It goes on.
http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2010/oct/11/cold-fusion/
Kemosabe is clearly someone who knows the skeptical arguments very
well. He's repeating them, even when they've been totally
deconstructed in the past. He doesn't ever present the other side,
the facts that might allow different conclusions than the ones he is
pushing. The big tip-off to me was that "editor at
Naturwissenschaften" thing. That was an argument presented by
ScienceApologist. There are a few other editors who would know about
that, but none of them that argue with the style of Kemosabe except
for one, SA. This is far from conclusive, but I consider it likely.
I'll review the arguments here. Reviewing them on the Columbia
Tribune site requires watching the 3000 character limit, it can be a
nuisance if debunking a brief polemic deception takes more than a few
words, as it often does, these deceptions are designed to influence
the incautious, honed over years of experience on Wikipedia. I will
likely post references there to this thread, but anyone is welcome to
quote any of this there or elsewhere.
<http://www.columbiatribune.com/users/kemosabe/>kemosabe (anonymous) says...
"See the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report on cold fusion:
"Technology Forecast: Worldwide Research on Low-Energy Nuclear
Reactions Increasing and Gaining Acceptance," DIA-08-0911-003, 13
November 2009. This document was written by a committee of 90 senior
scientists in the DoD ..."
The document itself contains:
"Prepared by: Beverly Barnhart, DIA/DI, Defense Warning Office. With
contributions from: Dr. Patrick McDaniel, University of New Mexico;
Dr. Pam Mosier-Boss, U.S. Navy spawar/Pacific; Dr. Michael McKubre,
SRI International; Mr. Lawrence Forsley, JWK International; and Dr.
Louis DeChiaro, NSWC/Dahlgren.
Coordinated with dia/dri, cpt, dwo, doe/in, us Navy spawar/Pacific and u.s
nswc/Dahlgren, VA."
I don't know what they mean by "coordinated with", but I'm pretty
sure it doesn't mean "written by". So it would seem to have been
written largely by 5 people, at least 4 of whom are not in the DoD,
and are strong CF advocates.
Or what am I not seeing?
Kemosabe is not seeing that the document was *edited* by Beverly
Barnhart, making her responsible for it, and that the substance was
approved by representatives of the listed agencies. This document
doesn't mean a great deal, except it is showing the level of
acceptance of cold fusion that is recently being shown. There is much
more evidence along this line, such as the recent review by Storms in
Naturwissenschaften, the Elsevier encyclopedia of electrochemical
power sources articles by Krivit, and the debate on Journal of
Environmental Monitoring where Kirk Shanahan, long-time dedicated
skeptic re cold fusion (since the early 1990s, and one of the few to
have actually published several papers) criticizes a 2009 review of
the field by Krivit and Marwan, which was co-published with a
response by a phalanx of published researchers, and Shanahan has
complained that JEM refused to allow him another response to their
dismissal of his objections. That's how fringe authors are treated!
My strong suspicion is that the JEM editors became convinced that the
field is viable and of interest to their readers. However, they also
knew that cold fusion is widely considered pathological science,
"wasn't that shown to be bogus twenty years ago?" They knew that some
of their readers would complain. And probably did. So when they saw a
submission from Shanahan, that was of higher quality than most of the
nonsense they would have received, they saw their chance to defend
their decision: they published it, but with the simultaneous response
showing that the objections were weak or totally bogus. I wouldn't be
surprised to see more of this. What's amazed me is that there have
been about seventeen peer-reviewed reviews of the field in the last
five years, and only one response that I've seen, Shanahan one
published in August. It's looking to me like the opposition to cold
fusion has collapsed, in substance. It's dead, with only reflex action left.
"No. Cold fusion is based on calorimetry, which is predicated on the
laws of thermodynamics. In other words, the only way cold fusion
could be wrong would be if the laws of thermodynamics are wrong."
CF experiments use calorimetry. It is hardly "based on" calorimetry.
