At 10:13 AM 7/8/2012, Guenter Wildgruber wrote:
To repeat: I think, as a matter of fact, that LENR is real, but not
nearly as far to commercial application as Rossi/DGT claim.
Two entirely separate issues here, though, of course, the second
depends on the first.
LENR is real, there is practically no room for rational doubt about
that, but those who are not familiar with the publication record may,
of course, remain unconvinced or even sure that LENR is unreal. It's
a piece of work to become familiar.
Those who think that a peer-reviewed review in a major journal might
be a clue could read "Status of cold fusion (2010)," by Edmund
Storms, Naturwissenschaften.
To head off some common objections:
1. Ed Storms is a believer. As if someone professionaly competent
would become a world-class expert on a topic, doing real research
with it, while not accepting the reality of the topic. What is
significant about this review is not the author, who already wrote a
monograph on the topic, published by World Scientific in 2007 ("The
Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions"), but the publisher,
Springer-Verlag, which is one of the two largest scientific
publishers in the world.
2. Naturwissenschaften is a life sciences journal. This is based on
two facts: NW is Springer-Verlag's "flagship multidisciplinary
journal" (their description). SV has organized its vast array of
journals into administrative units. It doesn't have a pile of
"multidisciplinary journals," and, perhaps because NW does publish a
lot of articles related to the life sciences (most of them are in
some way), the Life Sciences division makes sense. However, the "life
sciences journal" issue is raised to imply that NW would not have
access to physics-competent peer review. That is completely false.
3. This paper has not been cited in other peer-reviewed papers.
That's true. *It is not controversial,* the conclusions are
well-established, and for many years now, other papers on cold
fusion, some published in peer-reviewed journals, simply assume what
is clearly stated in this review, that the Fleischmann-Pons Heat
Effect is due to some process that fuses deuterium to helium,
mechanism unknown. The paper does not make controversial claims. The
summary in the abstract hasn't seen contradiction in the
peer-reviewed literature for many years.
4. The paper (allegedly) still shows that most experiments to confirm
the FPHE came up empty. Well, no, but there is a chart that can be
interpreted that way. It's also quite possible that the "most
experiments" claim is true, because many negative results have not
been published. However, claiming that this is negative as to the
reality of cold fusion would be like claiming that there are no fish
in a lake, because most fishers who try to catch one fail. The
experimental evidence, from early on, showed clearly that the FPHE
was difficult to reproduce, that it depended on poorly understood
conditions and, while recent research tends to be more reliable, it
is still true that the effect is "unreliable." I.e. that the
conditions are poorly controlled, generally depending on catalyst
nanostructure, and, given that the mechanism is not understood,
still, improving design is hit-or-miss.
(We know, however, that the effect is real because the ash has been
identified (helium) and it has been shown to be highly correlated
with the reported anomalous heat. That would not happen with
non-existent heat, a result of error in calorimetry, nor would it
happen with leaked helium, the usual objections.)
In 1989 and 2004, U.S. Department of Energy panels recommended
further research. Those reviews have often been presented as if they
concluded there was no effect. That's not so. In 1989, it's true, the
large majority of the panel might have been prepapred to make such a
statement, but they did not, due to the influence -- and threat to
resign -- of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was co-chair. In
2004, it's apparent, the recommendation for continued research to
resolve basic questions was a genuine consensus, the summarizing
bureaucrat says it was unanimous. In spite of continued "popular
opinion" among physicists, particularly, that "cold fusion" was
"impossible," evidenced in some of the individual reviewer reports,
the panel was evenly split on the reality of the heat effect, and
one-third considered evidence for the nuclear origin of the heat to
be at least "somewhat convincing."
A careful reading of the DoE review paper, and the review, shows that
some of the panel and the bureaucrat misread the paper and especially
the evidence for helium as the ash (which Storms covers well in his
2010 Review). What is, objectively, very strong evidence for
heat/helium correlation, was misstated by a reviewer and the
bureaucrat as if it were an anti-correlation. Simple error. Made easy
by the speed of the review, there was a one-day meeting, with very
little back-and-forth.
If anyone wants to understand what happened in 1989, there is an
excellent review of what the DoE did in Beaudette, "Excess Heat: Why
Cold Fusion Research Prevailed," 2nd edition, 2002. There is a
foreword to the book by the late Arthur C. Clarke. The book is
available on-line, as well as in print.
From the foreword:
"Perhaps the most disappoining outcome would be if cold fusion turns
out to be merely a laboratory curiosity, of some theoretical
interest, but of no practical importance."
From what I know from reliable sources, information that can be
verified or that enjoys a high level of credence by default, I cannot
say that cold fusion will ever be practical as an energy source.
