I think Peter posted this message here and at CMNS. Anyway, here is a response.
Peter quoted someone (not sure who): "Any report from Rossi will be worthless unless it includes the names of the claimed independent referee which Rossi refers to as "ERV". If this person is an unknown, without flawless credentials, the report is unacceptable. . . ." That is silly. Assuming the reactor is connected to some sort of radiator or ventilation system like any other space heater, then any licensed HVAC engineer who works with large furnaces could do this test. That is their job. It is what they do every day. If the reactor is not connected to a conventional ventilation system then it will cook everyone in the building. This is like saying that only a world-class plumber can replace a kitchen sink. Or only a world-class dentist can fill a cavity. 1 MW is larger than most heaters, but units of this size are used in shopping malls and other large buildings. Every one of them has to be tested on a regular basis. The test procedures reveal how much heat they are producing. For various reasons they can underheat, which can be dangerous. Here is a 70 million btu/hour heating system for a mall. That's 20 MW: https://www.wbdg.org/resources/hvac.php If measuring heat were difficult, or unusual, or something that required the kind of skills you need to operate a Tokamak reactor or a robot explorer on Mars, then yes, you would need a world-class expert. But this is not an arcane skill. Government licensing agencies and the ASME have published detailed guides on how to do this. The procedures are spelled out by law. To get a license you have to pass a test showing you know these procedures. Here are some ASME textbooks: https://www.asme.org/about-asme/standards/performance-test-codes There are 292,000 licensed HVAC engineers in the U.S. Their mean annual salary is $44,000 a year, so they are skilled but they are not rare, highly paid, world-class experts. The engineers who work with large-scale installations could confirm the performance of this reactor in an hour or so with absolute confidence. http://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/heating-air-conditioning-and-refrigeration-mechanics-and-installers.htm If HVAC engineers were not capable of testing large heating systems with confidence, then every day dozens of shopping malls and large buildings would explode and burn. People would be asphyxiated with carbon monoxide. I have worked with HVAC engineers from time to time, such as when I installed a heat pump at my house. They know more about calorimetry than, say, the authors of the Lugano report do. They are more qualified to test a 1 MW reactor than a typical physics professor would be. Heck, they are more qualified than the whole physics department tied together. They don't call this "calorimetry" but that's what it is, on a large scale. Of course they know less about this subject than say, Rob Duncan or Mike McKubre, and they do not know much about theory or thermodynamics. Then again, they probably know more theory than you might think. - Jed
