For neutral skepticism, I recommend A Dialogue on Chemically Induced Nuclear Effects, by Nate Hoffman.
You recommend this, whereas I regarded it as the third largest collection of horseshit ever published about cold fusion, after Taubes and Huizenga. It is remarkable how different our opinions are. The people at SRI agree with me. They threatened to file suit against the ANS unless it corrected some of the character assassination. That is why the ANS inserted a small piece of paper into the book with one major correction. The ANS should have replaced 90% of the book, it is so distorted.
My review of the book begins:
QuoteThis is a strange little book. It is well written in some parts, with knowledgeable, in-depth, analysis. Yet elsewhere the author makes factual errors that might easily have been avoided. Some of his mistakes are mind-boggling, like his suggestions that chemical supply companies sell used moderator heavy water from CANDU fission reactors, or that no researcher in any cold experiment has ever measured true rms power. The focus of the book is wrong. It covers a few backwater aspects of cold fusion. It describes a handful of unimportant, botched experiments while it ignores the real work. The most important fact about cold fusion is that it produces excess heat beyond the limits of chemistry. As Fleischmann says, “heat is the principal signature of the reaction.” In most experiments, heat is the easiest parameter to measure, giving the highest signal to noise ratio. Yet Hoffman does not discuss any experiments in which excess heat was observed. He censors them out, he pretends they do not exist. This eliminates most of the literature. In the second paragraph of the book, Hoffman says that Pons and Fleischmann claimed excess heat, but that is the last we hear about the subject until the closing remarks. He never says that hundreds of other scientists replicated their findings. He never mentions any particulars about heat. There is no discussion of power; net energy; energy versus mass (megajoules per mole of cathode material); power density; temperature; current density and other triggering mechanisms; or metallurgical conditions and surface treatments required to generate excess heat.
This censorship of anything relating to heat is carried to absurd extremes. A short chapter on calorimetry, titled “Possible Artifacts Associated with Heat Measurements in Palladium / Deuterium Systems” contains only speculation about hypothetical errors, and no actual calorimetric data from any experiment. Chapters that deal with things like neutrons, charged particles and helium contain references to the literature, samples of data from published experiments, and comments from researchers. But the chapter on calorimetry has no data from any cold fusion paper, even though the majority of papers deal with this subject. . . .
The book is a ham-handed attempt to make cold fusion look like failed science. It was ham-handed because Hoffman was stupid. Very stupid. In person he was the most stupid professional scientist I have ever encountered, and I have encountered many stupid people.
Morrison was pretty stupid too, as you see in this document:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf
Taubes knows nothing about any technical subject. He understands nothing about biology or, as it turns out, Japanese society. He supposedly has an engineering background but he does not know anything about electricity, temperatures or thermometers. He thinks you can stir up a cup of coffee and have one side of the cup at 20°C while the other is at 70°C. (Abd will probably say I made that up, but I quoted him saying that in my paper on the Titanic.) Despite his profound ignorance of everyday science, and his utter lack of common sense, he has a sort of native intelligence when it comes to making money by destroying people's reputations, careers and lives. He is good at that. He is a psychopath, as I said. That is, someone who exhibits "persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, egotistical traits." Unfortunately, cold fusion attracts psychopaths, notably Andrea Rossi.