Much of the skepticism over cold fusion has been maintained by a
failure to distinguish between the primary reaction and possible
secondary reactions. It has become apparent -- and should have been
apparent from the beginning, and especially once the Fleischmann
report of serious neutrons was withdrawn as artifact -- that the
primary reaction does not generate neutrons, which itself means that
it's something quite unusual and unexpected. However, from the
reported excess heat and from strongly correlated helium
measurements, I consider it well established that the primary nuclear
ash is helium, and that the primary fuel, the starting point, is deuterium.
Now, if helium is being made from deuterium, as it apparently is
(though another primary reaction fuel remains possible, perhaps
palladium or lithium or other element present in the cell), we would
expect, no matter what the mechanism is, that there would be some
incidence of hot products, even if most of the energy is somehow
dumped to the lattice. And these hot products could easily be hot
enough to themselves cause secondary fusion reactions, which would be
ordinary hot fusion and which would have the expected radiation
signatures of some form or other of deuterium fusion, probably.
If tritium is generated occasionally as a product, much of this
tritium might fuse, because it would be made hot from its birth, and
what would be detected with tritium analysis could be only a small
portion of the actual tritium generated. Reports of tritium being
found in CF cells are consistent enough that it's reasonable to
assume some level of tritium generation, but, as a rare pathway, it
might be quite variable, depending on exact cell conditions, some
conditions might encourage it more than others, if it is not merely a
simple branching effect.
The variability of CF experimental results, that sometimes an effect
was found that was well above background, and sometimes it was barely
detectable, and sometimes it was not detected at all, and that few
experiments were exact replications with a single experimental
variable, all contributed to the skepticism.
In fact, it is possible that there are many low-energy nuclear
reactions, of varying rarity, occurring under different conditions.
There was, at the beginning, some idea that there could be only one
reaction, because surely a whole family of reactions would have been
discovered before, and therefore the experimental variability led to
unreasonable skepticism.
It's the old story of the elephant and the blind men, who report
their experience of an elephant: it's like a tree, no, it's like a
snake, no, it has a tail like a horse, etc. Surely if they were all
reporting the same animal, their stories would match! But not necessarily.
But there never had been an exhaustive search for LENR, that only
began with 1989, and still hasn't been exhaustive, with lots of
tantalizing clues that might take many years to follow.
There is indeed a danger in uncritically amalgamating very different
experiments as, all together, confirming LENR, as some general field.
However, the baby was tossed out with the bath-water. Heat vs. helium
is reasonably established across a family of independent and
confirmed experiments, though I'd certainly like to see more
replication of accurate measurements, particularly because the exact
ratio of heat/helium tells us a great deal about what's going on in
the cells, and, further, what the limits are on other reactions
taking place, in some cases.
One of the great tragedies is that the CF community did not develop
its political strength, enough to hold the DoE to the recommendations
of its own panels. The community was never so small that it would
have been impossible to do this; but, regardless, it didn't happen.
It may soon all be moot, the wall is crumbling, that's obvious.
