Okay, I have read this SRI report a few times. I have a good impression. I need to think about it more, but so far, so good.
People at lenr-forum complained there is not much about errors or the margin of error. That's true, but there is some discussion. They say the errors are less than 5%. That sounds likely to me. It sounds conservative. The only concern I have heard here is from Brian Ahern, who worries that they may not be measuring the input power correctly. I don't know about that. I think Brian wants them to measure power going into the power supplies. That sounds like a good idea to me. Probably a lot is lost between the power supply input and the reactor core, but you could still compare a null run to an excess heat run. You could confirm that the apparent excess is not coming through the power supply that produces the fancy waveform. I assume that is what Brian fears. The method of using a flowing water envelope to ensure a stable background is very good. The kind of lab cooler they are using will maintain the water temperature to within a hundredth of a degree. There will be no noise from temperature fluctuations in the room. That and the rest of the isoperibolic calorimetry looks good to me. I also like the blank experiments and calibrations. I like that the results vary from one test to the next under similar conditions. That looks like a real effect, rather than an instrument artifact. As pointed out in the paper, this is probably the first time in history anyone has been able to test a cold fusion device in one lab, get a positive result, disassemble the reactor, move it to another lab, and have people in the other lab observe the same result. That does not sound like much of an accomplishment, but I think it is tremendous. The fact that it is low power and a low COP has no significance. Cold fusion needs control and reproducibility. Once it has those, higher power and a large COP are a sure thing. We know this because high power and an infinitely large COP (with zero input power) have been achieved already, more or less by accident. There is no question they are possible. The method of using a compensation heater and backing off the power as excess heat develops is conventional, conservative, and well established. This is how the SRI flow calorimeters work. The problem with the flow calorimeters was that they held the temperature too low for Pd-D cold fusion, according to Martin Fleischmann. This one holds it at 300 to 600 deg C, which is where it should be. People should read this report carefully several times before jumping to conclusions. - Jed
