Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan, an outspoken advocate of low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) research, is leaving his post as the vice chancellor for research at the University of Missouri, in Columbia, Missouri.

Duncan will become the vice president for research at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, on Jan. 1, 2014, according to press releases from both universities.

He will move from a university with significant nuclear research programs to a university with no nuclear research programs. Texas Tech has no nuclear physics or nuclear engineering department.

At the University of Missouri, Duncan is responsible for the management of the university’s major research facilities, which include the Missouri University Research Reactor, the most powerful university research reactor in the United States.

The shift for Duncan also includes moving down from a tier 1 university to a tier 2 university. The ranking is based on a gauge developed by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions, a “gold standard” used to compare the quality of universities.

Duncan did not return phone messages from New Energy Times.

On Oct. 15, New Energy Times spoke with Mark Prelas, a professor of nuclear engineering at Missouri who said he will miss Duncan.

“Not many universities or research folks favor cold fusion,” Prelas said. “This was certainly a breath of fresh air in terms of Rob promoting this research.”

Prelas said he appreciated the fact that Duncan encouraged people both outside and inside the university to take a look at the controversial research. Prelas’ nuclear work, which he considers inertial confinement fusion rather than LENRs, uses a thermal shock method.

Duncan began his job at the University of Missouri on Sept. 1, 2008. He is not a LENR researcher and had no involvement in the field until the Fall of 2008, when he was contacted by CBS’s “60 Minutes” producers Denise Cetta and Sam Hornblower. He has experience in low-temperature physics, and CBS asked him to give an outsider’s opinion on LENR research for its program “Cold Fusion Is Hot Again.”

In the program, Duncan did not distinguish between the discredited idea of “cold fusion” versus LENRs, a set of primarily weak-interaction and neutron-capture processes, a distinction that was well-known by that time. (See “LENR is Not “Cold Fusion” – A Crucial Distinction.”) There is no experimental evidence of LENRs as a nuclear fusion process, and in fact the preponderance of evidence contradicts the idea of “cold fusion.”

The CBS show featured the work of Energetics Technologies, a company apparently no longer in business. The company claimed in a 2009 press release “historic results achieving excess heat of 2,500 percent.” The company did not publicly disclose that it observed that result only one time, in 2004, and had never been able to repeat it.

When the CBS show was broadcast in April 2009, Duncan instantly became a hero for “cold fusion” fans, though the show had little other impact. Duncan defended “cold fusion” based on the principle of following the scientific method. He encouraged viewers to never let others do their thinking for them.

Later that year, at a science conference in Rome, Duncan speculated that muon-catalyzed fusion might explain LENRs. Muon-catalyzed fusion, however, cannot explain the magnitude of excess heat observed in LENRs. Duncan stands alone in making such a suggestion.

Soon after his “60 Minutes” appearance, Duncan and his wife, Annette Sobel, took paid consulting appointments with Star Scientific Ltd. of Australia, a company promoting muon-catalyzed fusion as a feasible novel energy source, according to a former investor in the company. The company used Duncan’s endorsement to convince investors to help fund the company.

A Dec. 3, 2011, article in the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune, reported that Duncan was trying to get the federal government to fund “cold fusion” research. In the article, Duncan also promoted the claims of Andrea Rossi, an Italian businessman who convinced countless people worldwide that he had invented and scientifically proven a commercially viable “cold fusion” device.

On Dec. 9, the Tribune published my letter criticizing Duncan for publicly supporting Rossi despite the fact that Rossi had failed to follow the scientific method and appeared to have nothing but smoke and mirrors. I criticized Duncan’s endorsement of Rossi, a convicted fraud, as a tremendous disservice to both Duncan and the LENR field.

Undeterred, Duncan announced, as reported in a Feb. 12, 2012, article in the Tribune, that he intended to purchase two of Andrea Rossi’s Energy Catalyzers.

Duncan is the only U.S. academic administrator in recent history to promote “cold fusion.” Not only did he lend his and his university’s credibility to “cold fusion,” but he also made extensive resources at the University of Missouri available for the research and for related colloquia.

During this time, Duncan attempted to change the name LENR to Anomalous Heat Effect, despite the fact that LENRs are far more than heat effects. Duncan consistently said that there was no feasible theoretical explanation for LENRs when he spoke at science meetings and with the press, and he consistently failed to distinguish between “cold fusion” and LENRs.

In January 2012, he negotiated a $5.5 million gift to the University of Missouri to create the Sidney Kimmel Institute for Nuclear Renaissance (SKINR), based on his opinion that no credible explanation for LENRs was available, as he wrote in his curriculum vitae.

“SKINR’s mission is to determine experimentally the mechanism that is responsible for the Anomalous Heat Effect (AHE) that has been reported in certain metals while heavily loaded with various hydrogen isotopes,” Duncan wrote.

