LENR Patents Open Doors to New Investment and New Conflict

Nov. 20, 2015 – By Steven B. Krivit –

Certain low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) researchers are now obtaining patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Recently issued patents in this field may stimulate private-sector investment in LENR research. At the same time, competition among scientists is intensifying.

Recent decisions by the USPTO indicate increased recognition of patentability in the field. For the last 25 years, venture capitalists have been reluctant to fund such research, in part because their chances of obtaining U.S. patent protection were slim to none. Although applicants who were issued recent LENR patents omitted the term LENR in their applications, they use the same materials, general processes and general concepts as other researchers in the LENR field have used.

New Energy Times has learned that, on Nov. 10, the USPTO issued patent US 9,182,365 B2 for a LENR method that produces excess heat to David Allan Kidwell, a chemist with the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). Kidwell’s second LENR patent, US 9,192,918, will issue on Nov. 24. Although some patents for LENR excess-heat-related inventions were issued in the 26-year history of this field, they have been rare events.

Two U.S. government-sponsored reviews of LENRs, one in 1989 and another in 2004, concluded that excess heat from LENRs and the entire set of nuclear phenomena in LENRs were not genuine. Subsequent events, and documents hidden since 1989, have shown that their conclusions were wrong. U.S. patent examiners have relied on these reviews, among other references, as grounds to reject all claims related to this new possible source of clean nuclear energy.

Navy Scientist
According to the patents, Kidwell has invented a method for producing excess heat by special preparation of palladium nanoparticles, two nanometers or less, placed on a metal-oxide support mechanism and subjected to pressurized deuterium gas. Kidwell works in NRL’s Surface Nanoscience and Sensor Technology Section (Code 6177).

Kidwell filed a provisional patent application, #61/246,619, with the USPTO on Sept. 29, 2009. A year later, he filed patent application #12/893,325 on Sept. 29, 2010. It was initially rejected by patent examiner Colette B. Nguyen (supervised by examiner Melvin C. Mayes) for being too broad and for conflicting with prior inventions. Kidwell divided the application and submitted application #13/921,195 on June 18, 2013, and application #13/962,024 on Aug. 8, 2013.

On Dec. 22, 2014, Nguyen objected to three relatively minor claims in the first application. Kidwell overcame these, and the patent, “Excess Enthalpy Upon Pressurization of Nanosized Metals with Deuterium,” US 9,182,365 B2, issued on Nov. 10, 2015. The examiner offered no objections to the other application and it will issue on Nov. 24.

In Tables 4 and 5 of the application for patent US 9,192,918, Kidwell displayed data for 33 experiments that produced an average of 52 Joules of excess heat per gram of material. These experiments produced, on average, 1.7 times more heat output than the expected heat produced by ordinary chemistry. In Table 2 of patent US 9,182,365 B2, Kidwell showed data for 47 experiments that produced excess heat.

The NRL data are in line with a potentially new class of LENR-based battery technology. A conventional AAA carbon-zinc battery has an energy capacity of approximately 1,268 Joules and weighs 9.7 grams, which amounts to 131 Joules per gram. Kidwell’s research is basic science rather than engineering; therefore, 52 Joules per gram is encouraging because an engineered device would likely be far more efficient. In fact, less-repeatable LENR experiments have shown far greater energy densities.

In 1994, scientists Francesco Piantelli, Sergio Focardi and Roberto Habel, working at the University of Siena, in Italy, published a paper in the Italian Physical Society’s Il Nuovo Cimento. They reported an experiment that produced 50 Watts of excess heat in a hydrogen-gas-loaded nickel rod with a mean excess heat of 44 Watts for 24 days, corresponding to 90 megajoules. The scientists did not report the mass of the active material used in the experiments, but I’ve seen the apparatus in Piantelli’s lab, and the active material can’t weigh more than a few grams, which indicates extremely high energy densities.

As exciting as these energy densities appear, there is a long road from basic science to commercial technology and working products, and many questions — about, for example, device size, manufacturing cost, and run time — remain unanswered.

Kidwell’s Record
In the past, Kidwell has been critical of other researchers in this field. In his first public appearance in the field, during a 2008 presentation at the 14th International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF-14), in Washington, D.C., Kidwell spoke in a condescending tone about the expertise and claims of researchers in the field who had reported low-energy nuclear transmutations.

