[Lessismore]

My recollection of the press announcements in March surrounding the Physical Review E publication is that Taleyarkhan and his team were keenly aware of the need to muster the right combination of collaborators in order to gain the most credibility. They had already suffered one round of having their earlier results branded as irreproducible by an Oak Ridge team. The politics of science is as complex as any other kind.

[Waldozer]

It is not a matter of complexity or collaborators. It is a matter of ethics. Just as with patents, a scientific claim without proper attribution of prior art is improper, although not uncommon. That, by itself, in the long run, will undermine Taleyarkhan's reputation.

It may be that Taleyarkhan's work was approved for publication specifically because neutron detection is an art (measuring levels not far from noise levels) and mistakes occur with it, such as the one admitted by Fleischmann and Pons immediately after their March 23, 1989 press conference. A paper like Taleyarkhan's can be useful for muddying the water for some time to come. And ultrasonic cavitation results are not highly reproducible, either. It took a long time for sonoluminescence to win acceptance after the initial claims. In other words, it may have been published in high-profile journals just because it can easily be an object of much contention, unsupported by the hard-core cold fusioneers.

It is ludicrous for the journals to publish this non-replicated evidence of anomalous nuclear reactions when much, much firmer evidence, replicated in quantity, from highly credible persons is ignored. For instance, evidence of tritium or helium from within the cathode is highly anomalous and seen in many cold fusion experiments. Tritium is just not considered a possible contaminant, unless one happens to be close to a fission reactor, but even then, it would have to find its way into the cathode with concentration increasing with depth into the cathode (citing Bockris), and it would be measured in the gas above the electrolyte in high concentration. Forget it.

Finding tritium is de facto evidence for nuclear reactions.