I think we should make a list of some of the major blunders, and uploaded into LENR-CANR.org as part of our News report. Two mistakes struck me the moment I glanced at the report. They are:
The DoE report includes objections made by skeptics that have no technical merit. For example, the skeptics claimed: "Contamination of apparatus or samples by air containing 4He was cited as one possible cause for false positive results in some measurements." This is not in evidence. With most experiments the helium is far below atmospheric concentration, so if air had leaked into the cell, the amount of helium would probably have increased by a huge factor, and the helium levels would have been random instead of correlated with excess heat production. With McKubre's experiment, which is described in the document submitted to the DoE panel, helium climbed above atmospheric concentration. An air leak would have reduced the amount of helium, but no reduction was observed.
The report says that the skeptics, "who did not find the production of excess power convincing cite a number of issues including: excess power in the short term is not the same as net energy production over the entire of time of an experiment; all possible chemical and solid state causes of excess heat have not been investigated and eliminated as an explanation; and production of power over a period of time is a few percent of the external power applied and hence calibration and systematic effects could account for the purported net effect."
These objections are all without merit, because they all miss the fundamental point, which is that no chemical process can store up or produce more than a few eV per atom. Suppose at time A the cell begins producing significant excess heat, and it continues to be exothermic to time B, never dropping to zero or below zero (it is never endothermic, so it never stores energy). Suppose the total integrated energy for that burst is 100 to 1000 eV per atom. Bursts on this scale have often been recorded, some of them lasting for weeks. The energy release during the burst is far above the limits of chemistry. That proves the issue. What happened previous to that event makes no difference, because there is no mechanism that can store that much chemical energy in the cathode. Also, the only input to output ratio that matters is the one measured during the burst. During a burst, the input to output ratio is usually high, sometimes 1:3 or more, and the effect is easy to measure. The overall ratio for the entire run is irrelivant. Even if the overall input to output ratio is only, let us say, 1:1.02, that has no bearing on the ratio or performance during the heat burst.
- Jed
