Iwamura works for Mitsubishi, and has produced some of the best, cleanest evidence for LENR transmutation, confirmed in Japan and noted in the financial press there. There it is, right in their own labs. If any nation should have an interest in LENR, Japan should be high on the list; first class in technology, totally dependent on outside sources for oil. Mitsubishi has deep pockets to pursue commercial development.
Jed has excellent connections in Japan.
Well, not excellent. So-so in most cases.
Why the thundering silence?
That I can explain! It is simple. First of all, Japan is not unified in any sense. There is no agreed-upon view of cold fusion. The scientific establishment is as divided as it is in the US, and the vast majority of scientists think that cold fusion is outrageous fraud and garbage. That is what they say, anyway. There is terrific hostility toward the researchers. Most of them are hanging on by their fingernails. Mizuno will probably quit or be forced out this year or next. Iwamura was reassigned to other, unrelated jobs for a year. He has one or two managers who support his work. The others say he is a disgrace to the company and this nonsense should have been stopped years ago. Obviously if the managers who support him are forced out, it will be game over. Mitsubishi is in dire condition these days because of unrelated corporate scandals, and it would not surprise me to see their research department gutted. Last year, Iwamura's prospects improved tremendously, when two leading institutions (Tokyo U. and the Spring8 facility) agreed to cooperate with him, and help confirm his results. He is very confident and he has guts, so he insists everything will work out fine in the end, and the tide is turning, but I fear those two labs may botch the experiment.
I do not think there are any other serious, properly funded CF research programs in Japan. If there are, I am sure the Japanese equivalents to Robert Park are doing their best to stamp them out. There is a little more academic freedom in Japan than in the US, and a little more leeway to research CF, but only a little.
The message I posted just now, "Brief summary of Nikkei article about Iwamura" was something I wrote in response to one of the Italian researchers who wanted me to translate the newspaper articles. I did not think those articles were worth translating. Most of them were only a little more positive than, say, Scientific American. Two or three of them bent over backwards to try to show how Iwamura's results have nothing remotely to do with cold fusion -- which everyone knows was disproven. One of these articles had a table comparing and contrasting "A Iwamura's claim" and "B Cold fusion" something like this:
Iwamura Cold fusion
------------- ------------------
Replicated Never replicated
Serious research Discredited
Transmutations Sporadic excess heat
. . .
In the interviews and comments Iwamura made in the press, I do not think he disputed the reporters' absurd attempts to make these fake distinctions, and he did not mention that he himself published papers showing excess heat, gamma rays and so on. Apparently, the reporter never bother to look at Iwamura's previously published papers (which are available at LENR-CANR.org by the way). Iwamura himself knows perfectly well that his results are cold fusion, but I do not think he goes out of his way to assert that with the public, or when he is speaking to know-nothing reporters. I cannot blame him!
Steven Vincent Johnson wrote:
> I fear the U.S. is already too late.
I think that is ridiculous, and I would think so even if a hundred Japanese corporations were working night and day to make cold fusion. Technology travels rapidly and easily from one country to another. For one thing, all research is still at the basic physics level, and none of the techniques that have been discovered have any potential commercial use as far as I can tell. For another, once the basic principles of cold fusion are discovered, every country on earth will soon catch up. Even if Japanese corporations get the jump on others, their advantage will last no longer than the US head start in RAM memory chips or hard disks in the 1980s, or the US head start over Russia and France in nuclear weapons in 1945.
- Jed
