Is the Cold Fusion Revolution Here?

There seems to be a lot happening in the world of cold fusion/low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) right now. So we can now rightly say that a cold fusion revolution could be beginning.

Peter Hagelstein and Mitchell Swartz’s 2014 Cold Fusion Independent Activities Period (IAP) Course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in January. Jerry Rys the Alien Scientist blogger attended the course and created a great video about it which does an excellent job of describing cold fusion what cold fusion is and laying out its early history. In particular Rys does a tremendous job of describing the science in such a way that even a history major like me could understand.

He doesn’t seem to be up on recent developments but hopefully that will change. The video is worth watching and showing to cold fusion skeptics. He also makes one important point:

“While critics and skeptics like to call cold fusion pathological science in light of recent events it seems that their denial is pathological,” Rys says of the skeptics. Rys seems to hit the nail on the head here. Rys has posted all of Swartz and Hagelstein’s lectures on his website.

He notes that Swartz started out as a skeptic who was out to debunk LENR. After doing some real research Swartz became a true believer and recently launched NANORTech a company working to commercialize cold fusion. Swartz has essentially been blacklisted by big science they’ll probably forgive him when he makes a billion dollars.

The IAP is really a set of lectures and not a course. There is no credit attached, Hagelstein himself noted that working in LENR can destroy your scientific career in Big Science.

Yet another cold fusion patent has been granted by the US Patent Office to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. USA.

EP 1202290 B1 issued on December 4, 2013, issues a patent for a “Nuclide Transmutation Device and Nuclide Transmutation Method” which would be used as a disposal process for long lived nuclear waste.

The US Patent Office it seems has quietly changed its mind about cold fusion and one of the world’s largest corporations is interested in it. I wonder what the big oil conspiracy theorists will make of this.

NASA is still showing a lot of interest in LENR aircraft. Its Aeronautics Research Institute discussed an LENR aircraft. A slide from the conference shows a giant aircraft called a comfortable global transport with a flight range of 12,500 miles and minimal noise pollution. It also mentions an autonomous package delivery package in other words a drone. That sounds like the US Air Force is interested in LENR.

Over in the United Kingdom Her Majesty’s military like the Pentagon is also interested in LENR. A PDF document put out by the UK’s Ministry of Defense called Global Strategic Trends Out to 2040 actually mentions LENR as something that strategists should worry about. It states:

“For example, the development of commercially available cold fusion reactors could result in the rapid economic marginalization of oil-rich states. This loss of status and income in undiversified economies could lead to state-failure and provide opportunities for extremist groups to rise in influence.”

Basically British generals and admirals think a new energy source is about to appear and that energy source will cause the collapse of states and governments reliant on oil profits such as Venezuela, Nigeria Saudi Arabia and Russia. It names that energy source as cold fusion.

That means the cold fusion revolution will be neither peaceful nor entirely beneficial. It will bankrupt some people and could increase political instability. The military men it seems believe in cold fusion if the so called scientists do not.

Case in point: http://hitchhikersgui.de/Talk:Cold_fusion/Archive_31 However, there is a document which examines publications in the field, put together by Jed Rothwell of lenr-canr.org, it's at http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf. By its nature, the information in this document is verifiable. I'm not proposing the document as a source for our article, but for review by those editors who are willing to take a neutral view of the subject. It shows some reason to suspect the common claim that negative papers outweigh positive ones in this field, and it shows an increase in publication frequency after 2004 or 2005, pretty clearly a nadir. (see p. 4 for the Britz bibliography chart and p. 5 for the lenr-canr.org chart). It should be known that Britz is skeptical about cold fusion, and, of course, Rothwell is quite sure cold fusion is real. I am most interested, for our purposes here, in an examination of the most recent publications in peer-reviewed journals, academic publications, and popular media. The graph on p. 11 shows publication by year of positive and negative results, as classified by Britz. Rothwell, later, challenges some of the interpretations, giving some specifics. In 1989, negative publications outweighed positive, roughly 83:46 (reading off the graph). Remember, by the end of 1989, the physics community was shouting "junk science." For 1990, the figure was about 76:75. And for every year after that, positive papers greatly outnumbered negative, there really are only a handful of negative papers after 1996. After 2005, there appear to be no negative papers. Now, as to recent results, I recommend a review of HE Jing-tang, Nuclear fusion inside condense matters, a review article, from Front. Phys. China (2007) 1: 96―102. The journal and the paper were discussed at some length above, see Talk:Cold_fusion/Archive_24#Holy_Grail_Found.3F_--_2007_Review_article. Regardless of that discussion, this is reliable source, coming from a hot fusion researcher at a major fusion research group in China. In his section on "Reproducibility of cold fusion," he writes that In the process of electrolysis of heavy water using Pd as the cathode and Pt as the anode, if the following two conditions are satisfied spontaneously, excess energy will be produced. And then he gives the conditions: D/Pd ratio larger than 0.88 The current density of the electrolysis is larger than 280 mA/cm2 In his table on p. 98, looking at excess heat, he gives results for groups that have done a total of 14,720 experiments, and he reports results for five years ago of 45% average reproducibility. For the last year before closing his paper, he reports average reproducibility of 83%, and he shows four research groups, in Japan, Romania, the United States, and Russia, as reporting 100% reproducibility. Garwin used to say that when there was 50% reproducibility, he'd be satisfied. He now wants two cups of tea brewed, which, of course, has nothing to do with the science. We don't reject muon-catalyzed fusion because you can't brew tea with it. The lowest reported reproducibility in the previous year was 50%, from an Italian group which we can speculate, from other data provided, has the least experience with cold fusion. While I regret that this paper didn't provide detail on the sources involved, and is ambiguous in certain respects, this is of higher quality than any popular media source, and with media sources, we generally wouldn't have that kind of detail either. I am aware of no recent academic publications which negate the claim of excess heat. If we read the 2004 DoE review, and especially if we read the individual reviewer papers (they are available on both lenr-canr.org and newenergytimes.com), we can see that, then, there was very substantial opinion (fifty-fifty among the reviewers) that evidence for excess heat was "convincing." The other reviewers were less convinced, to be sure, but not entirely negative. What if the DoE panel had been looking at recent results, instead of older ones? In any case, the He Jing-tang paper is a secondary source, published in a peer-reviewed journal, which would support a much stronger statement in the article than anyone has attempted to place in it, to my knowledge. And against this source is what?

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