LENR Archives Illuminate Scientific Mystery of Century – Part 4
March 6, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –
[This is Part 4 of a four-part series. Part 1 published on Feb. 20, Part 2 published on Feb. 22, and Part 3 published on March 1.]
This is the continuation of a review of selected papers from the first decade of LENR research. This part continues with research from 1998.
This report briefly reviews two papers:
Campari, E.G., Focardi, S., Gabbani, V., Montalbano, V., Piantelli, F., Porcu, E., Tosti E. and Veronesi, S., “Ni-H Systems”
Kim, Y.E. and Zubarev, A.L., “Ultra Low-Energy Nuclear Fusion of Bose Nuclei in Nano-Scale Ion Traps”
The research published in the Campari paper is one of the most detailed presentations from the Piantelli group.
The paper from Yeong E. Kim, a physicist at Purdue University, reveals precisely how theorists who pursued the “cold fusion” hypothesis cherry-picked their data to fit their goals, thus leading to unscientific conclusions.
Kim is the co-chair of the forthcoming International Conference on Cold Fusion. The conference series was called the International Conference on Cold Fusion for most of the first decade, then shifted briefly to the International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, and is now back to the original name.
Also mentioned in this article is research commissioned by Thomas O. Passell, when he was working with the nuclear power group at the Electric Power Research Institute. Passell was one of the few researchers who had the insight and interest to look at LENRs from the perspective of nuclear chemistry, his discipline.
The sets of nuclear evidence that Passell found remain among the most significant and irrefutable proofs of LENR. Excess heat, on the other hand, makes for difficult proof of LENR because it vanishes immediately. The permanent nuclear evidence that Passell found does not have this problem. But the “cold fusion” believers avoided talking about this kind of data because it also disproves the hypothesis of cold fusion.
The slow progress of the field in the last decade cannot be blamed on attacks from mainstream scientists or pathological skeptics. In most cases, the critics have simply ignored the field. Cold fusion believers’ continued promotion of anomalous heat, rather than direct nuclear evidence, is the most significant reason for the field’s stagnation because skeptics don’t trust anomalous heat.
The review concludes with a brief example of how cold fusion believers, like Peter Hagelstein, ostracized Gene Mallove, who played a significant role as a journalist in and archivist of this field. Mallove was the founder and editor of Infinite Energy magazine.
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ICCF-8
Campari, E.G., Focardi, S., Gabbani, V., Montalbano, V., Piantelli, F., Porcu, E., Tosti E. and Veronesi, S., “ Ni-H Systems ”
Sergio Focardi is a retired physicist from the University of Bologna. He is a former friend and colleague of Francesco Piantelli, a retired biophysicist from the University of Siena. They worked together for many years in the 1990s on light-hydrogen LENR research.
In 2007, Focardi associated himself with a businessman named Andrea Rossi, a convicted fraud who decided to get into the LENR business. In 2011, in conjunction with a publicity stunt orchestrated by Rossi, Focardi claimed that he was the “father of nickel-hydrogen LENR systems.” But this was inconsistent with history, as Piantelli explained it to me. Back in 2000, before the Rossi debacle, all the original authors of the light-hydrogen LENR work agreed on the genesis of their work.
“The observation by one of the authors (F. Piantelli) of an anomalous behavior of the system Ni-H was the starting point of systematic research on these effects,” the authors wrote.
The research presented in the paper is one of if not the most detailed papers I have read from the Piantelli group. In previous New Energy Times articles, I reported extensively about the group’s excess-heat observations. (Please see Piantelli Group LENR News and Research Papers.) This paper provides a detailed explanation about their observations of neutron emissions as well as unusual particle tracks they observed.
“Unfortunately, this simple kind of chamber cannot be used to make a quantitative and precise measurement. Nevertheless, on having observed tracks of length up to 9cm, alpha particles can also be ruled out [as the source]. In fact, alpha particles of this range would have an energy of about 20 MeV, which is too high for alpha emission from known radioactive elements,” the authors wrote.