Cold fusion can certainly be wrong without violating any physical
laws. Calorimetry is well-known to be prone to artifacts.
The original discovery was only solid as to the calorimetry. The
argument Kemosabe is responding to is a bit overstated, that is,
there is an incorporated assumption: that the agreement of many, many
experts in calorimetry that the excess heat is real is unlikely to be
radically incorrect, and it would have to be radically incorrect. The
strongest object has been Shanahan's, and his little secret is that
he is proposing a different unknown effect that allegedly causes
calibration constant shift by being located where it is unexpected.
He's never been able to convince anyone who knows anything about
calorimetry that he's correct, his view is isolated. But, Kemosabe,
it's the best you've got! Go for it. Try to figure it out and explain
it! In a way that makes sense.
Note that the helium results totally undercut the claim of calorimetry error.
What pseudo-skeptics often do is to assert one possible error in
order to explain one experimental result, then they invoke an
opposite condition to explain another. Shanahan objects to the
heat/helium correlation by claiming that both the heat and the helium
are not necessarily real. Fine. How, then, do they come to be
correlated with each other? How does it happen that with no excess
heat, there is no helium?
Shanahan has no real answer, he just keeps repeating that, if there
is no heat, there is no correlation, "what is being plotted?" he
asks. What's being plotted is the experimental result! If it is
caused by his "CCS," fine. Why does this correlate with helium?
He has proposed that the helium is leakage from the atmosphere, and
that's necessary, because if helium is being produced, it's all over.
It's nuclear. Except that the plots that show helium vs time (The
Case studies shown in the Appendix to the Hagelstein review presented
to the DoE) show helium rising above ambient with time, not even
slowing down. If the levels were caused by leakage, they would slow
as they approached ambient. Further, the no-heat results are
consistent, no helium (some of the Case cells produced no heat, for
unknown reasons) and the no-deuterium results (same experiment done
with hydrogen instead of deuterium) also show no helium.
Consistently. Across many groups. If you don't get heat, you don't get helium.
Shanahan proposes that the heat causes the cell to leak. Nice try,
Kirk. However, the level of heat involved, in terms of temperature
difference, in the experiments where heat and helium are being
measured, is generally low.
At some point we have to say to the skeptics, how about doing some of
your own experimental work? The hot air that's been expended on this
could have been avoided by a single conclusive experiment, as
happened with N-rays and polywater, showing how the reported
phenomena were actually produced by prosaic causes.
Make some excess heat and measure the helium! I know what Kemosabe
will claim. That making excess heat could not be reproduced. That's
fundamentally incorrect, it was only true that it could not be
*quickly* reproduced with what was known to the negative replicators
in 1989, and sometimes later. With persistence, everyone saw excess
heat, at least some of the time. So, run a bunch of cells, use
whatever art is necessary to get apparent excess heat, and see if the
helium correlates. Then show that the correlation is caused by
something other than a nuclear reaction. This experiment has been
done by more than a dozen labs, it could be done by anyone with the
determination to do it.
It was merely difficult, not non-reproducible.
<http://www.columbiatribune.com/users/kemosabe/>kemosabe (anonymous) says...
>> ks: Cold fusion is not real, the evidence is flaky."
> abd: According to one anonymous writer.
According to the DOE panel of experts.
Six years ago, after a shallow review. Kemosabe has misrepresented
the nature of that review. It did not decide that "the evidence is
flaky." We have little information on what the actual decisions were,
we have a summarization by a bureaucrat who made major errors. The
DoE report does not compare in quality to Naturwissenschaften, as an
example. The panel was larger than a few reviewers, but the reviewers
(1) did not agree with each other except on one point: that more
research was needed, and we all agree on that, and (2) did not spend
adequate time to become familiar with cold fusion. 9 reviewers a
month, but from some of the comments, probably from these reviewers,
we know that one or more gave the evidence no time at all.
We have much more information through the decisions being made, month
by month, at peer-reviewed mainstream journals.