“If you have what you think you’re making all over your room, do you really have it?” Kidwell said. “Or are you just fooling yourself from some random event?”

Many of the researchers in the field who had reported LENR transmutation results had sufficient expertise to distinguish genuine transmutation products from ordinary laboratory contaminants. Nevertheless, Kidwell continued to lecture them.

“Without all these precautions,” he said, “I wouldn’t go talk to my colleagues. You’re not going to rewrite 100 years of chemistry, you’re not going to pass go and you’re not going to win a Nobel Prize! With these cautions, you might go talk to your colleagues and say, ‘Something unusual occurred.’ But without them, I would just kind of be embarrassed.”

In fact, LENR researchers have expanded the boundaries of chemistry and physics and revealed insights into natural phenomena that have perplexed scientists for 100 years. It is unprecedented that small, tabletop experiments, at room temperature, can cause nuclear transmutations and produce the broad array of nuclear phenomena observed in LENRs. [1-4]

Yes, Virginia
The following year, at ICCF-15, in Rome, Kidwell gave two presentations. The title of the first paper, “Yes, Virginia, There Is Heat, But It Is Most Likely of Chemical Origin,” alluded to a line in an 1897 editorial about Santa Claus in the New York Sun newspaper. Kidwell was equating people who reported LENR excess-heat results to people who believed in Santa Claus. Kidwell emphasized his point further by the title’s suggestion that all LENR excess heat was the result of ordinary chemistry, rather than a novel nuclear phenomenon.

In that presentation, Kidwell discussed his LENR experiments with deuterium gas. He asserted that the pressurization cycles of deuterium and hydrogen gas fed into a chamber filled with palladium-based materials could be compared with the depressurization cycles to determine any excess heat. He claimed that the pressurization/depressurization cycle of hydrogen always gave a neutral heat balance; he used this as a zero baseline for the deuterium gas experiments.

Despite the dismissive title, Kidwell wrote in the conclusion of his paper that his deuterium gas experiments did produce excess heat. However, in the next sentence he wrote that, because the excess heat diminished after repeated pressurization/depressurization cycles, the effect looked more like chemical energy than nuclear energy. In the last sentence of his conclusion, he wrote that he could not fully explain the results and that “other sources of heat must be considered.” It was an inconclusive conclusion. He said nothing about a possible nuclear phenomenon.

Kidwell also managed to misuse the term “excess heat” in his paper. In several instances, he used it when he clearly meant “apparent excess heat.” An example is in the abstract of his 2009 paper.

“In some matrices,” Kidwell wrote, “the likely source of the anomalous heat is D-H exchange with the water present in the matrix, where an approximate third increase of the expected energy from calculations can account for most of the excess heat. In other matrices, no simple explanation of the excess heat can be made.”

In the LENR field, the term “excess heat” means observed amounts of heat that cannot be accounted for by known chemistry. If any measured heat can be explained with any ordinary chemical processes, then it is not excess heat. Kidwell’s slide presentation was even more ambiguous than his proceedings paper. Nevertheless, on Sept. 29, 2010, Kidwell filed application #12/893,325 (based on his provisional Sept. 29, 2009, application) for a patent in which he claimed to have invented a method for generating excess heat in a LENR experiment, though he avoided using the term LENR in any of his patent filings.

Some Concerns
In his paper and in his patent application, Kidwell claimed that his experiments at NRL with hydrogen did not produce any excess heat. There are strong reasons not to trust this part of his claim and his data. Not only does a significant body of data in the field show that the presence of hydrogen, as a gas or in light water, produce excess heat and nuclear anomalies, but also Kidwell’s own slide presentation says that “hydrogen may not be the best control.” Another statement in Kidwell’s paper seems inaccurate.

“No convincing evidence of radiation or transmutations has been reported, and the calorimetry results are sometimes called into question,” he wrote.

This blanket statement is wrong. The field has abundant credible references for low levels of low-energy neutron emission, alpha emission, production of new elements and anomalous isotopic changes. [1-4]

Kidwell’s assertion that the reported calorimetry results of the entire field are suspect is not credible. His reference was Nathan Lewis of Caltech, who, in 1989, used rumors and inaccurate and misleading newspaper photos showing the wrong size of equipment on which to base his suspicions that electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons had incorrectly measured their excess heat.

