At 05:01 PM 10/9/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
This is probably the biggest, best equipped cold fusion lab to be
established since Toyota in France. A million bucks! That's the kind
of money you need to make serious progress. Plus collaboration with
U. Missouri. This is very promising.
Well, my understanding is that this funding dried up. But ... they
have some momentum, they have some equipment....
I wish Krivit would shut up at times. His comments here are unhelpful.
To say the least. He's right about some things, but his biases have
been accumulating, and he went completely overboard here in making
corrections to what was, after all, a newspaper article, not a
scientific journal. Let's take a look:
<http://www.columbiatribune.com/users/sbkrivit/>sbkrivit (anonymous) says...
Correction: Energetics did not produce "25 times more electric
energy" than they put in. The amount of electrical energy they
produced was zero. That 2004 experiment - meritorious and credible
as it was - has never been replicated by anybody and produced 34
watts of heat - not electricity - for 17 hours.
Sure, he's technically correct. Typical non-scientist reporter who
isn't careful about details like this. But this is not an error on
substance, yet this is the first thing he responded to.
As I reviewed in my 2009 Journal of Environmental Monitoring paper,
Pons and Fleischmann were boiling water in 1992. The Energetics
trial and error approach is important, but this is not real progress.
That remains to be seen. Krivit isn't a journalist anymore, he's an
editorialist. Until the mechanism is known, and, in spite of Krivit's
apparent certainty that it's Widom-Larsen, there is zero confirmation
of this and we don't know what it is, we are pretty much limited to
exploring the parameter space. Or testing hypotheses as to mechanism,
which can be very, very difficult.
Steven B. Krivit
Editor, New Energy Times
October 9, 2010 at 11:34 a.m.
<http://www.columbiatribune.com/users/sbkrivit/>sbkrivit (anonymous) says...
Correction #2: A gross misunderstanding seems to have occurred
either in your communications with Robert Duncan or his
communications with people representing themselves as affiliates of
the Naval Research Laboratory.
NRL has never claimed measurements of excess heat, let alone tens of
thousands of times. In fact, the opposite seems more true. You can
look at what NRL representatives said about their work last fall in
Rome and also what they told the Army Research Laboratory earlier
this year. Specifically, look at the last sentence from NRL group
leader Kenneth Grabowski's presentation to ARL. After eight years of
NRL efforts in LENR, they don't think it is nuclear, "it is likely chemistry."
<http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2010/arl/arl-Agenda.shtml>http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferen...
To borrow Ronald Reagan's slogan: "Trust, but verify." Particularly
with anything to do with "cold fusion."
Steven B. Krivit
Editor, New Energy Times
October 9, 2010 at 3:22 p.m.
The article had, "Some of the most exciting results happened at the
Naval Research Laboratories, where scientists loaded microscopic
"nano-particles" of palladium with deuterium. They repeated it tens
of thousands of times and measured excess heat every time, Duncan said.''
Krivit's comment may partially be contradicted by the Grabowski
slides that Krivit hosts.
http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2010/ARL/Pres/10Grabowski-NRL-Efforts-Spanning-Tthe-Last-8-Years.pdf
It's hard to follow this, I'd say, the slides don't tell the whole
story. However, pages 10, 11, and 12 explicitly show "excess heat."
And I would not derive from the slides that Grabowski thinks it is
not nuclear. From the evidence he's reviewing, says that "Chemical
effect due to Deuterium-Hydrogen exchange may account for some of the
anomalous heat". This requires the presence of substantial hydrogen.
I don't know what he's talking about....
Looking at a Kidwell/Grabowski powerpoint presentation from ICCF15,
it looks like they are running, with the same cell, D2 and H2
pressurization cycles. But from electrolytic experiments, H presence
can poison the reaction, so they may be seeing less that they
otherwise might. In any case, the documents don't support Krivit's
claim. They are actively investigating, they certainly have not
concluded "likely chemistry."
<http://www.columbiatribune.com/users/sbkrivit/>sbkrivit (anonymous) says...
Correction #3: Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann are
electrochemists, not physicists.
Correction #4: Reporters did not "coin the term 'cold fusion'" in
1989. That term had been around for decades, and had been associated
with Steven E. Jones' distantly-related work. Reporter Jerry Bishop
of the Wall Street Journal was the first print journalist to apply,
not coin, that term to the Pons-Fleischmann work.
Correction #5: It is a partial misrepresentation to state that Pons
and Fleischmann "announced their discovery at a large news
conference ... before publishing their findings." They had submitted
their findings for publication and their paper had been accepted for
publication before the press conference. However, Pons and
Fleischmann, but more specifically, the administrators and attorneys
involved with the announcement, did not permit a pre-print of the
scientific paper to be distributed at the time of the press
conference and this was certainly poor form.
Correction #6: It is a misrepresentation to state that Pons and
Fleischmann "regretted the name 'cold fusion' and the news
conference." They did not choose to call it "cold fusion." They did
not use this term in the press conference, nor in their preliminary
note, nor in their 58-page seminal paper. The term grew into common
usage because it was the default term for everyone in the early days
of this controversy.
We've never heard from Pons about his view on the term "cold fusion"
or "fusion." We have heard Fleischmann express regret. However
Fleischmann doesn't just regret calling it "cold fusion." He regrets
even calling it "fusion," and that, only recently.
<http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2010/35/SR35910fleischmann.shtml>http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/201...