>> "This is a critical experiment, so why has only one group
published a refereed paper on it? And why are there none in the last 15 years?
>Storms (2010) shows twelve groups confirming it, using the four
most detailed studies to come up with his estimate of 25 +/- 5
MeV/He-4, and there is plenty of work in the last 15 years.
None of it peer-reviewed. Storms refers to conference proceedings.
So the original work has escaped peer-review.
Well, no. Helium was first reported by Fleischmann, but I'm not sure
at the moment how that was published. I know that it was challenged
and considered "possibly" an error. Like a lot of the evidence, early
on, it was considered adequate to suggest some possible error and
then leave it as if that was enough. That should never have been enough!
Helium was found by Morrey et al (1990) and Bush, Lagowski and Miles
(1991). However, "Miles and co-workers" were the first to show helium
production in an electrolytic cell while it was making energy. Miles
reported this work at ICCF 3, it was noticed by Huizenga who wrote,
in 1993, that, if confirmed, it would solve one of the major
mysteries of cold fusion.
Miles' work was published, however, in J Electroanal Chem, 1993, then
in Fusion Technology (1994) (twice).
Bush and Lagowski published their helium work in J Electronal Chem in 1991.
Chien and co-workers published "On an electrode producing massive
quantities of tritium and helium," in J Electroanal Chem, 1992.
Then there is Gozzi, J Electroanal Chem in 1998.
Sure, many of the papers Storms reports on were conference papers.
That's a judgment call, of the author and the reviewers. Conference
papers are generally unreviewed primary sources; the review takes
place when a secondary source like Storms examines them and reports
what is considered significant.
>Heat/helium ratio is a replicable experiment.
Not according to the DOE panel, which concluded that the correlation
had not been established.
Show the logic of that in the report! All that is mentioned is this
"ambient" canard, which correlation defeats. There is no sign that
most reviewers even noticed the heat/helium ratio, my suspicion is
that something about how it was presented distracted the reviewers.
The review summary reports an error, 5 our of 16 alleged electrolytic
cells showing excess heat that also showed helium. This was a result
of a reviewer getting it wrong, and then the bureaucrat copied that
and made it worse. That's not a correlation, but it wasn't what was
reported by the review paper. There were 16 Case cells, not
electrolytic cells, and we don't know how many of them showed excess
heat, but a reasonable surmise is 5. Another report of the same work
makes it plain that (1) some Case cells were "dead," i.e., showed no
excess heat, and (2) there were hydrogen control cells, presumably
included in the 16 cells. I really do need to talk to McKubre about
this.... it was a major oversight in the paper to allow that
impression to form. This was in an Appendix, and the purpose of the
appendix was to show the time correlation, and the appendix focused
on a single cell, the only one with heat data given. That graph has
been reproduced many times, but it was by no means the only evidence
for heat/helium!
>N-rays and polywater were debunked through actual experiment, not
through theoretical criticism.
But perpetual motion and homeopathy linger on decade after decade.
Not all fields are the same. It would be hard to swap a Pd foil for
a Pt foil at Energetics with no one seeing it. BTW, why are there no
double-blind experiments in CF?
Definitely, Kemosabe is a Wikipedia editor, the homeopathy reference
nails it again. You want to know why no double-blind? This is
difficult work, as it is. However, Miles' helium work was blind.
I.e., those testing for helium did not know which of the samples were
from cells that had shown heat. That's quite good enough! I'm
personally working on experimental cells to replicate the SPAWAR
neutron reports. These will be cheap enough and simple enough that
double-blind testing would become possible. I.e, the cells would be
coded as to which ones contained deuterium and which ones contained
light water, so that the experimenter running the cells could not
tell which ones were control and which were experimental. I will
definitely blind the solid state nuclear track detectors. So when I
develop and analyze them, I will not know which cells they came from,
or from what position. They will all look the same except for coding
that will be scrambled.
