The perpetual “is LENR even real” argument thread.

Quote from THHuxleynew

As a skeptic, all I want is for there to be ONE experiment replicable enough for it to be rolled out and checked by different groups, where the claims for "must be nuclear" results are definite enough for any scientist to agree, where the various assumptions made to get those claims are definite.

Any of these experiments, replicated enough and checked, could provide all that.

Which is why I was so confused about your zeroing in on bulk Pd/D electrolysis. It feels like a dead end.

The elegance of co-deposition is that it seems to solve for both the palladium materials science issues and the requirement to load to a high level. That and it seems to be far more replicable. These alone should stand it in good stead.

Moreover, it purports to offer a whole host of phenomena for study: heat, tritium, neutrons and charged particles, transmutation, x-rays and gamma rays.

The characterisation of what exactly would constitute an ideal reference experiment for LENR is a question that I don't believe I've ever read a satisfactory treatment of. The 'ideal' would solve not only for the challenges of the science, but also the sociology. I.e. it should be relatively straight forward and replicable but also be unambiguous to people like you (I don't mean that in a derisory way).

And it should be able to 'travel'. I.e. it should be elegant and unambiguous enough that a high quality multi laboratory study, published in a reputable journal, could be replicated with relative ease in the reader's own hands. The reader could 'see it for themselves'.

Righes et al. (as presented by Parchi at ICCF24) certainly looks like it's in the wheelhouse of the above, though I note that they still fabricate their cathodes by some as yet undisclosed process.

Righes et al. aside, I think (rightly or wrongly) that co-deposition meets much of my above criterion, and I think it meets the requirements you set out in the above quote, too.

I think it's a real shame that Google never gave it the time of day, as they could have done exactly what you're asking for; which is exactly what I want too.

Quote from THHuxleynew

LENR has the problem that it has only a few people trying to find evidence for (compared to what could be) and no people trying to find evidence against.

Mostly because they don't give it the courtesy of examining the evidence, or even looking at the literature.

Quote from THHuxleynew

It is only a dead end if you feel its rejection early on was justified.

I do not feel that way at all, your reasoning doesn’t make sense to me, and I think this misses my point. Though I might not have been clear, I meant this in the context of my definition of a reference experiment, which includes non scientific factors.

The experiment is extremely difficult, and to many, the calorimetry is terminally ambiguous. For those reasons it’s a non starter as a reference experiment according to my definition.

Quote from THHuxleynew

I am not sure we know it delivers higher loading? It must be difficult to tell when the active layer is thin-film. However I see no reason why there should not be higher loading.

It’s what Mosier-Boss and Forsley consistently say.

Quote from orsova

Reasonable minds can differ, but I'd have thought that something like tritium detected in co-deposition experiments would be far more amenable to replication and unambiguous to a skeptic.

I do not know much about that experiment, but if it is replicable I agree it would be a good one. Tritium has a big advantage over excess heat: it sticks around. You can measure it weeks later, or years later. You can preserve a sample of the original material and show that there is no tritium in it.

Nothing is unambiguous to a so-called "skeptic." The skeptic will find reason to dismiss any results no matter how widely replicated or how high the signal-to-noise ratio is. Such people are not actually skeptics, but that is what they call themselves.

Quote from THHuxleynew

The main thing to watch for is tritium concentration from the background tritium in the electrolyte - unless you get special low tritium electrolyte.

You do not need special low tritium electrolyte. Ordinary electrolyte is fine. You always measure the tritium before the experiment, during it, and after.

Heavy water from Canada has some tritium in it, from the production method. I don't recall why, or how much, but it is not enough to interfere with cold fusion experiments. It does not swamp the measurements. It can be measured and accounted for.

Quote from THHuxleynew

In the link above, the results are not definite unless it can be proven that the "separation factor" (how much the tritium gets concentrated) is as theoretically predicted.

1. Everyone knows that.

2. Everyone always checks for it, and reports the result.

3. Results always exceed the separation factor, often by orders of magnitude.

Once again, you state the obvious, as if no one else thought of it or discussed it. You give the reader the impression that you may have found an undiscovered error, when you are teaching grandma how to suck eggs. It is ridiculous that you think professional electrochemists do not know about the concentration factor, or recombination, or the other effects that you announce you "discovered." Do you not realize that anyone who bothers to read the literature knows everything you proclaim, and much else?

Quote from JedRothwell

Nothing is unambiguous to a so-called "skeptic." The skeptic will find reason to dismiss any results no matter how widely replicated or how high the signal-to-noise ratio is. Such people are not actually skeptics, but that is what they call themselves.

I had not looked at this article on wikipedia for some years and I have to admit it has improved a lot.

Pseudoskepticism - Wikipedia

Quote from JedRothwell

Heavy water from Canada has some tritium in it, from the production method. I don't recall why, or how much, but it is not enough to interfere with cold fusion experiments. It does not swamp the measurements. It can be measured and accounted for.

That is because the deuterium is separated from water by density over hundreds of cycles. Tritium oxide is also heavy, so it gets caught up in the mix. But the amount is negligible, otherwise they would separate it, because it's worth $30k/gram.

https://www.science.org/conten…arted#:~:text=This%20wasn't%20ordinary%20hydrogen,the%20price%20is%20worth%20paying.

JedRothwell , Alan Smith , by what I have read THHuxleynew writing on this subject, his concern is that somehow tritium that is present in the deuterium (but at levels either undetectable or known) gets concentrated several orders of magnitude by the LENR experiments. If I understood correctly, he thinks a possible mechanism is that the electrodes absorb tritium preferentially, accumulate it and later release it by some random reason.