Gloves Come Off
Kidwell threw another curveball while he was at the Rome conference. On Oct. 6, 2009, a week after he filed his provisional patent application #61/246,619 for excess heat, he gave a second presentation. In that, he suggested that, in a LENR transmutation experiment performed at Mitsubishi, the growth of praseodymium, a rare earth element reported by the Mitsubishi researchers, was the result of contamination.

But Kidwell did not simply suggest that the Mitsubishi data was the result of sloppiness on the part of the Japanese researchers. He went further, suggesting that a former Mitsubishi employee had used “lucky tweezers” to intentionally spike the experiment with praseodymium. It was a shocking accusation, even more so because it came from a U.S. government scientist.

In singling out the praseodymium result, Kidwell implied that the decade-long transmutation research effort led by Yasuhiro Iwamura, in a clean room at Mitsubishi, which demonstrated six pairs of element changes, not to mention anomalous isotopic shifts, was the result of contamination. This was not the case.

Some background information is required to understand what transpired among the U.S Navy, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and the U.S. Patent Office. In 2005, Kidwell, through NRL, agreed to work with Iwamura on a cooperative research agreement with Mitsubishi. At the time, Iwamura was having difficulty getting his own patent application through the USPTO; he told me that he had hoped that NRL would conduct an experimental replication that would help convince the examiner to grant his patent.

However, Kidwell failed to replicate Mitsubishi’s results. Iwamura, on the other hand, said that Kidwell didn’t set up and run the experiment according to detailed specifications provided by Mitsubishi. In an attempt to resolve their differences, Kidwell travelled to Japan to take another look at Iwamura’s entire experimental setup.

To Iwamura’s surprise, Kidwell announced, after 10 days in the Mitsubishi lab, that he was going to do an “environmental survey.” After doing so, Kidwell said he found traces of praseodymium “contamination” in one location in the Mitsubishi clean room, inside the mass balance. Within two weeks, Kidwell’s colleague Kenneth Grabowski, (NRL Surface Modification Branch, Code 6370), told Iwamura about the “environmental contamination.” Mitsubishi then checked the mass balance and they found praseodymium there too.

When Kidwell dropped his bombshell announcement at the 2009 Rome conference, Iwamura was given 5 minutes to rebut Kidwell’s assertion. Iwamura was aware of the impending attack and was prepared to respond. He spoke quickly, hardly pausing to inhale, and revealed that, because of multiple aspects of the experimental protocol, Kidwell’s claimed scenario was virtually impossible as an explanation for the reported transmutation data. Kidwell’s contamination scenario was, to use an old phrase, an extraordinary claim that lacked extraordinary evidence.

Iwamura told me that he was flabbergasted at Kidwell’s insinuation of spiking. “It was unbelievable,” Iwamura wrote, “for we have never used praseodymium as a reagent in our clean room!” Thus, the logical question is whether Kidwell brought some with him and surreptitiously placed microscopic amounts of praseodymium in the lab before or during his survey.

Kidwell’s survey took two-to-three hours, according to Iwamura. Kidwell had brought his own apparatus to perform the swipes. Iwamura and his colleague Takehiko Itoh were in the clean room during part of Kidwell’s survey, but they could not stay and watch him the entire time so Kidwell had ample opportunity to contaminate the Mitsubishi lab. The rest of the NRL visitors had gone home.

Because of Kidwell’s allegation of contamination, he claimed that his failure to replicate the Mitsubishi transmutation experiment was not his fault; the blame was Iwamura’s because, according to Kidwell, the transmutation experiment didn’t work.

I went up to Kidwell after his presentation in Rome and asked him to comment on a crucial omission from his presentation. Not only had all of Iwamura’s experiments always shown, in situ, the gradual increase of the heavy element, but they also always showed the concurrent, gradual decrease of a lighter element. These results are consistent with Iwamura’s theory, published in Fusion Technology in 1998. I asked Kidwell how he could explain the temporally correlated decrease of cesium (atomic mass = 132.9 amu) while the increase of praseodymium (atomic mass = 140.9 amu) was measured during experiments.

Kidwell started to respond, but after the first two words came out of his mouth, Grabowski, who was standing next to him, ordered Kidwell to stop talking to me. ( Full story here )

Patently Successful
As a civilian employee of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Kidwell had a remarkably easy time getting his patent through the USPTO. His success may have been helped by his careful selection of terminology and claims.