As long as that doesn't make it too hard to do the work! I'll publish
all the images, so someone else could shuffle the images and see if
they can tell which ones are from a deuterium cell and which ones are
from a light water cell. And which ones are background detectors, not
close to a cell.
>The SPAWAR neutron findings can be replicated for about $100 in
materials. If skeptics were real scientists, they'd want to do it
and prove that the results were artifact. Good luck.
It's the time they are protecting, not the $100. And anyway, failing
to see neutrons would prove nothing to believers. The experiment has
never been reproducible.
That's basically a lie. However, definitely it's tough to get any
reaction at all. Because I won't have sensitive calorimetry and I
won't have helium detection, I will only be looking at temperature,
sound, and light emissions, plus I'll have SSNTDs adjacent to the
cathode, but outside the cell, and they will be arranged so that only
neutrons could be producing tracks, and they will also be arranged so
that background from cosmic rays (expected to be well under 1/100
experimental, if I get the reaction SPAWAR has reported) can be
distinguished by track vector. I'm not using CR-39, for one hint.
I expect that if I get results, they will be very reproducible,
enough that I'll be able to sell the cells. But it's easy to spoil
one of these puppies. Just spit in it! 1% hydrogen or so reduces the
reaction to nearly undetectable levels, that's known. Just leaving
the heavy water exposed to atmospheric humidity can do it.
>Krivit's not "some," and not an expert, he has other motivations
as an "investigative reporter."
The fact that a reporter can so eviscerate a body of research as he
has done is even more damning.
He's eviscerated nothing, he's made an idiot out of himself. In one
of his reports, he got the decimal point wrong, and raked the
scientist over the coals over supposedly unethically "changing his
results" when the scientist said something like 0.5 x 10^15 vs 5 x
10^`14. Krivit is a would-be muckraker, he's looking for stuff to
tear apart, and he does a lousy job of it. You know, a year ago,
Kemosabe, you'd have accepted absolutely nothing that Krivit said.
Now, suddenly, he's the soul of cogency? Your bias is showing!
>The experts, the peer-reviewers, don't dispute it, they pass it.
16 reviews of the field in mainstream journals in the last five
years. No negative ones.
The DOE review was negative. And, to repeat, none of the original
research in the past 15 years has passed peer-review. Counting
reviews by advocates is cheating.
In what game?
Kemosabe is playing a game, a rather ugly one. He's attacking
research, the very research that was encouraged by the DoE, but he
wants to cite the DoE report as "negative." It was mixed, and
compared to 1989, a vast change. In 1989, probably 2 out of 15
reviewers thought there was anything at all to the reports. All that
was the same in 2004 and 1989 was the wording of the conclusion, a
conclusion that remained merely sensible. Until the science is better
understood, until there is proven theory, don't throw piles of money
at this. But modest levels of funding, for basic research and, of
course, funding by entrepreneurs who are risking their own money.
Cold fusion may never be practical. Even though it's real. But we
won't know until we know what it is, i.e., what the mechanism is and
what conditions are necessary, in detail. What Kemosabe is doing is
trying to repress finding out, as many others did before him. This is
very much anti-science. By all means, if someone approaches you and
suggests you invest in cold fusion, keep your eye on your wallet! I
think hundreds of millions of dollars have already been spent on
this, without a lot of practical value (but some!).
Notice that I said 16 reviews in mainstream journals. They were all
written by people knowledgeable about the field -- or in the case of
some, by a reporter, Krivit. Is he an "advocate" or not?
Whom do you expect to write a review? Would Robert Duncan be an
"advocate"? If so, why? Basically, on Wikipedia, if anyone wrote
about cold fusion in a positive way, they were considered "fringe."
It was completely circular.
(And all these arguments have been given there, this is all very familiar.)
Those 16 reviews were over the last five years. Kemosabe points to
the DoE in 2004. Since that review was far more favorable than might
have been expected, given the 1989 review, I made that the watershed.
I studied papers that were post-2004. The publication nadir, about a
paper every two months in the Britz bibliography, which is restricted
to mainstream peer-reviewed publications, generally, was 2004-2005,
so it's a good point to start a study of what has happened lately.