Duncan consistently failed to acknowledge the scientifically credible explanations of LENRs as weak interactions, which is best explained by the Widom-Larsen theory. The theory has received unprecedented recognition from the American Nuclear Society, Boeing Aerospace, CERN (the European Centre for Nuclear Research), the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, NASA and the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center.

In August 2012, Duncan was a featured speaker at a trade show hosted by National Instruments in Austin, Texas. In his talk, he explicitly avoided the Widom-Larsen theory and displayed the names of many of the other scientists who have proposed LENR theories. Duncan showed a preference for the “cold fusion” ideas of Yeong Kim, a professor of physics at Purdue University.

In the fall of 2012, Duncan announced that the 18th International Conference on Cold Fusion would take place at the University of Missouri in July 2013. Duncan had initially listed Purdue University as a sponsoring partner of the conference on the University of Missouri Web site and Kim as the co-chair of the conference.

In March 2013, Nicholas Giordano, the head of the Purdue University Physics Department, told New Energy Times that Purdue was not a sponsoring partner. Within days, Duncan de-listed Purdue as a sponsoring partner on the University of Missouri Web site and instead listed National Instruments Corp. and the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment. At the same time, Duncan changed the conference name to the 18th International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science.

Duncan will replace Michael San Francisco, the interim vice chancellor for research at Texas Tech. The former vice president for research at Texas Tech, Taylor Eighmy, left in August 2012 and became the vice chancellor for research at the University of Tennessee.

In a press release, Texas Tech University President M. Duane Nellis explained Duncan’s hiring.

“Dr. Duncan’s extensive backgrounds in teaching, research and as vice chancellor for research at the University of Missouri combine to provide a strong vision and effective leadership,” Nellis said.

Related News Stories:

ICCF-18 “Cold Fusion” Conference Begins Next Week
NRL Will Host Colloquium on “Cold Fusion”
Duncan’s Scientific Method Excludes Widom-Larsen Theory
Duncan’s Promotion of Rossi: A Tremendous Disservice
Vice Chancellor Duncan to Purchase Two Energy Catalyzers
2009 CBS-TV Program Wrongly Reported DARPA LENR Endorsement

Oak Ridge Nuclear Cavitation Confirmation

July 29, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

This is Part 12, the final part of “2001 Oak Ridge Nuclear Cavitation Confirmation Uncovered.”

This is a New Energy Times Special Report. The first part of this series published on July 18, 2013.

Nuclear Cavitation Experiments: Difficult to Build, Easy to Test
Nuclear cavitation experiments are difficult to repeat and reproduce. The most challenging aspect is the construction of the glass chamber because it is handcrafted, requiring specialized skill and experience. Although the glassblowers at Oak Ridge had a general concept of the design requirements, their ability to create a working chamber was hit-or-miss. If the glass was too thick, it might not have the required elasticity to flex during the bubble explosions. If the glass was too thin, it might break easily. There were other factors, too, as Richard Lahey explained to New Energy Times on May 25, 2007. Continue reading »

Oak Ridge Nuclear Cavitation Confirmation

July 27, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

This is Part 10 of “2001 Oak Ridge Nuclear Cavitation Confirmation Uncovered.”

This is a New Energy Times Special Report. The first part of this series published on July 18, 2013.

Shapira and Saltmarsh Stand by Their Data (March 2002)
The day the Taleyarkhan group’s paper published, March, 8, 2002, journalist Charles Seife, on the news side of Science, reported Saltmarsh’s speculation about the excess neutrons.

“One possibility [for the excess neutrons] is that the extra neutrons are left over from the 14-MeV neutrons fired into the cylinder,” Seife wrote, “eventually winding up in the detector after skittering about the room. To rule out that scenario, says Saltmarsh, he and Shapira timed the flashes of light from the bubbles and compared them with the arrival times of the extra neutrons. The effect disappeared.”

The question of coincidences was moot, as West explained later in an e-mail to New Energy Times.

“The flaw in Seife’s logic is so obvious,” West wrote. “The number of neutrons would be the same whether there was cavitation or not, whether the acetone was deuterated or not, and whether the acetone was at 20 degrees C or at 0 degrees C. Seife apparently didn’t understand the significance of our control experiments.”

Peter Weiss, writing for Science News on March 9, 2002, cited the Shapira and Saltmarsh document (Ref #31) and the Taleyarkhan group’s rebuttal (Ref #32). Weiss gave the last word to Saltmarsh, who countered the Taleyarkhan group’s rebuttal with a single sentence.

“Not so fast,” Saltmarsh counters. “We stand by our data.”

Shapira and Saltmarsh Submit Comment to Science (March 2002)
In fact, the Taleyarkhan group stands by the Shapira and Saltmarsh data, too. But the Taleyarkhan group did not fight the battle in the media. It did not seem to understand the role of science media in communicating its work to the public. It did not seem to understand the effort it would take to correct facts and public myths once the first impressions took hold. These were hard lessons for the Taleyarkhan group.

