LENR Archives Illuminate Scientific Mystery of Century – Part 1
Feb. 20, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –
[This is Part 1 of a Four-Part Series]
On Jan. 14, I reported that New Energy Times had completed an update of our low-energy nuclear reactions conference proceedings pages. This update included the upload of our digitized copies of the front matter and table of contents of all the International Conference on Cold Fusion series proceedings. As far as I know, this is the first time that these indexes have been placed in the public domain.
A lot of significant work happened in the first decade of LENR research. Some of this research appears to have been forgotten, and it is surprisingly applicable, especially today. Much of it is just as significant as the more recent work. The digital indexes of the conference papers will help researchers be aware of the full body of information available in this field. I hope we will also digitize the remaining proceedings.
As I was digitizing the table of contents from ICCF-6 (1996), ICCF-7 (1998) and ICCF-8 (2000), I glanced through them for papers that caught my attention. I looked at two dozen papers. Only two of them were available to download from the LENR-CANR.org site, and most of the others were not listed there.
I found interesting things in 14 of these papers. Some of the remaining papers from the group I selected may have had notable findings; however, some of them were so poorly written that I was not able to draw out clear meaning or conclusions.
I hope that these papers will shed more light on the past and the present and illuminate the future, as well. In this four-part series of articles, I present a listing of the 14 papers along with the highlights from each of them.
1996 was a particularly rich time for creative research and occasionally stunning results in LENRs. In many ways, the LENR research community in 1996 was far truer to the scientific method, unencumbered by ideology or commercial interests, than in the years that followed. These researchers were doing their best to observe something new and unexpected, yet they were constrained by their limited abilities of observation and experience of something science had never seen. The parable of blind men each examining a unique part of an elephant, with each man (and, occasionally, woman) concluding with absolute certainty that he or she knew the precise characteristics of the elephant is parallel to what happened with LENR in the early days.
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ICCF6 Conference (1996)
Tullio Bressani, “Nuclear Products in Cold Fusion Experiments: Comments and Remarks After ICCF-6”
Tullio Bressani, a professor at the University of Turin, explained the following concepts:
– Why many research groups early in the field’s history searched for high-energy neutrons even though discoverers Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons knew that few high-energy neutrons occurred
– A comprehensive history of the key helium-4 experiments, although Bressani omitted John Bockris’ helium-4 work
– An excellent summary of Daniele Gozzi’s efforts to analyze his experiments for helium-4
Bressani looked at the helium-4 observations and concluded that helium-4 was the complete explanation for the nuclear product that would explain the excess heat in LENRs.
“These experimental facts seem to me largely enough to conclude that the excess power released in cold fusion cells is of nuclear origin (D + D –> 4He + Heat),” Bressani wrote.
This was an incomplete analysis because Bressani did not account for or consider the contributions of other nuclear processes to the total heat release of the experiment. Such experimental data was available to Bressani.
What may come as a surprise to observers of the field today is that Michael McKubre, an electrochemist with SRI International, and Peter Hagelstein, an associate professor of electrical engineering at MIT, who have been (or perhaps were) pursuing the heavy-hydrogen LENR path in the last decade, in hope of proving the D + D –> 4He + 24 MeV heat “cold fusion” idea, were both skeptical of this “cold fusion” concept in 1986.
As McKubre said on ABC-TV in 1996, he knew that LENR didn’t look like fusion. In 1992, Hagelstein knew that the reaction signatures evident by the experimental data were inconsistent with the idea of fusion. (See this article: LENR Is Not “Cold Fusion”)
But in 2000, McKubre and Hagelstein reversed themselves and convinced their peers and the public that “cold fusion” was exclusively about anomalous heat and helium-4 (D + D –> 4He + 24 MeV heat) and that they had performed the groundbreaking work that proved it. That is what they told the Department of Energy in 2004. As a result of their prestigious affiliations, their opinions had far-reaching influence in the field.
However, McKubre fabricated the key part of that proof. (See this index: Investigation of Michael McKubre’s “M4” Experiment.)
By 1996, the light-hydrogen LENR research versus the heavy-hydrogen LENR research fissure had emerged, but this is another story. By 2003, light-hydrogen LENR research had been significantly discredited by the heavy-hydrogen LENR researchers, and any remaining signs of the conflict went into remission, as did light-hydrogen LENR research, until it came back into vogue in 2011.
Ben Bush, Joseph Lagowski and Melvin Miles, “Nuclear Products Associated With the Pons and Fleischmann Effect: Helium Commensurate to Heat Generation, Calorimetry and Radiation”
Like Bressani, this trio was viewing the LENR data and basing their belief in “cold fusion” on a specific subset of the available data, and like the blind men and the elephants, they too were certain that their perspective was correct and complete.
Melvin Miles’ work was one of the key experiments that showed that helium-4 was generated in LENR experiments. Like Bressani, Miles did not account for the production of other nuclear products in the cells on the total energy balance and did not state his assumption that there were no other nuclear products.
A footnote to this story concerns Miles, the primary researcher on this paper when he worked at the Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, Calif. Because of the stigma attached to the subject, he decided that, to increase the chances of getting his work published, he would circumvent the bureaucratic red tape and ask his associates Ben Bush and Joseph Lagowski at the University of Texas to submit the paper. Miles’ supervisor soon assigned him to report to the stockroom clerk for his new assignment doing inventory of chemicals.