There are reviews, not in the peer-reviewed literature, by scientists
that point out the balance, such as Goodstein.
<http://www.columbiatribune.com/users/kemosabe/>kemosabe (anonymous) says...
>> ks: Coincidentally, helium exists in the background at about the
same levels, whereas the other products don't.
> abd: The helium found varies only with the amount of heat found,
That's not surprising. outgassing and permeation depend on temperature.
Anyway, the fact that helium is present at about the right levels
makes it suspicious. Why are there no experiments with levels 100
times background, or 1000 times? All the other products of reactions
that aren't available in the background don't come anywhere close to
explaining the heat. And why was Gozzi forced to admit after years,
in what were pretty careful experiments, that the helium levels were
inconclusive?
The temperature difference involved with excess heat is *usually* --
except for so-called heat-after-death -- a matter of a few degrees at
most. In other words, it should have almost no effect on permeation,
and, as well, this would not at all explain the time behavior, which
approaches and exceeds ambient with no sign of the asymptotic
approach that would be expected.
This is an example of a desperate explanation, a wild stab, based on
no actual analysis but just reaching for something that might sound
plausible. Kemosabe knows that most people won't read the sources, so
he's just trying to find arguments to present that will leave a
desired impression.
As to 100 times background or 1000 times background, that would
obviously require generating 100 or 1000 times as much heat!
Kemosabe keeps repeating "background," even though that has been
shown to be misleading. "Background" in measurements is what you get
with no signal. I.e., you have a radiation detector, and you aren't
in a deep mine shaft. You'll get so many counts per minute as
"background radiation" from cosmic rays, radon in the atmosphere,
etc. Even if your sample is doing nothing.
However, here, what is being measured is helium levels, using a very
senstive mass spectrometer, and they are routinely measuring levels
that are a thousand times below "ambient," which is what Kemosabe
might legitimately call it. This means that helium is found in the
air at that level. So, it is possible to imagine that helium found is
from leakage. However, the people doing these experiments do know
what they are doing, and they find that when they don't get heat,
they don't get helium. Leakage would occur whether they get these
small amounts of heat or not. And leakage would not ever result in an
excess over ambient. The Italian work Storms reports (Krivit was
criticizing that in total error, he didn't understand what they did,
recalculated their results based on total misunderstanding)
apparently did not exclude ambient helium. So with very low heat what
they reported was very close to the ambient level. With a larger
amount of heat, they were at roughly the right amount above ambient.
Now, how can you explain that through "leakage"?
As to Gozzi, here is the paper:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GozziDxrayheatex.pdf
From the abstract:
The energy balance between heat excess and 4He in the gas phase has
been found to be reasonably satisfied even if the low levels
of 4He do not give the necessary confidence to state definitely that
we are dealing with the fusion of deuterons to give 4He.
Does that support Kemosabe's statement? If you don't understand the
field, you might think so. Here is what Gozzi is talking about. He's
got no doubt about "nuclear reaction." But different nuclear
reactions will produce different "energy balance." The fusion of
deuterons to give He will produce a particular value, no matter what
the mechanism is (unless it's dumping energy somewhere else). He's
not confident of the accuracy of his value enough to say "definitely
deuterium fusion." But he's not far from it.
Here is his conclusion, relating to our topic:
The results show an overall picture with its own internal
consistency: 4He is produced at the surface of the wires, but only
the innermost wires in the bundle are active (see the discussion
about the spots on X-ray film) and it is not found inside Pd. On the
other hand, the low levels of 4He do not give the necessary
confidence to state definitely that we are dealing with the fusion
of deuterons to give 4He. No evidence of contamination by
atmospheric 4He was found by the detection of 20Ne2, and the energy
balance seems quite well satisfied when 4He, expected by the
measured heat excess, is compared with 4He found. This results
markedly overcomes the stagnant situation in the understanding of
cold fusion phenomena, where heat excess measured was never
counterbalanced by a proper number of nuclear particles, such as
neutrons, as expected by the d, d fusion in plasma. Moreover, the
exposure of the X-ray film is a clear-cut proof (very simple
experimental device for which errors of measurement and:or of
procedure, as well as artefacts cannot be invoked) that a nuclear
phenomenon is at work.