After Shapira and Saltmarsh promoted their Web-published document and spoke widely to the media about their unreviewed critique, they submitted a formal scientific comment to Science.

Katie Pennicott, writing in the April 2002 issue of Physics World, reported the forthcoming Shapira and Saltmarsh journal comment. Pennicott reported that Shapira and Saltmarsh had attempted their own replication.

“Shapira and Saltmarsh are now preparing two reports for Science that outline the technical shortcomings of Taleyarkhan’s original work, and give a fuller account of their own attempts to reproduce it,” Pennicott wrote.

On March 28, Shapira and Saltmarsh submitted their comment to Science. Science immediately sent the comments to the Taleyarkhan group, which submitted its reply three weeks later, on April 15. Science accepted the Shapira and Saltmarsh comments three months later, on July 2, and accepted the Taleyarkhan group’s reply on Aug. 19. The two papers published back to back on Sept. 6.

The Shapira and Saltmarsh comment raised questions about neutron/tritium ratios, detector efficiencies and coincidences and concluded, “These inconsistencies cast serious doubt on the claimed evidence for D-D fusion in these experiments.”

In its paper, the Taleyarkhan group responded to the “serious doubts” raised by Shapira and Saltmarsh.

Shapira and Saltmarsh Submit Comment to PRL (July 2002)
On July 17, two weeks after Science accepted Shapira and Saltmarsh’s comment, they submitted a paper to Physical Review Letters. The PRL paper published remarkably fast — 33 days after PRL received it, on Aug. 19, 2002. If Pennicott’s information, “now preparing two reports for Science,” was correct, then this PRL paper may have been the second report Shapira and Saltmarsh originally prepared for Science.

Shapira and Saltmarsh’s PRL paper was on a faster track than their comment to Science. Their PRL paper published before the comment and reply in Science on Sept. 5. Taleyarkhan, the corresponding author of the March 8, 2002, Science paper, was not offered a chance by PRL to submit a paper to go along with the Shapira and Saltmarsh PRL paper.

By July, when Shapira and Saltmarsh submitted their paper to PRL, many news reports had stated that they had attempted their own replication, and the idea had begun to take hold in the public’s mind. The Taleyarkhan group had remained silent.

Shapira and Saltmarsh Make Replication Claim in PRL (August 2002)
They began their PRL paper with the phrase, “We have repeated the experiment of Taleyarkhan et al.” as they had done in the Feb. 20 and March 1 documents, and they directly titled their paper an attempted replication: “Nuclear Fusion in Collapsing Bubbles – Is It There? An Attempt to Repeat an Experiment That Reported D-D Fusion in Bubble Collapse Induced by Cavitation in Deuterated Acetone.”

In the Feb. 20, 2002, and March 1, 2002, documents, even though Shapira and Saltmarsh started out with the phrase “We have repeated the experiment,” they also wrote in the papers that “the cavitation apparatus was operated by the original authors,” that is, the Taleyarkhan group.

That’s not what they wrote in the PRL paper. Shapira and Saltmarsh rephrased the sentence: “The operating condition of the cavitation apparatus was set by the authors of Ref. [6] to be identical to that used in their experiment.”

The content of the PRL paper is mostly the same as the Feb. 20, 2002, and March 1, 2002, documents with one major exception: Shapira and Saltmarsh speculated about background neutrons.

The authors knew that both the ETD and the PD neutron data showed excess neutrons, even statistically significant excess neutrons. They knew that their data had inadvertently confirmed, not disconfirmed, the Taleyarkhan group’s claim. For these reasons, in the PRL paper, Shapira and Saltmarsh knew they could not write that they had seen “no evidence for any excess neutrons,” as they had told the press and the ORNL science writers in March.

Instead, they addressed two possibilities, neither of which they tested. The first was that the intensity of the PNG varied during experiments. This would mean that the intensity of the PNG, by chance, varied directly when cavitation was on or off, when deuterated acetone was used or normal acetone was used, and when the apparatus was chilled to 0 degrees C or not.

Their second explanation is “possibly a change in neutron scattering geometry due to people in the area being at different positions for the two runs.”

Taleyarkhan wrote to New Energy Times and explained what would be required if Shapira and Saltmarsh’s explanation were valid.

“In order for room-return background neutrons to bounce off of us to create such an effect,” Taleyarkhan wrote, “either JaeSeon or I (Shapira mostly remained seated) would have had to be running three feet toward and then three feet away from the test cell every 25 microseconds at speeds of 1,000 m/s to 10,000 m/s constantly for the entire hour. This is ridiculous, besides being impossible. And, of course, their conjecture would have required us to sit still for the entire hour during the run with cavitation off.”

This was the third alternative hypothesis that Shapira proposed.

Next Part: Shapira Confirms He Did Not Perform a Replication