Okay, the abstracts are uploaded, as noted. I hope to have the paper from Robert Duncan by next week.
The conference proceedings will be published by Biberian in his electronic journal. Here are a few of my own comments about the conference. The first day of the conference was mainly devoted to nano particle gas loaded cold fusion, the Arata method. Compared to a few years ago, that technique has swept the field. Ever since Arata announced his results I have been hoping this would happen and recommending the technique. I think it is the most likely to be commercially useful. Unfortunately Arata himself could not attend the conference, although his papers listed in the abstracts. Many authors were not able to attend the conference. I hope that Biberian will accept papers from absent authors. Otherwise the proceedings will be skimpy. Takahashi and Kitamura reported on the continuing nano particle work at Kobe University. I was disappointed. My impression is that they have not made much progress. They have still not tried a large sample of material, which I think might produce significantly more heat. Dmitriyeva described the nanoparticle loading experiments underway at Coolescence. They sound promising but I do not think she is ready to sign off on a definite anomaly yet. The trouble with the gas loading experiments at Kobe U., the NRL and Coolescence is that they produce an awful lot of chemical heat and is difficult to separate the chemical heat from the anomalous heat. Kidwell, Knies and Dominguez described many different experiments at the NRL. I found this interesting but disturbing. They have received calorimetric equipment directly from SRI and energetics technology, cathodes from ENEA, and nano particle powder from a variety of sources in Japan and from Brian Ahern. These are hard-working first-class people, yet they still cannot make experiments produce definite excess heat! I have been under the impression that given the right materials and instruments, a “person skilled in the art” (Patent Office jargon) can reliably reproduce cold fusion. Apparently that is still not true. The NRL electrochemical experiments have produced marginal levels of heat several times, and in one recent instance a significant amount of heat. Unfortunately that run got cut off by technical problem. Dominguez displayed a bunch a slides describing ~130 experiments. She went zipping through them. One said “Did not achieve sufficient current density.” She explained later that it did not reach high enough current density because the recombiner failed. Another went for only a few days before something else failed. As she closed the talk she mentioned that they removed the four wire loading measurement sensor in recent experiments because it causes problems. Problems with recombiners and four-wire measurements and so on are normal. These are the reasons the experiments are so hard to do. I said to her after the talk: "I think it would be helpful if you would separate the 130 experiments into two groups: 1. Experiments that failed for a known reason such as a recombiner problem; 2. Experiments that met known control parameters and should have worked.” She agreed that would be a good idea. She said that most experiments are in the latter group. Okay, though I, but if they have removed the 4-wire gadget, they are not measuring loading so they do not know whether they have met the control parameters. I do not think they are measuring loading by other methods such as lost gas, but I may be wrong about that. The four wire measurement is what McKubre uses, and he is the one who set the minimum loading control parameter standard. It could be that if you measure loading by some other method you get a different answer, and a different control parameter standard. For example, while I do not know this to be the case, the lost gas method may give a better answer for the entire bulk, but the 4-wire method may tell you about loading near the surface, and near-surface is where you need the high loading. So you should stick to McKubre’s method to be sure you are meeting his parameters. I hope I can upload their slides so readers can see for yourself what I'm blathering on about here. The two Davids Knies and Kidwell described the gas loading experiments in great detail. They are trying every means they can think of to disprove the heat or to show that it is all chemical heat. I sense they are running out of excuses, and they are on the verge of being forced to agree it has to be anomalous heat. Some people say they have gone too far trying to find objections, because they don't want to believe it is cold fusion. Others say they are doing good science and it is up to them to eliminate every conceivable objection before setting off on experiment. Let the reader decide. The biggest anomaly is that the heat from deuterium is much higher than from hydrogen and there is no corresponding endothermic phase after it appears. That seems definitive to me but they keep looking for D-H exchange reactions and various other obscure reasons that might explain it. The D-H exchange is ruled out I think (paper GL-06). Apparently they have one or two other suspicions left they want to thrash out. To be honest, I do not recall the details, and the abstract is not explained it enough. (I hate taking notes during a lecture so I don't recall. When I take notes, I find afterwards that the only thing I remember is the act of taking notes.) They look for other anomalies such as particle production and helium. They get much more helium than predicted by plasma theory. Obviously this contamination. Frankly, I do not see the point of doing this. They use tiny amounts of material and get only 10 to 100 J of energy, so there's no way they could detect the helium even with their superb instruments. So why look for it? In paper GL-4 the “commercial” source of nanoparticle powder they refer to means the powder from the two Japanese companies, Santoku Corp. used at Kobe U., and the other one used by Arata at Osaka U. I can’t remember the name of that company. . . No one knows why the Japanese find anomalous heat from these materials and the NRL does not. That is disturbing. Regarding paper EL-11, here is something that was unclear from the abstract and slides. Some members of the audience were confused. While this paper mainly describes methods and results from the 1990s, it also describes current work. Imam is back to work making the Pd-B alloys, and these experiments are underway again. A couple of years ago Imam sent Storms a sample of this material and Storms confirmed excess heat from it. Miles tested the Pd-B when he was in Japan with the NHE and observed excess heat from it. (The NHE did not want to hear about that, and the guy in charge couldn’t be bothered to go down the hall and look at it.) Miles recently tested a new batch and got much more excess heat than he has ever observed before, with any material. I think it was close to 2 W sustained where used to get a third of a watt at best. The abstract describes a 9 W boil-off event, but I don’t recall he talked about this, oddly enough. It seems a little quixotic to be doing bulk palladium experiments at this late date but I'm glad someone is still getting excess heat from them. In EL-12 Miles put to rest concerns about shuttle reactions (a kind of recombination) in co-deposition experiments. He put them to rest to his satisfaction, anyway. Miles knows a lot about chemistry and electrochemistry, and I think his judgment is authoritative. Even the abstract gives a lot more reasons for his conclusion that most do. I expect Pam Boss will be pleased to hear about this. It has been a sore point between her and the NRL. - Jed