Jacques DuFour, Jacques Foos, Jean Paul Millot and Xavier DuFour, “From ‘Cold Fusion’ to ‘Hydrex’ and ‘Deutex’ States of Hydrogen”
The paper by Jacques DuFour and his colleagues, when he was working on contract for Shell Petroleum at the Laboratoire des Sciences Nucleaires in Paris, includes this idea: “unexplained disappearing of hydrogen (deuterium) which cannot be explained by leakage, diffusion through the walls of the reactor or combination with elements present in the reactor.”
Very few LENR researchers have attempted to measure, let alone find, the loss of hydrogen or deuterium in their experiments. This is a rare and significant observation, which supports the hypothesis that hydrogen or deuterium is the primary fuel consumed in LENRs.
Also, the researchers apparently performed a thorough search for the synthesis of new elements in the palladium electrode. This kind of extensive broad-spectrum elemental analysis was, and is, uncommon in the field. They concluded that one newly observed element could certainly not have been traced back to any source of contamination: lithium.
They suggested, among other proposals, that a weak interaction could create a neutron, which would in turn decay to a proton, to explain the production of the lithium. They attempted to derive a weak-interaction-based theoretical model, but DuFour’s theory never gained much recognition.
A decade later, Allan Widom and Lewis Larsen published their illuminating LENR theory, which included an explicit description of how a weak interaction can create a neutron in LENRs. (See index: Widom-Larsen Theory Portal)
Peter Hagelstein, “Anomalous Energy Transfer Between Nuclei and the Lattice”
For several years during the early 1990s, Hagelstein had been pursuing a “neutron hopping” model to explain LENR anomalies.
“The potential advantage of neutron hopping as a mechanism was that neutrons experience no Coulomb barrier, thus removing the Coulomb barrier problem. Neutron hopping with the exchange of low-momentum virtual neutron states appeared to be the only possible mechanism for tritium production,” Hagelstein wrote.
He also intuited what Larsen would later figure out, that ultra-low-momentum neutrons are produced from collective, synchronous effects.
In 1993, Hagelstein also appreciated that weak interactions were a feasible “non-fusion approach that actually begin[s] to address the Coulomb barrier problem.”
However, he based his model on virtual neutrons because he was never able to figure out how real neutrons could be formed within the systems. By 1996, as he explained in this paper, Hagelstein abandoned his “neutron hopping” model.
By 2000, Hagelstein was focused entirely on the heavy-hydrogen LENR concept, trying to make his case for D+D “cold fusion.” In the next few years, Hagelstein gained no observable ground with his “cold fusion” approach. When he pitched the idea to the Department of Energy in 2004. the department reviewer’s eyes began to roll, according to Randall Hekman, at that time president and CEO of Hekman Industries, who was at the meeting.
On July 10, 2008, New Energy Times published two feature articles on the light-hydrogen LENR research work of Francesco Piantelli and Sergio Focardi. A month later, when Hagelstein presented a paper at the ICCF-14 conference, he mocked light-hydrogen LENR research and implied that it was not credible.
By 2011, light-hydrogen LENR research made a strong return to popularity in the field. By 2012, Hagelstein cited the light-hydrogen LENR research in a preprint paper.
As I look back through the history of the field to see Hagelstein’s persistent (more than 50 papers) but limited effectiveness with LENR theories, I can’t help but think that he was appreciated within the field more for his prestige as the X-ray laser whiz kid, and perhaps for the fact that he represented MIT, than for anything he’s done with LENRs.
In his 2012 preprint, Hagelstein complained that mainstream science had isolated and ignored him since he began pursuing “cold fusion.”
“Those [researchers] who pursue anomalies such as the Fleischmann-Pons experiment are isolated from science and ignored,” Hagelstein wrote.
The recent film produced by 137 Films, “The Believers,” shows Hagelstein lamenting that the field is going to die. In 1953, Irving Langmuir, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, described characteristics of pathological sciences. According to Langmuir, a pathological science eventually dies out.
But the dying pathological science applies only to hypothesized “cold fusion.” Researchers who see the larger picture of LENR have gained remarkable attention recently in places like CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, and at the American Nuclear Society.
Hideo Kozima, Masayuki Ohta, Masahiro Nomura and Katsuhiko Hiroe, “Analysis of Nickel-Hydrogen Isotope System on TNCF Model”
In this paper, Japanese LENR theorist Hideo Kozima provides a review of significant early light-hydrogen LENR experiments. His first reference discusses work performed by Robert Bush and Robert Eagleton, then at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. According to Kozima, Bush and Eagleton found shifts in strontium isotopes associated with periods of excess heat.
Bush and Eagleton were using rubidium in their electrolyte, one element away from strontium. They speculated that rubidium was undergoing neutron capture. They were among many researchers during the mid-1990s who speculated that there was some unknown source of neutrons and that those neutrons would undergo neutron capture.
Other light-hydrogen LENR work Kozima reviewed was by the Piantelli-Focardi-Habel group in Italy and the group led by James Patterson in Sarasota, Florida. Kozima speculated that helium-4 could be formed from neutron capture on lithium-6, which, coincidentally, is one of the ideas that Widom and Larsen published in their 2006 paper.
Kozima knew how effective a neutron-based model was in explaining the broad spectrum of LENR phenomena.
“Thus, if we assume the existence of a stable thermal neutron in the crystal, we can explain various CF phenomena which show nuclear transmutation, excess-heat generation, tritium production, helium production etc. in several systems by conventional physics with only one adjustable parameter of trapped neutron density,” Kozima wrote.
Kozima later acknowledged Widom and Larsen for coming up with a real source of neutrons, and he said that this insight completed the gap where previously Kozima could only assume the existence of such ultra-low-momentum neutrons.
Part Two of this series will publish on Friday Monday Tuesday
Questions? Comments? Submit a Letter to the Editor.