Other nuclear products are found, notably tritium and some
transmutations. The transmutations remain fairly controversial, some
of what has been reported as transmutation might have been
contamination, though it seems unlikely that all of it is that.
Tritium is less controversial. It's there, but not in nearly enough
quantity to be involved in the primary reaction. Helium is. That's
the point. Occam's Razor, at this point: this is some kind of fusion,
with deuterium as fuel, making helium. At this point, all the
evidence points that way.
So what's the problem? Why is Kemosabe so determined? I don't know,
just as I don't know the motivation behind ScienceApologist on
Wikipedia. However, there is one possibility: if CF is accepted as
real, it might well attract funding away from hot fusion, which is
supporting many physicists and a number of major institutions, at a
funding level of hundreds of millions of dollars per year, with
little end in sight (and practically no progress). Rather than
physicists, the specialties needed for cold fusion research would be
materials scientists and the like, far removed from the plasma and
particle physics of hot fusion specialities.
It could be simple economics, and fear. So, you've invested years of
your life, secure in a vision of the future, employed in your
specialty, and suddenly there might be a lot of people out of work
from that specialty. Supply and demand. What's that going to do?
This went on:
<http://www.columbiatribune.com/users/kemosabe/>kemosabe (anonymous) says...
> abd: Before that kind of investment would be appropriate, the
mechanism should be understood, to the extent possible. That takes
basic research, which is what the DoE panel unanimously recommended in 2004.
If they had found unanimously that the evidence for CF was
conclusive, instead of 17 of 18 against, they would have recommended
a special program with billions in funding. They would be crazy not to.
Kemosabe is deluded. The evidence for CF was, on heat, 9 to 9 divided
between "conclusive" and "not conclusive." What is he talking about
17 to 18 against? He's talking about total polarization. After one
day of exposure for half the reviewers, and a month to read the
papers if they did it, the other nine. One reviewer considered the
evidence "convincing" for nuclear origin. Five more considered it
"somewhat convincing." And two-thirds apparently were not convinced
at all. What does that mean? It's quite clear. It means that it takes
more than a day to understandint the evidence enough to be convinced.
It took me months, personally.
This probably boils down to unskilful presentation of the evidence by
Hegelstein et al. I've met Hagelstein. He is not an assertive guy, he
projects caution. He's very soft-spoken. Ask him if the sun came up
today, and he's likely to say something like, "Well, I didn't direcly
observe it, I'm not sure." Somehow reviewers missed the heat/helium
evidence, that's obvious from the error made in the report.
(I'm not blaming Hagelstein, he's a scientist, not a promoter. That's
generally true of the researchers, with few exceptions. These guys
are not the naive, wide-eyed "believers" that people like Kemosabe
would have us believe. Storms is skeptical of every theory. He's just
seen enough of the heat/helium data, and the rest, to be convinced
about fusion as an overall rough description of the process, hang the
mechanism.
And what they did recommend was not more research, but only that
"funding agencies should entertain individual, well-designed
proposals for experiments that address specific scientific issues
relevant to the question..." Not quite the same thing.
Really? Sounds like more research to me. Of a kind needed. Agreed?
>It is very difficult to engineer something that is not understood
Nonsense. CF experiments claim heat. Chemical heat from combustion
was engineered long before it was understood. If CF produces heat,
we know how to use it. Space heaters and cooking require no
engineering at all. And Stirling engines don't care how the heat is produced.
And a Stirling engines has been run from CF heat. Arata did that as a
demonstration. (One of the useful things about Arata gas-loaded cells
is that the heat is quite predictable, apparently. They all work,
about the same.)