In his applications, Kidwell avoided making any claim of a nuclear reaction — low-energy, “cold fusion,” or otherwise. He also did not support his case by claiming any associated emission of nuclear particles or transmutation products.

Kidwell did not use the term LENR in the patent application; nor did he make any suggestion that the excess heat he observed was of nuclear origin or magnitude. Nevertheless, the 12 papers on LENRs that he and his colleagues have presented or published since 2008 at “cold fusion” and LENR conferences leave no doubt that the research discussed in his patent is about low-energy nuclear reactions.

The examiner could have looked, for example, at Kidwell’s 2009 paper and seen that reference #1 was Fleischmann and Pons’ 1989 fusion paper published in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry. [5] The examiner would have seen that Kidwell’s paper had also cited Iwamura’s 2002 paper in the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics. [6] In his patent applications, Kidwell did not cite the prior art of Fleischmann-Pons or Iwamura.

Nevertheless, Kidwell’s two patents are now citable prior art that, as far as the USPTO is concerned, are based on operable, useful and novel ideas.

The Mitsubishi-NRL Backstory
Iwamura and his associates had been performing LENR experiments since 1993. Initially, they performed electrolysis experiments with palladium and heavy water. The data they reported in a 1998 paper in Fusion Technology made it clear to them that they were dealing with nuclear processes, not ordinary chemistry.

“Chemical reactions cannot explain the X-ray and neutron emissions and the detection of the anomalous elements,” Iwamura wrote. “Excess-heat generation up to 10 keV per atom also cannot be produced by the known chemical reactions. [But] the most anomalous feature of the phenomena in the deuterium-palladium system is our detection of various elements that did not exist before electrolysis.” [7]

In Iwamura’s 1998 Fusion Technology paper, he proposed the Electron-Induced Nuclear Reaction Model. He postulated that the reactions were based on the weak-interaction creation of neutrons, although he did not propose a mechanism that could explain how the neutrons were created. In this theory, neutron captures induce nuclear transmutations of target elements. Subsequent beta decays produce transmutation products composed of heavier stable elements.

Like many other LENR researchers who were paying attention to transmutations, Iwamura also looked for anomalous isotopic ratios. He saw significant deviations in iron. He tested a sample of natural iron and took three readings for the iron-57/iron-56 ratio with a secondary ion mass spectrometer (SIMS). The measurements were 0.023, 0.023, and 0.022. Among five samples tested in the heavy-water electrolysis experiments, all of them showed anomalously high ratios, typically three times higher than the natural isotopic ratio. [8]

In 2001, Iwamura switched to deuterium-gas LENR experiments. He saw transmutations similar to those when he used electrolysis, but the reaction rate was much slower. As a result, he didn’t expect to see any excess heat and therefore didn’t attempt to perform calorimetry. The advantage, however, was that the possibility of contamination was reduced by several orders of magnitude. A secondary benefit was that he could measure transmutations each week in the closed system as they occurred, through online, in situ XPS (X-ray Photoelectron Spectrometry) measurements, which can be used to analyze for elements in near-real time.

Iwamura’s deuterium-gas research — first published in the prominent Japanese Journal of Applied Physics in 2002 — is substantially the same as the ideas contained in the 2015 Kidwell patents; both concepts use the idea of nanometer-sized particles placed on a metal-oxide support mechanism, and both are subjected to pressurized deuterium gas. The biggest difference in experimental data used to support claims in the respective patent applications is that Iwamura analyzed only for transmutation products whereas Kidwell analyzed only for excess heat.

Iwamura filed for a U.S. patent on Oct. 19, 2001. In his 2009 provisional filing and his 2010 patent application, Kidwell did not cite any of Iwamura’s application prior art.

Iwamura’s 10-year ordeal with the USPTO was not nearly as trouble-free as that of Kidwell. Iwamura’s experience, however, was typical of those of most scientists who tried to patent LENR-related inventions before 2010.

Patent examiner Jack W. Keith responded with an initial rejection to Iwamura’s application on Oct. 28, 2003. Keith believed Iwamura’s claim was based on “cold fusion,” and because he believed that all claims of “cold fusion” were “allegations that border on the incredible,” he believed they didn’t work. In patent lingo, the term for such devices is “inoperable.” If the patent examiner determines that a device is inoperable, it cannot be patented because it fails the fundamental test of providing utility.

