LENR-CANR CONTENTS

June 2004. Introducing a new paper by Edmund Storms, " Calorimetry 101" covering how to build a good calorimeter, how to evaluate calorimetric data, how to avoid common pitfalls and mistakes while evaluating data. Application of calorimetry to cold fusion or LENR presents unique problems that have not been previously summarized. This paper discusses various calorimetric methods that have been applied to the subject and evaluates each in light of what has been discovered about their limitations and errors, based on his personal experience.

The New Scientist magazine in the March 29, 2003 issue featured an article about cold fusion research at U.S. Navy. Click here for more about the article, and a list of papers in our library published by Navy researchers.

Very unusual radioactive elements were produced in a Pons-Fleischmann cell by K. Wolf at Texas A & M. The results were reported by T. Passell (EPRI).

We have added six papers about tritium: one from Fusion Technology by Storms and Talcott (1990), one from ICCF-8 by Yamada (2000), and four from ICCF-2, by Will, Claytor, Lanza and Bertalot (all 1991). Actually, the latter describes experiments at ENEA and Texas A& M that did not find tritium, although one produced 57 kilojoules of excess heat. It illustrates the difficulty of looking for tritium. The LENR-CANR Library has other, more recent papers by Will (1994) and Claytor (1998) with even better results. Readers may be interested to see the evolution of their work.

March 2003. We take a closer look at some of the early history of cold fusion. The state of Utah played a starring role in the first years. It commissioned a report by W. Hansen (1991). This report illustrates how difficult it was to judge cold fusion results at first, and how foolish the rush to judgment in 1989 was. Utah funded the National Cold Fusion Institute, which was run by one of the world's leading electrochemists, F. Will. The institute published definitive proof that cold fusion produces tritium, which can only be the product of a nuclear reaction. The dark side of 1989 is shown in a hard-hitting expose of the role of MIT, by E. Mallove (2003).

A few years after research began, it became apparent that cold fusion not only produces tritium and helium, in some cases it converts the metal cathode into some other metal. This was dramatic evidence that cold fusion is more complicated than anyone anticipated. Transmutations were reported by Bockris (1995), Mizuno (1996) and Miley (1996), and in the work of K. Wolf (T. Passell) (1995) we featured earlier.

De Ninno et al., at the ENEA (Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment) report important evidence for helium production in a cold fusion experiment. The report in our library is here (2003). The ENEA website in English is here. We have recently added early, important papers from Stanford University, by Schreiber (1990) and Huggins (1993). We would like to draw the reader's attention to two papers describing tritium results at Los Alamos by Claytor et al., Tritium production from low voltage deuterium discharge on palladium and other metals (2002), and Tritium Production from Palladium Alloys (1998).

February 2003. Very unusual radioactive elements were produced in a Pons-Fleischmann cell by K. Wolf at Texas A & M. The results were reported by T. Passell (EPRI) (1995). Mallove (1995) described some of background politics that prevented more widespread dissemination of these results.

We have uploaded more papers from the University of Illinois, including ones by Miley, Luo and Castano (all 2002).

Introducing A Student's Guide to Cold Fusion (2003), by Edmund Storms, in HTML format with links to many of the papers in the Library. A version in Acrobat format is available here. A paper by Oriani (1990) describes excess heat measured with a Seebeck calorimeter.

January 2003

We have uploaded some papers from the INFN - Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, http://www.lnf.infn.it/ We are also in the process of uploading more papers from the ICCF-7 proceedings, by Case, Iazzi, Miles, Lonchampt, Sankaranarayanan and Savvatimova.

December 2002

A nine page introduction and a collection of thirteen reprinted papers by Szpak, Mosier-Boss et al. are gathered in Technical Report 1696, Anomalous Behavior of the Pd/D System (1995), published by the U.S. Navy, Naval Command, Control and Ocean Surveillance Center RDT& E Division. The file is 2.5 MB long. The thirteen papers are also available individually in the Library. The Naval Research Laboratory and the China Lake Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division have published several fine papers about cold fusion. See papers listed under M. Miles, and the reports edited by Mosier-Boss et al. A very important paper by Miles was recently uploaded, Correlation of excess power and helium production during D₂O and H₂O electrolysis using palladium cathodes. Among other things, this demonstrates why the famous negative 1989 experiment by Lewis et al. (CalTech) was actually positive. Lewis made an " obvious" error in calorimetry, and both Lewis and Albagi (MIT) used far too insensitive helium detection.

