Well, Mr. Gibbs, while I appreciate your
reporting on Defkalion, you continue to confuse
and conflate two separate issues.
1. The reality of cold fusion as a physical phenomenon.
2. The existence of practical applications.
The kind of information you request below is
entirely focused, in terms of what you want, on
validated practical applications. At this point,
those don't really exist, and it's a matter of
speculation and whom to trust as to whether anything is coming soon.
But the reality of cold fusion is not in question
any more, not in the scientific journals, at
least. There is still a lot of held opinion out
there, but it hasn't been seen in the journals
for almost a decade. The actual evidence that
this was real was available with the publication
of Miles' helium measurements by 1993, and with
the confirmation of Miles' measurements after that.
You wrote, in your article:
Unfortunately it turned out that the Fleischmann
and Pons experiment was not reliably
reproducible. In the academic fracas that
followed, both mens reputations were ruined and
the field was quickly relegated to the domain of
fringe science along with perpetual motion, telekinesis, and anti-gravity.
"Reliably reproducible" is not a requirement for
scientific validation of a phenomenon. Some
phenomena are difficult to reproduce, generally
because there are unknown or difficult-to-control
conditions. However, what Miles found and
reported in 1993 was that, while the amount of
heat produced in a series of cold fusion cells
was not easily predicted, the cells produced
helium proportionally to the heat measured.
That was an astonishing result at the time,
because helium was not expected to be the main
product, and far more helium was being produced
than would be expected from the expected ordinary
deuterium fusion reaction (which only produces
helium in a tiny fraction of the involved
fusions). Indeed, as it turned out, the energy
produced is quite close to the expectation if
deuterium is somehow fused to helium with there
being no other products, no gamma rays, no
neutrons, no tritium. Basically, no radiation.
This work has been amply confirmed, being done
with increased accuracy. There is still a lot of
work to do, but the science is now clear, that a
nuclear reaction is responsible for the
Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect. That is no longer
being actively contested by anyone who knows the
literature; what we have seen in recent years has
only been the internet activity of a few
pseudoskeptical cranks, raising preposterous
arguments that ignore the basic evidence.
Storms' paper, "Status of cold fusion (2010)" is
the basic review recent of the field, published
in Naturwissenschaften, a peer-reviewed
multidisciplinary journal that's been established
since 1913. It's unchallenged, so far.
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEstatusofcoa.pdf
However, the reality of cold fusion does not
equal practical application. The effect has been
extremely difficult to control.
You report on recent work with nickel hydride,
but that work is *not* massively confirmed, as
was the palladium deuteride work of Pons and
Fleischmann and others (including Miles). We
don't know for sure that nickel hydride even
works, though so many people are now working with
it, mostly under commercial secrecy, that there
probably is *something* there. We don't know what
the product is, the "ash." (Helium is the ash
from palladium deuteride fusion.) Most
importantly, we don't know how reliable the nickel hydride reaction is.
One of the likely explanations for all the
obfuscation and delay from Rossi and Defkalion is
that they are having difficulty with reliability
and sustainability. How long does one of these cells work? We don't know.
While mainstream science was apparently quite
happy with this situation and went about
spending billions of dollars on hot fusion
(there are many who claim that cold fusion was
systematically marginalized and deprecated by
establishment scientists), a few rogue
researchers continued with cold fusion research
and, over the last few years, evidence has piled
up that cold fusion may, in fact, be real.
It's just not accurate. The evidence for reality
was available by a decade ago. It was difficult
to get anything published, and that's a major
story on its own. It's been covered by a
sociologist of science, a book called Undead Science, by Simon.
What's been happening recently is the flap about
nickel hydride, and evidence for the reality of
of nickel hydride nuclear reactions is still anecdotal and shady.
I wrote may
be real because until recently
the evidence looked promising but hardly conclusive.
Again, this confuses the issue. Cold fusion is
real, as found with palladium deuteride, under
the right conditions, that's been confirmed by
hundreds of researchers, independently.
"Promising" would be, again, a reference to
practical application. Scientific evidence can be
conclusive for something that isn't at all promising.
You must be referring to evidence that a practical application exists.
At 01:06 PM 10/21/2012, Mark Gibbs wrote:
I don't have the time to review the huge amount
of literature you people have already looked at
... if any of you, Rothwell included, would like
to help build a list of successful experiments
I'd be happy to build it into an article with
full attribution to all contributors. I'd like to see a list that includes:
* where
* when
* technology
* run time
* COP
* experimenters and affiliations
* observers and affiliations
* references
I think such a list would be very useful in
public discussions about the reality of cold fusion.
