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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Feb. 22, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

[This is Part 2 of a Four-Part Series. Part 1 published on Feb. 20.]

This is the continuation of a review of selected papers from the first decade of LENR research. This article continues with research from 1996.

ICCF-6 Conference (1996)

Tadahiko Mizuno, Tadayoshi Ohmori, Tadashi Akimoto, Kazuya Kurokawa, Masatoshi Kitaichi, Koichi Inoda, Kazuhisa Azumi, Shigezo Simokawa and Michio Enyo, “Isotopic Distribution for the Elements Evolved in Palladium Cathode After Electrolysis in D2O Solution”

In this paper, Tadahiko Mizuno, now the director of Hydrogen Engineering Application and Development Co. in Sapporo, reported one of the most distinctive before-and-after elemental analyses of LENR transmutations in the field.

LENR Transmutation by Tadahiko Mizuno

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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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