17th International Conference on “Cold Fusion” Next Week

Aug. 10, 2012 – By Steven B. Krivit –

The 17th International Conference on “Cold Fusion” takes place next week in Seoul, Korea.

A few dozen researchers — mostly the people who have been active in the field for the last 23 years — will give presentations. The conference schedule is here. The presenters include researchers from the U.K., U.S., Italy, Russia, Ukraine, Japan, India and China.

I spoke with Frank Gordon, the co-chair of the ICCF-17 conference, earlier this week and asked him about forthcoming highlights.

Gordon mentioned that Mitchell Swartz and George Miley will present recent work. Last year, Miley made a claim of 300 Watts of excess heat continuously, but after I spoke with him in great detail, I learned that his data showed only 8 Watts for 100 seconds.

The ICCF-17 schedule shows that Francesco Piantelli/Peter Mobberley will give the first technical paper. I e-mailed Mobberley on Monday, and he confirmed that Piantelli will not attend and that he will give the paper on Piantelli’s behalf.

Gordon also directed my attention to the participation of Brillouin and Defkalion at ICCF-17.

I spoke with LENR researcher Robert Godes of Brillouin on Monday, and he will not be going to Korea, but he said that LENR researcher Francis Tanzella, at SRI International, will give the paper on his behalf.

Menelaos Koulouris from Defkalion, the Greek company that was involved with Andrea Rossi, will present at ICCF-17. Despite the many media events this past year from Defkalion, it has failed to show any scientifically credible data.

I have been in contact with many of the researchers who will be presenting at the conference, and I have begun to get copies of their papers. They will appear here. Gordon has promised to release the remaining papers and abstracts on Aug. 13.

Pamela-Mosier Boss will be presenting a paper at ICCF-17, but because of recent management decisions at SPAWAR, she is not permitted to work in the field anymore as a SPAWAR employee, though she can do so on her own time. For this reason, she has made arrangements to list her affiliation as MIT, through the help of her colleague, LENR theorist Peter Hagelstein.

Mosier-Boss told me that her new paper addresses some question that Hagelstein had raised about the lack of X-rays in her work. She also said they have new ideas about the reaction mechanisms in LENRs.

“We speculate that the transmutation may be due to fission,” Mosier-Boss wrote. “Note that the energetic particles can be accounted for by the primary and secondary fusion reactions, which really aren’t fusion but are actually D-on-D stripping reactions.”