Regarding Abd's comment that Hoffman ". . . made some mistakes, no question about that, but there is nobody on the planet who has not done that."
There are forgivable mistakes, and there are huge mistakes that no one should make. Suppose Hoffman had written a throwaway sentence or footnote in his book: "I wonder if some used moderator water has gotten into the stock of laboratory grade heavy water sold by Ontario Hydro. That would explain the tritium." That would be a stupid mistake. It would be the kind of mistake we all make from time to time. That's not what happened. He devoted a couple of years to this book, and a grant of ~$120,000 as I recall. It is a short book; 220 pages including indexes. Chapter 3, 11 pages long, is devote to the hypothesis that the water came from CANDU reactors. It includes a table of data of uranium decay isotopes and a lot of detailed technical discussion. He must have spent days or weeks writing these pages. This is not a spur-of-the-moment guess, or a weak moment. He worked hard on it. Yet neither he nor his editors did any elementary fact checking, by calling Ontario Hydro and ask them if it could be true. Furthermore, every expert in nuclear reactors I have asked has said this is outrageous nonsense. It is unthinkable. The people at Ontario Hydro were beside themselves. I am no expert, but the moment I read it I thought it I thought it was crazy. I was stunned that anyone would say this. I still am! This is an appalling error. I have never seen a worse technical error in a professionally published document from a place like ANS. The book is chock full of other idiotic mistakes, all readily apparent to me, and I am no expert. I listed several in my review. As bad as it is, this book does not hold a candle to Taubes. Taubes is reportedly an engineer, but he does not have a middle-school grasp of elementary electricity or everyday physics. The fact that several Nobel laureates praised his book in the blurbs is telling. They could not have read it carefully. Perhaps they did not read it at all. Their praise proves they are so biased by emotional opposition to cold fusion they will endorse any damn nonsense, without thinking. - Jed