"Cold fusion" as a name incorporated an assumption, and this was
often then interpreted to mean "d-d fusion," a known reaction. What
Pons and Fleischmann actually claimed, however, was an "unknown
nuclear reaction." Ignoring that claim, many skeptics assumed d-d
fusion and then pointed out how impossible this was. Whether it's
actually impossible or not remains to be shown, but I always point
out that "deuterium fusion" doesn't necessarily mean "d-d fusion." As
another possibility, a hot fusion physicist, Akito Tachakashi, has
calculated that a particular physical arrangement with low relative
momentum of four deuterons, including electrons (i.e., two deuterium
molecules), using quantum field theory, can be predicted to fuse
within a femtosecond, producing a single Be-8 nucleus, which would
decay into two helium nuclei, without any extra radiation. No gamma
rays, no neutrons, etc.
However, as a theory of what is producing the FP Heat Effect, that's
far from complete, nor is any theory complete. While people have
ideas, we do not know what is actually happening.
Reviewing what happened with cold fusion, we can see the drum-beat of
"no explanatory theory," over and over, as if that were some reason
to reject experimental results, results that were ultimately
massively confirmed.
Clarke points out that the cold fusion affair is "almost certainly
the biggest scandal in the history of science." Huizenga, the highly
skeptical co-chair of the 1989 DoE review, titled his book: "Cold
fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century." He didn't know the half of it!
This brings us to the second issue. From what we know about LENR
research, there have long been reports of heat and other possible
nuclear effects from Nickel-Hydrogen experiments. There are
theoretical reasons to think that Ni-H fusion is impossible, but we
already know that impossibility arguments like this are defective.
Ni-H is less likely than D-D in Pd-D experiments, if we think of
simple brute-force-to-overcome-the-Coulomb-barrier. But "unknown
mechanism" covers a universe of possibilities, a universe of which we
know little.
However, the problem with NiH, as with PdD, has been, not reality,
but practicality. PdD results are notoriously unreliable. Using the
Pons and Fleischmann approach, anyway, unreliability is a *confirmed
characteristic* of the reaction. Even with carefully chosen material,
even if most cells show the effect, the quantity of heat still varies
greatly, under what would appear to be identical conditions. They are
not identical conditions, obviously, but the differences are almost
certainly at the nanostructure level, and in electrochemical
experiments, the material itself shifts greatly with time.
It is one thing to get a sample of NiH to show a reaction, some
anomalous heat, but quite another to get it to do this reliably, and
yet another thing to get it to do it in a sustained way. The reaction
apparently tends to alter the material such that the effect fades,
perhaps after a few days.
That Rossi might have found some way to increase the reaction level
-- or he simply scaled up what others have done at lower levels,
trying to avoid unpredictable meltdowns -- a real danger with PdD
experiments -- is believable. What was news was his claim of
reliability and sustainability. And it is this which has not been
confirmed in any way that we can, as the public, verify.
It should be realized that those jockeying for position in this field
have high motive to exaggerate their results. It is for reason like
this that puffery in business is normally legal. It is not fraud, per
se. Rossi may not be doing anything illegal; "fraud" would only arise
under certain specific contractual conditions, and we aren't seeing
the contracts.
In another direction, because of the difficulty of patenting cold
fusion devices (a legacy of the fiasco of 1989), Rossi has a motive
to appear to be a fraud. Basically, he could be running on a balance:
he needs to gain attention, but not to convince possible competitors
to dive in headlong.
What I noticed recently was this: Rossi is claiming to be gearing up
to produce a million devices in short order, implying that all that
is being dealt with are production logistics. If that's true, then he
must have a settled design that is known to work reliably, or else
the production engineering would easily be wasted, a terrible and
possibly fatal business mistake if investment funds are limited. He
must have tested this design thoroughly, already, or else he's
extraordinarily foolish.
He could sell this design, immediately, for investigational use. He'd
have a demonstration device, readily available, and reliable. He
could bet the farm on it, i.e., he could challenge the U.S. Patent
Office rejection of cold fusion patents by supplying a working model.
Thus he could resolve the intellectual property problem, and openly
solicit investment, based on open demonstrations independently verified.
The investigational device would be expensive, compared to later
production units, but not nearly as expensive as what he's claiming
to sell: a megawatt unit. The magawatt unit is apparently built upon
many individual devices. He's selling it that way for what reason?
A possibility is obvious. He wants to limit the sales to very few
potential buyers, and he can then delay and postpone delivery as long
as he likes, and I'm sure that the contract would allow him to do
this. To confront this would take someone willing to risk a lot of
money, for little gain, since, if this is real, it will come on-line
fairly soon at much better pricing.
Meanwhile, I suspect, he keeps trying to get the design right. Given
the situation, it's highly unlikely that he has achieved this.
Guenter, I think you are likely correct.
We can conclude *nothing* from Rossi's claims. I cannot clearly
conclude from my argument here that he is deceptive about his
production plans, merely that this makes sense.
My biggest worry about Rossi is that he fails, for whatever reason,
and it gives everyone working in cold fusion a black eye. It
shouldn't, but people do draw conclusions from what should be irrelevant.
Cold fusion is real. Practical? We don't know.
Rossi is what? We can suspect this and that, but ... I'll speak for
myself. He looks like a con artist, he looks highly deceptive (see
his face when the Levi video catches him at the controls when a
little manipulation of input power could produce a necessary
appearance of "lots-o-steam"), but the reality?
I don't know.