There is another problem as well. I did the calculation to figure
out, roughly, how much palladium it would take to make a home hot
water heater, using an estimate of the heat yield from 7 grams of
palladium in an Arata cell. A mere $100,000! At current prices. For
this to be a practically application, a catalyst other than palladium
might need to be found. People are working on nickel. Maybe. Maybe
not. It is possible that some bacteria can pull off the trick (not
surprising, once one accepts that some physical arrangement of
deuterium atoms might do it. But that work has not been replicated.
To my knowledge, nobody has tried. Too far out, I'd guess. But the
technique that was used looks very solid, which is why peer-reviewed
papers on this have been accepted.) Until we know what is actually
happening, on a nanoscale, finding alternate catalysts is guesswork,
and will remain difficult and expensive, unless someone gets lucky.
> and that is apparently as fragile as the cold fusion effect.
That's another matter. But the fragility of the effect makes it hard
to believe. If those electrodes are giving off heat without input
power, that should be dead easy to demonstrate, by just putting them
in an isolated thermos with water and a thermometer.
That's called a calorimeter, and this demonstration has been done so
many times it isn't funny. Arata cells are trivial. Just load them
with deuterium, and they heat up from the heat of hydride formation,
but it goes higher than with hydrogen. Hydrogen-loaded cells settle
to ambient temperature within a few minutes. The deuterium cells stay
elevated, several degrees above ambient (about 4 degrees C.), for
3000 minutes, when they take the cells for helium analysis. I wish
they'd just leave one running, to see what happens! But try telling
old man Arata what to do! Good luck!
>At this point, there is no science behind the categorical
rejection of cold fusion, it is pure politics and holdover opinion.
The problem is there is no science behind the claims. That has to come first.
There is solid experimental science behind the claims. Against them,
there is weak theory. The theory is based entirely -- read Huizenga
and other skeptics -- on the hypothesis that if there is fusion, it
must be d-d fusion, two deuterons fusing. That is a well-known
reaction, and the other kind of cold fusion, muon-catalyzed fusion,
produces the same products and branching ratio, i.e., produces
neutrons and tritium, each about half the time, and only rarely
helium, and if there is helium, there is a gamma ray, easily detected.
The extreme skepticism that Kemosabe is showing is not terribly
uncommon. It's apparent from some of the reviewers in 2004, that they
were totally unwilling to consider experimental evidence without a
theory to explain the reaction. That's backwards, and that is not
science, it is a form of religion.
The claims don't stand up to the simplest tests, like scaling,
like being able to actually provide their own input power, like
actually producing heat in a completely isolated, transparent environment.
There are three "tests" here.
1. Scaling. That's irrelevant. Correlation between heat and helium
shows the core of scaling. If you produce more heat (take more time,
change the operating conditions so that you get more excess heat,
which is difficult but not impossible), you get more helium. I think
he means that by doubling, say, some parameter, you could double the
reaction found. I think that's true, but there is something to
realize here. Fleischmann started using a centimeter cube of
palladium. He left it one night, having turned off the power, and
came back in the morning to find the lab full of smoke, a hole burned
through the lab bench and several inches into the floor. After that,
they scaled down.
The problem with not knowing the exact conditions of fusion can mean
that you suddenly get just the right reaction conditions and you get,
quickly, very much more heat than you'd ever seen before. Several of
these puppies have melted down, some of the larger ones. That's
another problem with commercialization!
Providing their own input power? Arata cells do that. They just don't
generate a lot of heat.
Most of the energy involved in a CF cell is expended getting the high
loading that is necessary, it needs to be over 88%. That used to take
months of electrolysis, it is very difficult to get and maintain that
loading. Not every batch of palladium has the right microstructure to do it.
My concern is the science, not practical applications. Kemosabe, to
accept the science, really wants to see a practical application
first. That's backwards.
And he just went on and on, with misrepresentation after
misrepresentation.... at some point, it's quite enough.
