean that satellites were never launched, or failed efforts to clone means animals have never been cloned. Your claim makes no logical or scientific sense. You would never apply this standard to any other discovery.

3. You make up another imaginary and unprecedented standard: that many people must understand cold fusion and agree it is real. Again, you would not apply this to anything but cold fusion. If someone said, "if we do not all agree that vaccines work, that is proof the COVID vaccines do not work" you would come down on them like a ton of bricks.

It can be seen that with regard to cold fusion you are as irrational as any antivaxxer. You may be scientific about other subjects, but not this one. You do not have a single valid logical, scientific, or technical reason to doubt that cold fusion is a real nuclear effect. You will not look at the calorimetry of McKubre, Miles or anyone else. You have no scientific reason to reject cold fusion, but only emotional or political reasons.

Quote from Paradigmnoia

The LENR charlatans have poisoned the well of actual science, and because of the willingness to receive “any” LENR theorists into the fold,

There is no fold. There are no gatekeepers. No one letting theorists in or keeping them out. There is no agreement among theorists themselves. I have the impression that most experimentalists ignore theory. Cold fusion theory is not just unsettled. It is chaotic. I suppose most of it is "baloney," which is how Watson described biology theory before the discovery of DNA. That is how nascent science is. It is an unavoidable step in the development of science. See pages 12 and 13:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJlessonsfro.pdf

I suppose there is a "fold" in the sense that ICCF conferences allow just anyone to present a poster. The APS allows absolutely anyone to present a paper or talk. (I guess that would be anyone with a PhD -- not sure.) They made this rule decades ago after a scientist who was rejected went berserk or hurt people, or killed someone. I don't recall the details. Anyway, they decided that physics conferences should not have gatekeepers.

I myself cannot judge whether theories are reasonable or the product of crazy people or charlatans. Fortunately for me, that's not my job. Jean-Paul and the conference organizers do that. Whatever they allow into the Proceedings or JCMNS I upload to LENR-CANR.org. If individual researchers ask me to upload papers, I will usually do it, unless the papers seem to have no connection to cold fusion. I think I rejected two or three for that reason. They were not even in a far-out branch of the field such as biological transmutations.

If I could tell who is a charlatan I guess I would agree they should not be allowed into ICCF conferences. The whacko people seem harmless. You can never tell whether someone is crazy or highly original and right. I can't tell, anyway.