“Because the allegations would not be readily accepted by a substantial portion of the scientific community,” Keith wrote, “sufficient substantiating evidence of operability must be submitted by applicant.”

Keith’s approach and response to Iwamura’s application were typical of most USPTO examiners to LENR-related patent applications. As early as June 5, 1989, the USPTO had advised its examiners not to let “cold fusion” patent applications slip through the pre-examination screening process.

In 1994, the USPTO established a secret policy called Sensitive Application Warning System to weed out applications for a variety of controversial or potentially embarrassing subjects as well as nonsensical topics such as antigravity devices, free-energy claims, and other matters that violate the general laws of physics. “Cold fusion” was listed among these. The policy remained secret until an employee of the USPTO leaked a memo outlining it in 2006. I spoke with the employee, but he wants to remain anonymous until he retires. The SAWS policy continued until the USPTO retired it on March 2, 2015.

Thus, by mandate of the USPTO, here is what happened to Iwamura, and what happened to many other applicants in the LENR field for two decades. In his initial rejection on Oct. 28, 2003, Keith cited a litany of 1989 news stories reporting, in his words, “negative results from … scientists skilled in the art.”

“The examiner,” Keith wrote, “has presented evidence showing that, in such cold fusion systems, the claims of transmutation, excess heat as well as of other nuclear reaction products, are not reproducible or even obtainable. It consequently must follow that the claims of excess heat are not reproducible or even obtainable with applicant’s invention.”

Keith cited the 1989 Department of Energy review, as well as informal speculations about errors discussed in Internet newsgroups, in e-mails and on personal Web sites. The examiner cited the books by Frank Close (1991), John Huizenga (1992), and Gary Taubes (1993) that depicted what was then called “cold fusion” as an erroneous body of experimental and theoretical research. In hindsight, it is easy to see that Keith was not going to issue Iwamura’s patent.

Keith argued with Iwamura that, because of the many reported failures to replicate “cold fusion” in 1989, Iwamura’s device could not be considered real unless it was replicated at a credible independent laboratory. The examiner, of course, could not prove that Iwamura’s device didn’t work; nor could he prove that the science was wrong.

Thus began a frustrating and wasteful exercise in futility by both the examiner and Iwamura. The examiner made demands that might satisfy his judgment that Iwamura’s device was operable. But once Iwamura satisfied one demand, the examiner presented another, and so on. There is a term for this. It’s called “moving the goalposts.”

The Game
On July 7, 2004, the examiner again rejected Iwamura’s claim and demanded that his experiment be replicated by an “independent unbiased source.”

“Reproducibility,” Keith wrote, “must go beyond one’s own lab.”

Accordingly, on January 7, 2005, Iwamura informed the examiner that researchers at Osaka University had replicated the transmutation experiments. Even though the experiment took place in another laboratory, the examiner denied the claim because one of the Mitsubishi researchers helped the Osaka researchers.

In response, on April 4, 2006, Iwamura advised the examiner that, on May 20, 2005, Mitsubishi had begun a cooperative research agreement with NRL in an attempted replication effort. Sometime in the fall of 2005, Kidwell, at NRL, failed in his initial attempt to replicate the Iwamura work, but neither he nor Iwamura had given up.

On July 10, 2006, three months after Iwamura advised the patent office of the in-process NRL replication attempt, Kidwell, Grabowski and one other person from NRL visited the Mitsubishi lab and observed experiments. That’s when Kidwell performed his environmental survey and asserted that the Mitsubishi clean room was contaminated with praseodymium.

I do not know whether the information about Kidwell’s contamination claim reached the patent office then, but the examiner allowed the application to remain open, and he gave Iwamura more time to produce other replications that, ostensibly, would change the examiner’s mind.

On April 21, 2008, examiner Keith issued his final rejection, again based primarily on Keith’s belief that Iwamura was trying to patent “cold fusion.” But Iwamura’s patent application made no such assertion. He neither used the phrase “cold fusion” nor implied the erroneous theory of deuterium-deuterium fusion at room temperature. To the contrary, Iwamura had been proposing a weak-interaction-based neutron model since 1998 to explain his experiments. The examiner didn’t seem to understand the distinction. The examiner also didn’t seem to know about the three replications that had been performed at Japanese universities.

“Applicant has been given more than two years to supply the office with evidence in support of the invention,” Keith wrote. “No such clear and convincing evidence has been provided. This supports the examiner’s contentions that applicant’s invention is drawn to the theory of “cold fusion,” as there is no ability to reproduce [it.]”

