[This is the 4th time I have tried posting this. Let me break it into
two parts.]
Here are some notes about ICCF-15. This is written from memory a few
days after the conference. I did not take notes because I have some
difficulty writing with a pen and paper. So I may have forgotten
important details. Fortunately, a video of the conference was made
and will be distributed to the participants in DVD format. This will
help me prepare more rigorous and comprehensive reports. I do not
know if the video will be made available to the public.
The conference website is here:
http://iccf15.frascati.enea.it/http://iccf15.frascati.enea.it/
The Abstracts are here:
http://iccf15.frascati.enea.it/docs/Abstracts-11-9.pdfhttp://iccf15.frascati.enea.it/docs/Abstracts-11-9.pdf
The ICCF-15 conference was held in Rome, Italy October 5-9, 2009. It
was sponsored by the ENEA (the Italian National Agency for New
Technologies Energy and the Environment), the Italian Physical
Society, the Italian Chemical Society, The National Research Council
(CNR), and Energetics Technologies. The conference opened with brief
lectures by the presidents of the Physical and Chemical societies.
They expressed support and best wishes but they seemed to know little
about the subject. Silvestrini, a high official from the EU who is in
charge of efforts to reduce CO2 and prevent global warming, took part
in a panel discussion. He also expressed support for cold fusion but
again, he seemed to know little about it. I got a sense that he does
not realize that if this research pans out, it will solve the energy
crisis completely. He said he hopes this research will be part of
the solution. In the past, high officials in government and national
societies have ignored or opposed cold fusion, so it was pleasant to
see official support.
Many new and important results were presented. In contrast to recent
conferences, there were no rehash presentations of research done long
ago or results presented at earlier ICCF conferences, although many
described progress or incremental improvements to work presented
earlier. Both the audience and the presenters included many younger
people, especially from the U.S. Navy, the ENEA and Japanese
universities. By younger I mean people in their 30s and 40s, rather
than retired professors in their 70s.
There appears to be lot of new funding for the research, perhaps a
million dollars or more per year. That's a lot by the standards of
cold fusion. There may be more effective funding now than there has
been since 1990. I cannot judge whether the dollar amounts are
greater, but the talent and instruments being brought to the subject
are the best they have ever been, with people from the NRL and two or
three U.S. universities with capabilities that rival long-time
researchers at SRI and the ENEA.
(I have to be circumspect about some aspects of this report, such as
describing which universities are doing what. They have not yet gone
public. They do not want to alert people such as Robert Park who
oppose cold fusion. Park and others like him try to derail funding
and destroy the researchers' reputations by various methods such as
publishing assertions in the mass media that the researchers are
frauds, lunatics and criminals.)
The conference organizers distributed two books, the book of
Abstracts with 117 abstracts, and a book titled Cold Fusion, the
History of Research in Italy (ENEA, 2008), 217 pages, with 27
papers. (See link above)
Notable Presentations
There were a number of excellent presentations and papers, such as
Duncan, Kitamura, Grabowski, Sarto and Mizuno and some poorly
presented work that are important and I hope will be made clearer in
the papers, especially Arata and Czerski Huke. The latter ran
overtime and was cut off before Czerski got to the interesting part,
which is that plasma fusion itself does not obey the so-called laws
of fusion that plasma fusion researchers claim make cold fusion
impossible. Czerski Huke have published previously. I gather they
have made progress but I had difficulty understanding the
presentation and as I said, it was cut off.
I will not try to cover all of the interesting papers since the
reader can read the abstracts. Some of the newsworthy papers that
impressed me are described below.
Grabowski et al. have made heroic efforts for several years to
replicate Iwamura. Unfortunately they have failed. They visited
Mitsubishi and observed the experiments first-hand. They also used
their extraordinarily sensitive equipment to look for praseodymium in
the laboratories at Mitsubishi. They found some on the weight scales
here. Trace amounts, but perhaps enough to explain some of the
Iwamura's results. Iwamura pointed out reasons why this is unlikely,
such as the fact the Pr did not show up in some experiments, and it
appeared to show up gradually during the course of the experiment. Pr
has only one isotope,
