I couldn’t agree with you more. The paper is total garbage (almost like something generated here: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/). I’d like to see an explanation from SPAWAR on why they think that this is worthy of their time and money. Honestly, I think their pursuit of this is waste, fraud, and abuse of government resources. If any government agency should be doing research on this, it would be the Department of Energy. This is beyond SPAWAR’s scope.
Cold fusion/LENR has been around for 25 years and nobody can point me to a single commercial product that uses the technology. That’s proof to me that it’s just more junk science.
It’s obvious that E-Cat just slapped a DTRA logo on their paper, which is not hard to do, in an effort to give it more credibility. They’ve pulled the same stunt with DIA, too. (Can anybody tell me why on God’s green earth the Defense Intelligence Agency would be funding research on LENR? That’s like having the Department of Housing & Urban Development researching blue whale migration.)
As far as the paper being released by DTIC.mil? If it’s not downloadable on their website, it didn’t happen. I don’t want to go into my resume here, but this is something that I actually have experience with.
And here I am, throwing you a weird link. https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen is from MIT’s official website. These MIT students wrote a program that will generate a bogus technical paper, all you have to do is enter your name and/or anybody else’s that will show as the author(s) up top. Bogus technical papers generated by this program were actually submitted for presentation at several technical conferences and accepted! After being accepted, the students came clean and cancelled their presentations.
The whole thing was an exercise to show that it’s not that hard to submit a bogus paper and have it accepted by scientific peers, have it published, have it accepted for presentation at technical conferences, etc. An appalling amount of the time, it appears that the papers are never actually read, reviewers just read the executive summary, peruse the conclusions, give it a quick yea or nea, and it’s off to the next thing in life. I kinda think that’s what going on with LENR (and definitely with global warming; liberals in government and the private sector are shoveling money at anybody who is doing “work” to “prove” that global warming is real and their standards for scientific work are basically non-existent, while any skeptics are trashed and have their professional careers ruined for being “crackpots”).