Very interesting presentation this morning. Ólafsson was both low key and optimistic that Holmlid is onto something important. Alan Goldwater also presented his open source work on the basic glow reactor of Rossi/Parkhomov. At first glance, there would appear to be no connection between the two but read on.
Holmlid is clearly the lead individual on the dense hydrogen phenomenon and Ólafsson is interpreting his work going back to 2008 and before. However, most of the proof is by process of elimination. This will be even more controversial than cold fusion until proven. Again, what was demonstrated is NOT cold fusion and not really hot fusion either. Copious amounts of radiation would expected in such a laser driven reaction when it gets up to the kilowatt level of thermal gain. Now it is subwatt. However, in different circumstances (electrolysis) the same reactant (which is dense deuterium clusters) could explain P&F cold fusion, and explain the lack of radiation in circumstances where a laser does not disintegrate the reactant. IOW, there can be a range of circumstances all involving dense deuterium bound at a few picometers separation - where other outcomes are expected: other than disintegration to mesons -> pions -> muons etc. With the laser as the input power, when a deuteron disintegrates in a laser pulse, over 900 MeV or ~ 40 times MORE energy is released than in fusion ! There were about 35 people in attendance including a few heavy hitters who prefer not to be identified. The venue is a stones throw from Sand Hill Road. A video crew filmed the whole thing. Holmlid apparently wants to call the phenomenon Cold Spallation but I think that is a bad choice, since it does not look like nuclear spallation as we know it. And there is nothing cold about the output. BTW Ólafsson said that calling the Rydberg matter inverted (in the paper with Miley) was not accurate. The only thing needed now is replication. A professor whose name I did not catch (San Jose State ?) has been trying to replicate LH but has not been successful. Holmlid recently told him that the dense hydrogen takes several weeks to accumulate, and has an extended shelf life thereafter. That seems to me to be the main takeaway lesson ** weeks to accumulate **. As I recall, a few years back, there was a message where Rossi mentioned that his supplier in Italy required months to make a batch of active reactant. Could it be that Rossi has been inadvertently getting dense hydrogen all along? The presentation of Alan Goldwater was very impressive. I am confident that if and when Alan announces thermal gain in a Rossi style reactor we can believe it. That has not happened yet but he is very methodical and dedicated. Like many others including myself, he accepts Bob Higgins downgraded assessment of the Lugano report (slight gain perhaps COP~1.2 see Bobs white paper). I encouraged Alan in light of Olafssons presentation - to consider a 2-stage or compound system where he would manufacture the dense deuterium separately from the reactor where it is to be converted to heat. At first he seemed dubious that two steps would be required in order to merge Holmlids results with Rossi. But this strategy would allow a very low powered continuous laser to accumulate the dense material over time. The ideal situation, if one wishes to avoid radiation toxicitym seems to be: do NOT to use a fast pulse intense laser to convert dense deuterium into heat (this assumes there does exist the radiation-free route to convert it to heat). IMO - It will be very difficult to continuously resupply the dense Rydberg matter in situ (in the same reactor it is being burnt in) and not see harmful radiation. It can be done at the subwatt level, but those two processes are fundamentally in conflict especially when you get to high power.
