Cold Fusion Filmmakers Go Back to Filming
By Steven B. Krivit
Clayton Brown and Monica Ross of 137 Films, after announcing several months ago that their film was done, have started filming again.
The film was originally titled “The Experiment,” then retitled “The Believers.” Production was finished last fall. At the end of September, according to Brown’s blog, they tried to find buyers at Independent Film Week in New York.
In November, after they had announced that they were done filming and were editing, they asked to interview me for the film. I declined because of my lack of confidence in their understanding of this complex and convoluted topic.
In December, Brown and Ross announced that they were back on the set and filming again. In this second round, according to their Web site, they plan to interview “a cold fusion enthusiast with his own radio show and a high-school student intent on pursuing cold fusion as a career.”
The crew for “The Believers” also plans to go to a lab affiliated with the University of Missouri Life Science Business Incubator at Monsanto Place, to film researchers formerly with Omer, Israel-based Energetics Technologies, Ltd. These researchers are now affiliated with a new corporation, Energetics Technologies USA LLC.
The University of Missouri lab is championed by cold fusion proponent Rob Duncan, vice chancellor for research. Duncan is also one of the incubator’s directors. In a presentation he gave in Rome in 2009, Duncan suggested muon-catalyzed fusion as a possible explanation for “cold fusion.”
However, the energy cost for muons is far greater than the energy produced by muon-catalyzed fusion and thus cannot explain the anomalous heat produced in low-energy nuclear reactions. Furthermore, the branching ratio of muon-catalyzed fusion conflicts with that of LENR.
I met longtime cold fusion critic Richard Garwin in November, and he told me that he explained to Duncan why muon-catalyzed fusion cannot explain LENR.
“Duncan seems to believe what he wants to believe,” Garwin said.