I haven't done the math properly, so I will just offer a hunch of why I think this thinking is flawed: the total initial content of tritium at the maximum level below detection is so small that you would require to process several lakes of heavy water to achieve the concentrations produced by the experiments where tritium was detected.

Quote from Curbina

JedRothwell , Alan Smith , by what I have read THHuxleynew writing on this subject, his concern is that somehow tritium that is present in the deuterium (but at levels either undetectable or known) gets concentrated several orders of magnitude by the LENR experiments.

Well, it cannot get "concentrated" to level higher than the total amount in all of heavy water used in the experiment. Which is what it would have to do.

The total amount used in an open cell experiment is the starting liquid plus the make-up water added every day or two, to replace water lost as D2 and O2 from electrolysis, plus a much smaller amount lost from evaporation. If there is X amount of tritium in all of this water, you cannot get more than X in the final measurement.

They measure a starting sample of heavy water from the bottle to compute how much is in each cubic centimeter. They can do that again after the experiment, because there is usually some left over in the bottle. So you have the starting sample and the final sample. You can send both to a third party to confirm the measurement.

Quote from Curbina

I haven't done the math properly, so I will just offer a hunch of why I think this thinking is flawed: the total initial content of tritium at the maximum level below detection is so small that you would require to process several lakes of heavy water to achieve the concentrations produced by the experiments where tritium was detected.

I haven't done the math either. It is something like that. Not as much as that, I think. For the experiments 10 to 50 times background reported by Will et al., I guess it would be 10 to 50 times more than the tritium in the total volume of heavy water they used. Bockris et al. measured 10,000 times background. See:

Chien, C.C., et al., On an electrode producing massive quantities of tritium and helium. J. Electroanal. Chem., 1992. 338: p. 189.

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

QUOTE:

"More than 40 reports exist from different groups concerning the formation of T above the enrichment.
We have recently observed an electrode that yielded T at ~ 10^4 times above background.
Production of tritium continued for three weeks and was intentionally interrupted. . . ."

(Yet another paper THH has not read, and will not read, but he will keep insisting that no one has thought of enrichment.)

Quote from THHuxleynew

What do you mean "everyone knows that?" Tritium separation as a process depends on multiple variables, and unlike Jed the authors here were careful to qualify results - as they should be.

It makes no difference how many variables there or, or how tritium separates. You do not need to know any of that. All you have to do is measure the tritium in the heavy water before you start.

Quote from THHuxleynew

It does no-one good to claim certainty over things not certain.

It is 100% certain how much there is. They measure it. They do not sit there with a textbook trying to figure out from theory how much there should be!

Quote from THHuxleynew

If Jed's view were commonly held, half the world would be experimenting now with LENR

Correct! If it was commonly known that cold fusion is real, and that it is likely to become a practical source of energy, corporations would be spending $100 million a day on it. They only reason they do not do this is because they are ignorant. They do not know the facts.

What are you suggesting? That I am wrong because other people know nothing about cold fusion? Just about everyone who knows the facts about cold fusion agrees with me. Only a few people such as Huizenga read the literature and disagreed. You disagree, but have not read the literature, so your views don't count. You have no business expressing any opinion. All of your assertions about cold fusion are either wrong, or flat out nonsense -- such as this latest claim above, that we have to figure out how much tritium there is based on theory, rather than just measuring the stuff.

Quote from THHuxleynew

And this is exactly why the way Jed processes results - though psychologically tempting - will never be accepted by mainstream (= real) scientists.

This was one result - an outlier with 1000X higher tritium than typical experiments.

You didn't read the paper, did you? Of course not.

You have no idea what "typical experiments" produce.

Quote from THHuxleynew

I know that every possible thing I can think of will have been considered and correctly rule out by some of the relevant LENR experiments.

But, there are many such issues known. And maybe a systematic issue no-one ha thought of. And a few experiments that are juts based on mistakes.

By that logic no one can be sure of Newton's laws, or the Laws of Thermodynamics. No question can ever be settled. Because a person can always come up more reasons to doubt a claim. Heck, people claim the world is flat. They give reasons, too. The thing is, these "reasons" are preposterous. So are all of your objections to cold fusion, such as "it might be recombination" (even thought that's 40 times too small), or "we can't just measure tritium, we have to explain how it got there." Plus, your doubts do not get a free pass. You have to support them with as much rigor as the cold fusion researchers support their claims. Which you have never done. A negative view does not win by default.

Quote from THHuxleynew

In the absence of a replicable definite experiement you need to take all these results

All of the major experiments in cold fusion are replicable, and all are definite. Heat, helium and tritium have all been replicated hundreds of times, at very high signal to noise ratios. That makes them replicable and definite. Or do you have some other definition of those words? Being repeated hundreds of times does not mean replicable?

You probably mean "easily replicable." You would not apply that standard to any other experiment. You don't go around saying that Tokamaks do not exist because they are hard to make. Or robot explorers on Mars. You invented this one-off standard to give yourself an excuse to dismiss cold fusion.

Another paper from Graham K Hubler, but on what seems to be classic electrolythic LENR, and calorimetry

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364331220_Long_Term_Anomalous_Heat_from_9_nm_Pd_Nanoparticles_in_an_Electrochemical_Cell

reported on e-cat world too

I cannot judge myself.