Keith was correct about one aspect. The theory of “cold fusion” is not supported by experimental evidence, and in fact, the experimental evidence disproves the theory of “cold fusion.” I presented these facts for the first time on Aug. 20, 2008, at the American Chemical Society conference, in Philadelphia, Penn. [8] I also published this information, including the key distinction between “cold fusion” and LENRs, in peer-reviewed journals and print encyclopedias in the following years. [1-4] But in April 2008, the idea of “cold fusion” was stuck in Keith’s head.

The hoped-for NRL replication attempt didn’t pan out, but Iwamura told Keith on Sept. 22, 2008, that the experiment had been replicated by researchers at Iwate University and at Kobe University, without any direct assistance from Mitsubishi researchers. The examiner still refused to change his mind.

New Examiner
On Dec. 12, 2008, prosecution of the Iwamura application was switched from examiner Keith to examiner Johannes P. Mondt. I don’t know the reason for the switch. Mondt continued with the same approach: He assumed that Iwamura had been claiming “cold fusion,” and therefore, the invention was summarily dismissed as inoperative. Iwamura allowed that application to expire.

On June 12, 2009, Iwamura re-submitted the patent application and began the whole process again. On Oct. 9, 2009, Mondt gave Iwamura the same reason for rejection.

“There is no reputable evidence of record to support any allegations or claims that the invention is capable of operating as indicated in the specification,” Mondt wrote.

Iwamura even went to meet with Mondt on July 9, 2010, but that didn’t help. Iwamura told me that Mondt asked irrelevant questions but Iwamura tried his best to explain the status of the research in the field to the examiner. Ron Rudder, an attorney from the American law firm representing Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, also tried to help explain the research, but their efforts were in vain. Mondt just didn’t seem to understand the science, Iwamura wrote to me in an e-mail.

The application sat on Mondt’s desk for another year. Then an interesting, for me, turn of events took place. I had unknowingly become part of the story.

On Oct. 10, 2011, Mondt used a comment written by Kirk Shanahan, a long-time critic of LENRs, about one of my reviews of the field as a reason to reject Iwamura’s patent application. The reason Mondt cited Shanahan’s critical comment was that Shanahan had cited Kidwell, who had asserted that Iwamura’s transmutation was the result of contamination. Kidwell’s suggestion of contamination had scored a direct hit against Mitsubishi’s U.S. patenting efforts.

Shanahan has not been a disinterested party in the LENR controversy. He is a scientist who works at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River National Laboratory, in South Carolina. When Shanahan made his erroneous comment, he was sponsored by contract DE-AC09-08SR22470 from the Department of Energy. Kidwell’s expenses were paid for by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

I wrote a brief response to Shanahan on the New Energy Times Web site on July 30, 2010. Ten researchers in the field — including Iwamura — joined forces and wrote their own response to Shanahan. That paper published on Aug 6. 2010, but Mondt ignored both responses.

Iwamura’s patent was not issued in the U.S. He did, however, obtain a LENR patent in Japan, 04346838 (P2001-201875), and two related Japanese patents, 0434726 (P2005-142985) and 04347262 (P2005-142986), all on July 24, 2009. He was awarded a European LENR patent, EP1202290B1, on April 12, 2013.

Later that year, in the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics, researchers at Toyota Central Research and Development Laboratories reported that they, too, had replicated the Mitsubishi findings: an increase in the amount of praseodymium in a cesium-ion-implanted Pd/CaO support mechanism subjected to pressurized deuterium gas. [10]

In March 2015, the Condensed Matter Nuclear Reaction Division of the Research Center for Electron Photon Science at Tohoku University, Japan, was established, and Iwamura was asked to head the LENR research group there.

The most telling and perhaps accurate statement made by Mondt about Iwamura’s application was this: “Applicant’s finding, if true, would represent a serious revamping of standard nuclear physics and, as such, would represent an extraordinary achievement.”

