Let me add a post-script. Since 2000, the ENEA researchers have put a lot of effort into understanding and fabricating palladium. They have done a good job. I have not made a rigorous comparison, but I think their material now rivals the best J-M material from the IMRA program. It puts out about as much energy per gram, and it works even more reliably and consistently. In most tests I have heard about it is used with superwave stimulation, which is probably contributing to the enhanced performance. It is hard to know how much.
The ENEA samples are much smaller than the IMRA cathodes, so you have to adjust to make the comparison. You might say the ENEA has recapitulated whatever it was the J-M did to make the palladium work well. Unlike J-M however, they are a national laboratory, so their work is public. They discuss it in detail at conferences, and publish papers. Brian Scanlan gripes that their material still constitutes a "secret sauce" available only to a handful of other labs such as SRI, rather than something available to anyone. That's true but I still think it is an improvement over the corporate secrecy of the IMRA program. I have no objection to corporate secrecy. A corporation must develop a thing like this in secret. However, this is counterproductive in the early stages of fundamental research, which is why we need national laboratories and universities. Both have a vital role to play, but I think at this stage in cold fusion, the open source national laboratory probably has more to contribute. - Jed