On Wednesday November 24, 2002, Utah Public Radio (KUER.org) interviewed Dr. Michael McKubre, Scientist from SRI International Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, and Charles Beaudette, Author of " Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed." The audio file is here: http://audio.kuer.org:8000/file/rw112702.mp3. A transcript of the Interview is available in the Introduction to LENR-CANR section.

A paper by McKubre (2000) (SRI) is optimistic that a working theory to explain cold fusion is emerging. McKubre expressed this view in the Utah Public Radio interview (above). This paper describes some of SRI's successful replications of different cold fusion techniques, with different instruments. One of these is rather unusual: the Double Structured palladium-black cathode developed by Arata and Zhang (1994).

A paper by Roulette, Roulette and Pons (1996) describe a high temperature reflux boiling cell that produced 101 watts of excess heat continuously for days, adding up to 294 MJ. The Fleischmann-Pons boil off results were confirmed in a series of experiments performed by Lonchampt and Bonnetain (1996). Lonchampt was one of Commissioners on the French Atomic Energy Commission when these experiments were performed. He has retired and he is working on proton conductors with Jean-Paul Biberian, described in two papers uploaded earlier.

Selected pages from Charles Beaudette's book Excess Heat (2002) are now available in the library. (See also the book description below).

Papers by Cellucci (1996) and Gozzi (1998) describe x-ray detection. A paper by Oriani and Fisher, Generation of Nuclear Tracks during Electrolysis, was published in the October 2002 issue of the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics (JJAP). Unfortunately, the printer made a serious error in Table 1. The correct version of the table is here, with the abstract and a pointer to the file at the JJAP Online web site. Similar results were reported by Lipson (2002) at ICCF-9. Cravens (1993) offers practical advice for experimenters on a tight budget. This paper was voted " best in conference" by Martin Fleischmann at ICCF-4.

November 2002.

This month we feature newly uploaded papers by Ed Storms. Storms studied the Pons-Fleischmann Effect at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) starting shortly after the announcement in 1989 and is now working in his own laboratory. He has successfully produced excess heat as well as tritium, both on numerous occasions. His major interest has been to understand why the effect is so hard to replicate and discover the unique conditions required for its initiation. To this end, he has surveyed the entire literature on the subject and written several critical reviews of the P-F effect as well as the field in general. These provide a student with the background needed to understand the scientific implications of the claims.

Storms' landmark paper How to produce the Pons-Fleischmann effect is required reading for anyone who wishes to know how an experiment is actually performed. Many skeptics, including the authors of the ERAB report (1989) have the peculiar idea that a cold fusion experiment is inherently " simple." They wrote that it consists of " just a pair of electrodes" immersed in a " jar" (sic) of heavy water. This is like characterizing a transistor as " just a slab of silicon with a dab of boron and phosphorous thrown in." As this paper shows, testing the materials and devising the instruments in a cold fusion experiment takes months of intense labor and expert knowledge.

We now have twelve papers by Storms. Here are some recommended for the general reader:

How to produce the Pons-Fleischmann effect.StormsEhowtoprodu.pdf (1996)
Some Thoughts on the Nature of the Nuclear-Active Regions in PalladiumStormsEsomethough.pdf (1996)
A critical evaluation of the Pons-Fleischmann effect: Part 1 & Part 2StormsEacriticale.pdf (2000 both parts are in this file)
Cold Fusion: An Objective Assessment StormsEcoldfusionc.pdf (2001)

Many readers downloaded a paper by Prof. Richard Oriani, The Physical and Metallurgical Aspects of Hydrogen in Metals (1993). Oriani was one of the first to verify the cold fusion, in 1989. Unfortunately we do not have his Fusion Technology paper describing the replication, but he has sent us four other papers:

A Brief Survey of Useful Information About Hydrogen in Metals (1994)
An investigation of anomalous thermal power generation from a proton-conducting oxide (1996) A replication of Mizuno's proton conductor excess heat)
Anomalous heavy atomic masses produced by electrolysis (1998)
Generation of Nuclear Tracks during Electrolysis (2002)

Selected pages from EPRI's definitive report on cold fusion, Development of Advanced Concepts for Nuclear Processes in Deuterated Metals. (1994)

Annual APS March Meeting 2003

Session K33 - Cold Fusion.

This conference is over, but the abstracts are still available on the APS website. The cold fusion session attracted about 70 participants. LENR-CANR.org may offer a DVD video of the sessions.

http://www.aps.org/meet/MAR03/baps/abs/S9530.html