————

Nov. 22, 2015, Clarification: This article describes the Iwamura / Mitsubishi experiment as a LENR transmutation experiment. It is not. It is a LENR gas-loading experiment in which Iwamura analyzes only for LENR transmutation products.
————
Nov. 23, 2015, Update: LENR researcher Francesco Celani brought to my attention that in 2002 and 2003, he and his colleagues at the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Frascati also reported an electrolytic replication of the Mitsubishi/Iwamura experiment. [11, 12]

The Celani group used ICP-MS before the experiment to characterize all components present in the cell including the electrolyte. After repeated deuterium loading/unloading cycles, they found that some strontium was transmuted to molybdenum. They reported that molybdenum was found in excess of any possible contamination, and the isotopic composition of the molybdenum was different from the natural one.
————
* Kidwell changed the title of his ICCF-15 paper/presentation at least three times. When he submitted a copy of his slides to the USPTO in a provisional patent application on Sept. 29, 2009, the title was “Anomalous Heat Generation from Deuterium (or Platinum) Loaded Nanoparticles.” When he submitted his abstract and slides to the ICCF-15 conference, it was “Does Gas Loading Produce Anomalous Heat?” When he displayed his title slide during his presentation, he changed it to “Does Gas Loading Produce Anomalous Heat? Yes, Virginia, There Is Heat BUT.” When he submitted his paper to the ICCF-15 conference, he changed it to “Yes Virginia, There is Heat But It Is Likely of Chemical Origin.”

Link to Iwamura LENR Bibliography
Link to Kidwell LENR Bibliography

References
1. Krivit, Steven B. (Sept. 3, 2009) “A New Look at Low-Energy Nuclear Reaction Research,” Journal of Environmental Monitoring, Royal Society of Chemistry, 11, p. 1731-46, 2009, DOI:10.1039/B915458M
2. Krivit, Steven B. (Aug. 2011) “Development of Low-Energy Nuclear Reaction Research,” Nuclear Energy Encyclopedia, pg. 481-96, Steven B. Krivit, Editor-in-Chief, Jay H. Lehr, Series Editor, John Wiley & Sons, 978-0-470-89439-2
3. Krivit, Steven B. (2012) “The Big Picture of Low-Energy Nuclear Reaction Research,” Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, 107, ISSN 0003-018x, p. 413-14
4. Krivit, Steven. B. (Sept. 23, 2013) “Energy: Review of Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions,” Reference Module in Chemistry, Molecular Sciences and Chemical Engineering, Reedijk, Jan, Ed., Elsevier, Waltham, MA, ISBN: 978-0-12-409547-2, doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-409547-2.01193-8
5. Fleischmann, Martin, and Pons, Stanley (April 10, 1989) “Electrochemically Induced Nuclear Fusion of Deuterium,” Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, 261(2), Part 1, p. 301-8; Errata: Fleischmann, Martin, Pons, Stanley and Hawkins, Marvin, 263, p. 187-8 (May 10, 1989)
6. Iwamura, Yasuhiro, Sakano, Mitsuru, and Itoh, Takehiko (July 2002) “Elemental Analysis of Pd Complexes: Effects of D2 Gas Permeation,” Japanese Journal of Applied Physics A, 41, p. 4642-50
7. Iwamura, Yasuhiro, Itoh, Takehiko, Gotoh, Nobuaki, and Toyoda, Ichiro (1998) “Detection of Anomalous Elements, X-ray and Excess Heat in a D 2-Pd System and its Interpretation by the Electron-Induced Nuclear Reaction Model,” Fusion Technology, 33, p. 476-92
8. Iwamura, Yasuhiro, Itoh, Takehiko, Gotoh, Nobuaki, Sakano, Mitsuru, Toyoda, Ichiro and Sakata, Hiroshi (1997) “Detection of Anomalous Elements, X-Ray and Excess Heat Induced by Continuous Diffusion of Deuterium through Multilayer Cathode (Pd/CaO/Pd),” Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Cold Fusion, p. 167-71
9. Krivit, Steven, B. (Aug. 20, 2008) “Low-Energy Nuclear Reaction Research – 2008 Update,” presented at the American Chemical Society meeting, Philadelphia, PA
10. Hioki, Tatsumi, Takahashi, Naoko, Kosaka, Satoru, Nishi, Teppei, Azuma, Hirozumi, Hibi, Shogo, Higuchi, Yuki, Murase, Atsushi and Motohiro, Tomoyoshi (October 4, 2013) “Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry Study on the Increase in the Amount of Pr Atoms for Cs-Ion-Implanted Pd/CaO Multilayer Complex with Deuterium Permeation,” Japanese Journal of Applied Physics, 52(10R) p. 107301-1-8
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