One interesting point about the recent Mizuno experiment is that it has a curious history going back to the preWar Japanese efforts to make synthetic fuel from coal. They attempted this by the hydrogenation of coal tar.
Like the Germans, the Japanese suspected back then, just as today, they must find an alternative to oil if they were going to either subjugate their neighbors, or to prosper economically when they must pay exorbitant prices for it. The surprise is that a 75 year old anomaly - the one which influenced this work - has been revived from obscurity and is just now coming back, from the world of anecdote into the world of science. [SIDE NOTE] Today in South Africa, a company called Sasol converts literally billions of tons of coal into high quality oil at a cost of under $30 barrel! Some congressmen in big-coal states in the USA consider it to be a national disgrace that the "Arabia of coal" (with 30+ % of the world's deposits) does not do the same, when we are in effect exporting the dollars which could be used to do this - to our enemies in the Mid-East. However, a few of us on this forum might now opine - as soon as this Mizuno work is replicated: Do Not Even Think About It ! Obama (he is from a big-coal state) This finding points the way to a much better solution so put a few billion into LENR instead (or in addition to) big-coal. Cite for this most important paper: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MizunoTanomaloushb.pdf [SIDE NOTE #2] - Although the recent Arata work got far more publicity in the USA, this Mizuno experiment (assuming both are fully replicated) will be infinitely more valuable to society ! Most of the reasons for that conclusion are obvious from looking at the cost of the reactants - pennies per pound in the cited paper above. In stark contrast the Arata reactants are in the tens of dollars per gram range. Nuf' said on that detail. What is surprising in this experiment is that despite the high pressure and temperatures there is no significant hydrogenation. Why not? Is impeding the hydrogenation itself critical to the transmutation? This experiment was stimulated by Soejima’s research circa 1930 into methods of changing coal to oil by liquefaction. Soejima observed abnormal heat generation during hydrogenation of creosote oil heated in high pressure hydrogen gas. Like the present work, the heat generated was much larger than the largest estimated chemical reaction that can occur with creosote and hydrogen (which should actually be endomthermic to begin with). In Mizuno's case the heat is 10,000 times higher than any chemical reaction would be. Even the best Mills' work exceeds chemical reactions by only a factor of 200. But many have long suspected that MIlls goes to great efforts to actually -AVOID- LENR, since it nullifies his patent claims. [SIDE NOTE #3] It is somewhat of disgrace that Mizuno does not cite Mills, nor is he apparently familiar with Forster or FRET. Both of these areas are extremely relevant to this work, whether he realizes it or not. He may be a great experimenter, and surely an 'old-timer' in the sense of having a narrow focus - but still, in this day and age, a failure to properly attribute prior work casts doubt on your own findings since it is so easy to find the reports electronically. Someone needs to show even the great experimenters, even the 'national treasures' how to use Google - well, not them personally: but in Japan, like here, professors have a cadre of grad students who are responsible for this kind of thing. There is absolutely no excuse for saying "we never heard of him in Japan". Any such nonsensical talk about work published in the same journals as yours, and which has been ongoing for nearly twenty years - is indicative of sloppiness and laxity; and can cast your own good experimental work into a negative light - when its absence is pointed out -- as it will always be these days. Jones
