http://beforeitsnews.com/news/26739/Krivit_says_cold_fusion_is_not_fusion_but_LENR.html
As with a few of the citations, this one does get that Krivit is still promoting LENR.
I find it fascinating that the only skeptical questions at the press conference were from Krivit; I was amazed at how many questions they allowed him to ask, but I suppose if nobody else was turned away, it could have been okay. They were not intelligible to a general audience, they seemed to be attempts to force these scientists to answer heavily loaded questions, useful only to Krivit and his agenda. It seems he's managed to alienate most of the researchers in the field.
It is not the job of a reporter to "challenge dogma." It is the job of a reporter to find and present facts, and of a science reporter to find and present scientific fact. Definitely, if there are inconvenient questions, they should be asked. But scientists are human; they make mistakes, and if you start trying to show that the mistakes were intentionally deceptive, or that the researcher is being intellectually dishonest and covering it up, or that the scientist is otherwise engaged in reprehensible conduct, you become a hostile prosecutor, not a reporter, mind-reading and judging, and they will stop answering your questions.
There is a job to be done, to educate the public, and skeptical scientists. What is known about cold fusion? What is the state of the research, what avenues are being explored? What criticism is there of the body of work? What is the *actual scientific consensus*?
"Scientific consensus" isn't a survey taken of all scientists, it is a social phenomenon, and we must assume that it appears among those familiar with the field. Scientists get their news from the media like everyone else, except in a field where they closely follow the journals and other current activity. A particle physicist is not an expert on what chemists are finding, and vice-versa. I'd like to leave the final say on what cold fusion involves to the theoretical physicists, those who take on the tough math of quantum field theory, necessary in condensed matter, and that will take, I predict, a lot of time.
But the actual experimental work is mostly a chemistry experiment of one kind or another. Even the "nuclear" tools used are found, most commonly, with non-nuclear-physics work: SSNTDs, widely used for dosimetry, radiation detectors of other kinds, used for indentifying radioisotopes.
Condensed matter nuclear science is a new field, a synthesis or crossover field. Who are the experts? There is little or no formal answer, but we could look to those who have published work; the peer-review process indicates a finding of some level of expertise. There are no recent published critiques of the field from "outside." Kowalski may have been off in his critique of the SPAWAR work, or not, but he's not a cold fusion skeptic -- and he was at least partially right.
If we look at recent published work, which would almost always be an indication of current scientific consensus, it's entirely positive on the LENR issue. There are condensed matter states which are producing nuclear reactions, unexpected from prior theory. The work has largely turned from trying to prove this to investigating details.
How can we communicate this? What we are dealing with is a common human phenomenon, that people assume that what they believed twenty years ago, which was at least somewhat rational then, is still just as rational. It's frustrating to see the same canards repeated over and over, such as the one that Fleischmann's work could not be replicated. It was true for maybe a few months. Then not true any longer.
The arguments against cold fusion began as normal skepticism and even cogent criticism. Fleischmann really did fall into a big error with that gamma spectrum, claiming neutron radiation. But ... where it began is not where it went. It went into standing assumptions that any report must be an error. That's politics, not science.
