Tadahiko Mizuno is officially retired from Hokkaido U., but he is hanging around the campus doing research, mainly on cold fusion. He hopes to publish some papers soon. Ten years ago retired profs were not allowed to hang around because they exercised too much influence, I think, but that rule has been bent for Mizuno, who had no influence anyway.
He was originally in the fission reactor business, specializing in hydrogen, hydrogen embrittlement, and electrochemical effects, since he studied with Bockris. He used electrochemistry to rapidly embrittle and age samples of reactor steel. He says the industry excommunicated him when he started on cold fusion. But a dozen of his former grad students are now high level engineers in TEPCO. TEPCO and the Japanese government have been frantically rounding up every scientist who knows anything about fission reactors. They more or less drafted him and put him back to work. They have been sending him samples of of soil taken at various distances from the reactor, 1 km, 2 km and so on. He says they are heavily contaminated with long-lived isotopes and he does not think anyone will be able to live within 10 km of the reactor for decades. They are hundreds of times background, causing the Geiger counter to buzz. He is afraid of them! God only knows what they will do with all that soil. He emphasizes that the contamination from the accident does not follow a perfect circle. Depending on wind conditions and the shape of the ground, some areas closer to the reactor are safe, and some farther away are not safe. You cannot just draw an arbitrary 10 km circle. Local radioactivity in Sapporo has risen significantly above normal background, sometimes an order of magnitude. Not enough to be dangerous but enough to measure easily. He was surprised by the accident, as was I. We both thought that after TMI, they tightened up the safety standards, and something like this would never happen to a U.S. or Japanese reactor again. He's an expert, so I feel a little better that I was lulled into thinking this stuff is foolproof. He says he thinks nuclear power in Japan is dead. They will build no more reactors. They just shut down a working one for three years while they build a new taller breakwater. I don't understand why it takes three year to do that. While Mizuno and I were on the phone having this conversation, P.M. Kan was on television saying that Japanese energy policies are hereby scrapped, and we are starting over from scratch. The plan to expand nuclear power to 50% is "on hold." Alternatives will be considered. In cold fusion, he is working on -- surprise, surprise -- Ni nanoparticles. Who isn't? He says there is no doubt in his mind that Rossi's claims are right, and the calorimetry good enough. Mizuno's own calorimetry was never as highly precise or complicated as, for example, Storms' but I think it was always good enough. Actually, it resembled Bockris, not coincidentally. I directed him to the Rossi Hints file and suggested he try to figure out what the two magic elements are. Mizuno has a much deeper academic background, and he survived graduate studies with Bockris, who was one of the toughest taskmasters in electrochemistry. Everyone who worked with him tells me it was like the academic equivalent of being in the Marines. Rossi and Mizuno share some personality characteristics and dogged determination. If anyone can replicate Rossi by ESP, Mizuno can. He and I agreed that if Rossi is funded at a huge level, everyone else in this field will soon be awash in cash. He says if the Japanese government finds out about Rossi, and they come to believe the effect is real (for example, after the reactors go on sale and one of them shows up in the Ministry of Education), they will go hog wild and start pumping billions of dollars into Ni-H cold fusion. At the moment I doubt anyone in any ministry in Japan knows much about Rossi, or believes the claims. - Jed