As far as regrets about the news conference, Fleischmann, at least,
had regrets about it before it even started. This fact has been
published in many books. When I met Pons in 2004, he didn't want to
talk with me about anything from the past, so I cannot speak for him.
Steven B. Krivit
Editor, New Energy Times
October 9, 2010 at 7:34 p.m.
Definitely the reporter was sloppy. However, they may also have been
told things that weren't completely true, such as the "cold fusion"
origin. But surely this was a trivial error. I.e., a reporter applied
the term, he did not coin it. But maybe he did. It's kind of an
obvious usage.... Did he mention muon-caralyzed fusion?
This was nit-picking, definitely distracting.
<http://www.columbiatribune.com/users/sbkrivit/>sbkrivit (anonymous) says...
Correction #7: It is incorrect to state that "no one could ...
replicate the results." Aspects of the results; heat, and most
importantly, tritium were replicated within weeks. Please refer to
my Elsevier encyclopedia chapters and JEM article.
<http://newenergytimes.com/v2/about/presentations-publications.shtml>http://newenergytimes.com/v2/about/pr...
Correction #8: It a partial misrepresentation to state that "20
laboratories around the world replicated Pons and Fleischmann's
study." In terms of the labs that precisely replicated the Pons and
Fleischmann's study, it is probably closer to five. In terms of the
labs that more generally replicated LENR phenomena, it is probably
in the hundreds, if not thousands.
Correction #9: You write that "some of the most exciting results
happened at the Naval Research Laborator[y]." Again, you seem to
have a reversal of your facts.
To the contrary, some of the most exciting results have happened
outside NRL -at a competing Navy facility known as SPAWAR, in San
Diego. The SPAWAR lab has 21 published papers reporting their
original, positive LENR results. NRL has none.
<http://newenergytimes.com/v2/reports/SSC-SD-Refereed-Journal-Articles.shtml>http://newenergytimes.com/v2/reports/...
Correction #10: You state that "sometimes [Energetics] saw enough
energy to power a high-powered lamp." As I reported in Brussels,
Belgium, at the International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy
Systems, Energetics achieved a maximum power rate of 34 Watts for 17
hours. This is their best result reported thus far. In a follow-up
effort during the years 2006-2007, they best they reported (in a
book I edited for the American Chemical Society) was a half-watt of
excess heat. I may have overlooked something in the last few years,
but I am not aware of any other significant excess heat results from them.
<http://newenergytimes.com/v2/books/2008-LENR-Sourcebook/LENR-Sourcebook.shtml>http://newenergytimes.com/v2/books/20...
Steven B. Krivit
Editor, New Energy Times
October 9, 2010 at 7:36 p.m.
Yeah, this "no one could ... replicate" is irritating. It's common in
news reports on developments in this field. Krivit is correct about
this, though there is, in fact, with almost all this work, a quibble
that replications are not exact. However, what is a "replication" is
not crisply defined. There are various ways to conceptualize these
experiments. A simple one: make some highly loaded palladium
deuteride, following one of the successful recipes, or following a
new one. Is there excess heat? Any report of significant excess heat
in palladium deuteride is a kind of replication.
What gets really interesting is if you look for helium at the same
time. Is there helium? If the helium results correlate with the heat
results, across many different cells, and even across various
experimental approaches, this is practically proof of a nuclear
reaction. Heat alone can't do that, this was the basis of a lot of
the skeptical position, "Where the hell is the ash?"
And the results to correlate, at a value that Storms estimates at 25
+/- 5 MeV/He-4.
Does this prove fusion? Well, given that deuterium is the fuel, yes.
But what it does not prove is d-d fusion. Even Storms, who does, in
fact, know better, made this mistake in a YouTube video of his where
he covers the evidence. It proves deuterium fusion, but doesn't tell
us the mechanism, the pathway. It might be 4D fusion (Takahashi's
Be-8 theory), some other kind of cluster fusion (Kim and Storms and
probably Hagelstein et al), or even some exotic neutron pathway
(Widom-Larsen and Krivit waving the pom-poms), or, sure, d-d fusion
with some very odd behavior, but if it starts with deuterium and ends
up with helium, and other products are missing, compared to helium
and heat, it's fusion. Krivit went completely bananas on this,
imagining that if W-L theory is correct, it's not fusion.
(W-L theory *allows* the formation of neutrons from deuterium, though
"heavy electrons." These neutrons then can cause transmutations, and
some of the transmutation cycles end up with helium. But what W-L
theory hasn't encompassed is the *fact* that the product of cold
fusion is almost entirely helium. Ultra-low momentum neutrons
wandering about would produce a whole lot of other very detectable
stuff, but non-helium transmutations are generally reported at levels
way, way below the helium, and are, for this reason, still quite contoversial.)
The best comment on Krivit, there:
<http://www.columbiatribune.com/users/N86MZ/>N86MZ (anonymous) says...
Hey, Mr. Krivit --
This is a newspaper, not a scientific journal for academia. Get over
yourself .....
October 9, 2010 at 11:30 p.m.
Krivit's obsession with details will just confuse most readers. The
substance of the article was correct, but many details were
incorrect. That's been true of very many normal newspaper accounts
whenever I've had close knowledge of a subject. The reader was
basically right. The level of correctness that Krivit seems to have
expected is unusual outside of peer-reviewed publications or other
very carefully-edited material.
If Wikipedia had a sane governance structure, a way of ensuring that
content builds instead of backsliding, it could far outstrip any
other publisher in accuracy and depth. But it doesn't.