They also reported a wide variety of newly found elements from LENR transmutations. Reading this paper, I am reminded of an artificial distinction that proponents of the “cold fusion” hypothesis, such as Scott Chubb, had told me when I first began covering the field. Chubb said that transmutations do not occur in the heavy-hydrogen LENR systems, that they occur only in light-hydrogen LENR systems.
It is clear to me now how erroneous this distinction was: The real reason that transmutations were not often reported with heavy-hydrogen LENR systems is that those researchers did not want to look for transmutations, with the exception of only the lightest isotopes, such as tritium or helium-three or helium-four, that they thought could be the products of “cold fusion.”
Yeong E. Kim and Alexander L. Zubarev, “ Ultra Low-Energy Nuclear Fusion of Bose Nuclei in Nano-Scale Ion Traps ”
This paper from Yeong E. Kim, a physicist with Purdue University, reveals precisely how theorists who pursued the “cold fusion” hypothesis misled themselves and subsequently other people in the field. I do not, however, think that they intended to deceive.
“Recently, Arata and Zhang [3-5] observed anomalous production of both heat and helium-4 from their electrolysis experiments. A Pd metal cylinder containing Pd fine particles was used as a cathode in the electrolysis of heavy water. No other nuclear ashes or radiation were observed. The anomalous heat was not observed in the electrolysis of water in the control experiment,” Kim wrote.
I read those three references from Arata and Zhang. It is true that Arata and Zhang didn’t observe any other nuclear ashes or radiation. But here’s the catch: They didn’t look for other ashes or radiation. They were looking for what they wanted to see, and only what they wanted to see.
Kim cited other experimental papers to support his “cold fusion” thesis.
“A similar anomalous result, producing both heat and helium-four but no nuclear ashes or radiation, was also observed by Bush et al. [6-8], Miles and Bush [9], and Case [10]. In Case’s experiment [10], gaseous deuterium was introduced in a catalysis container consisting of activated carbon coated with a platinum-group metal operating at 130-300°C. The experimental results [3-11] suggest the following radiationless nuclear reaction: D+D –> 4He (Q = 23.848 MeV),” Kim wrote.
I read the 1998 paper by Bush and Lagowski. I found the same situation as Arata/Zhang: no other nuclear ashes or radiation observed, and none looked for.
When Bush and Lagowski were paid by EPRI to look for other nuclear ashes, they found them, in fact in the same year. In my 13 years following this field, nobody has ever talked about this EPRI-sponsored work. My sense is that these results have been intentionally ignored or simply disbelieved by the “cold fusion” people. I learned about this data by chance when I was scanning the EPRI research index. Here’s the article I wrote about it three years ago, “ Isotopic Anomalies Reveal LENR Insights.”
Passell also had researchers at the University of Texas analyze a cathode from Arata and Zhang, and those researchers found other nuclear evidence besides helium-4: numerous isotopic anomalies.
Passell was certainly an independent thinker in the field in the 1990s, when he was more active. I’m certain that his findings of substantial nuclear evidence that was contradictory to the “cold fusion” ideology were not appreciated by many of his colleagues. The progress of the science owes much to Passell for his insights and efforts.
The “cold fusion” believers also didn’t appreciate Gene Mallove, the founder of Infinite Energy magazine, when he began telling people, sometime around 2003, that LENRs were most likely not the result of a “cold fusion” process. Their comments about Gene will be saved for another time. Concurrently, the believers appreciated my enthusiasm as well as my lack of knowledge.
Although I was overjoyed in August 2003 that Peter Hagelstein invited me to do the off-camera interviewing during a 12-hour documentary film shoot at the Royal Sonesta hotel in Cambridge, Mass., during ICCF-10, I was a relative newbie to the field. I barely knew anybody; I had just begun to learn the science. But I knew in my heart that something was wrong; Gene should’ve been the one interviewing these pioneers, not me. It should have been me sitting alone in a corner of the hotel coffee shop watching Gene interview McKubre and Martin Fleischmann, not Gene watching me. But he knew too much, was outspoken, and was a threat to their ideology and objectives.
Unfortunately, Mallove was murdered on May 14, 2004, and did not live to see the further blossoming of the field. Just one day earlier, the Department of Energy began preparing its second review of the field. In 2012, a defendant accepted a lesser charge of first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to 16 years in prison.
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