Dave, You are not alone – few know of this incident. But it’s not a sensible choice to base anything regarding the validity of LENR on Rossi’s problems with IH. The technology will survive, but Rossi’s lack of credibility could taint the field and impede progress for years.
The Thermacore runaway, as impressive as it was, has not previously been reported. To put it (the runaway) into context, there had already been a fatality at SRI a few years before (unrelated). It was not known back then, in the mid-nineties, whether the reaction was safe or not especially when drastically scaled up (2-3 orders of magnitude). The Thermacore incident was not reported for any number of legal and liability reasons, not to mention OSHA - and the project was canceled immediately. The Company was only interested in the scale-up potential of it, so it was nixed. Ahern’s sources of information on this are impeccable. BTW – to my knowledge, no one since then has tried an experiment with a similarly large mass of potentially active material but it could easily be the case that there is a “critical mass” equivalent, even if that term is shoehorned into QM (or CQM). There are in fact, a number of scientific papers on “entanglement mass” which would be the corollary. I’m glad they weren’t using deuterium. From: David Roberson Jones, Is it possible to find another source to back up what you are describing in this event? A second written record would be fine if available. I have not heard of that particular thermal run away reaction that you have listed below but would find it interesting to follow up on. The recent negative information that is coming out pertaining to Rossi is beginning to concern me and your example seems like just the medicine needed to cure that problem.
