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Technology Science

DOE Report on Cold Fusion 368

Posted by samzenpus from the mr.-fusion dept.
thhamm writes "The DOE Report on Cold Fusion (mentioned here too) is out. Take a look at it on the DOE Website. Well, looks like there is nothing really new since Pons & Fleischmann in 1989, because "While significant progress has been made in the sophistication of calorimeters since the review of this subject in 1989, the conclusions reached by the reviewers today are similar to those found in the 1989 review.""
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DOE Report on Cold Fusion More

DOE Report on Cold Fusion

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  • Can't be more appropriate (Score:5, Funny)

    by fembots ( 753724 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @08:51PM (#10970112) Homepage
    Finally, a news that is "Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.".

    • Not so fast (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ravenspear ( 756059 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @08:55PM (#10970150)
      Lots of people felt the same way about nuclear energy in the 40s (both for war and peacetime use). Just because we can't make it work now doesn't mean that will be the case in the future. Nor does it mean we should abandon all avenues of research pertaining to it.

      • Re:Not so fast (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:28PM (#10970382) Homepage Journal
        So long as the research based on scientific merit rather than the desire for media stardom, and is peer-reviewed before going to the popular media, I wouldn't have a problem with it.

        • Re:Not so fast (Score:3, Insightful)

          by ravenspear ( 756059 )
          While I agree with this in principle, unfortunately not even the peer-reviewed scientific community is always correct in deciding whether certain research is based on scientific merit.

          An old school example of this from my field (Aerospace):

          In the early 40s many Aerospace scientists and engineers believed that we would never be able to break the speed of sound because one of the equations that was used to calculate drag predicted that it would approach infinity as the speed approached Mach 1. To oppose a

          • Re:Not so fast (Score:5, Informative)

            by Deadstick ( 535032 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @11:54PM (#10971446)
            With all due respect, that's my field too and I say horse hockey. Ernst Mach was measuring supersonic drag in 1877, and supersonic rifle ammunition was a consumer product before that century was out. The X-1 aircraft's fuselage, in fact, was modeled on the ogival shape of the .50 caliber Browning machine gun bullet because of its demonstrated ability to sustain supersonic flight for a long way downrange. Supersonic airplane flight was a stability and control problem.

            That tale is one of those "Aren't we smarter than those self-important authorities" homilies that are as persistent as herpes. It's on a par with "19th century scientists opposed railroad development because they believed you couldn't breathe at 20 mph"...which is very popular among folks who've never been outside in a gale or ridden the animal I alluded to in the first sentence above.

            rj

            • Re:Not so fast (Score:3, Informative)

              by ravenspear ( 756059 )
              With all due respect, that's my field too and I say horse hockey.

              Ok, if you need a more authoritative source how about John Anderson, Curator for Aerodynamics at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum? He discussed that very example in an aerospace textbook. His characterization was basically the same as what I wrote.
            • Supersonic airplane flight was a stability and control problem.

              Exactly. I was merely stating that some (obviously misguided) engineers had postulated that a theoretical problem existed where none did.

            • Ok here you go (Score:5, Insightful)

              by ravenspear ( 756059 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @02:43AM (#10972179)
              From this page [aerospaceweb.org]-

              Sound barrier:
              "The term sound barrier is often associated with supersonic flight. In particular, "breaking the sound barrier" is the process of accelerating through Mach 1 and going from subsonic to supersonic speeds. The term originated in the 1940s when researchers discovered a large increase in drag that seemed to indicate that an infinite amount of thrust would be needed to fly at the speed of sound. In other words, some believed that a physical barrier existed that would prevent an aircraft from ever being able to travel at supersonic speeds. Since there obviously is no such barrier, the term sound barrier is outdated and really should not be used any more. Nevertheless, it has become a popular part of the human language, and continues in use."

              Obviously the people who believed this were using flawed methods of reasoning. However, claiming there were none who thought this way is simply denying history. The Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] has a good synopsis. Yes the fact that bullets were known to travel at supersonic velocities should have clued these people in as to the errors in their equations. Unfortunately, as I mentioned in another reply, scientists sometimes choose to ignore factual data that contradicts their preferred theories.

      • Re:Not so fast (Score:3, Informative)

        by Waffle Iron ( 339739 )
        Lots of people felt the same way about nuclear energy in the 40s (both for war and peacetime use).

        Ummm... once fission was discovered, it was only a couple of years before the first working nuclear reactor was assembled. During that time, there really wasn't much doubt about what was going on or how much energy could potentially be released. Experiments showed clear evidence of fission reactions, and theoretical calculations matched the experimental data.

        OTOH it's been well over a decade since this col

        • Compare the amount of investment then with now. Even the Germans, with Heisenberg and lots of money couldn't get it to work. There were hurdles along the way. But some very smart people fixed those (with non insignificant funding to help).

          • Re:Not so fast (Score:3, Interesting)

            by HuguesT ( 84078 )
            Of course after the war Heisenberg claimed that the only reason why the Germans couldn't get a reactor going was that he was making sure their efforts wouldn't succeeed, and thus Nazi Germany would not develop nuclear weapons.

            His claim didn't convince everyone. Many think he did his best and failed.

            This controversy is the topic of the play "Copenhagen". If it plays in your city do yourself a favor and go and see it.

            • Re:Not so fast (Score:3, Interesting)

              by jabuzz ( 182671 )
              The real reason is that Heisenberg got his theory/sums wrong. He thought that the size of the lump of Uranium 235 that you would need to get a chain reaction going would need to be a ball equal in diameter to the mean free path of a neutron in Uranium 235. This leads to needing huge quantities of U235 to start the chain reaction. In reality it only needs to be half this which leads to a much smaller lump of U235, which is practical to drop from a plane. From memory he calculated you needed something like 10

        • Re:Not so fast (Score:3, Informative)

          by ravenspear ( 756059 )
          Ummm... once fission was discovered

          The first fission experiments were conducted by Fermi in the early 30s. It took over a decade for fission to produce any practical application and during that time there were differences of opinion within the scientific community about whether it ever would.

          I'm not trying to imply that cold fusion will ultimately have the same benefits, because it may not. I'm just saying that it often takes a while for science to realize the merit of new ideas.

          • Re:Not so fast (Score:4, Insightful)

            by pfdietz ( 33112 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @07:12AM (#10972984)
            Fermi conducted neutron capture tests on various materials. He bombarded uranium with neutrons, among other elements, but did not interpret the results as fission.

            Once fission itself was discovered, a critical nuclear reactor was constructed only three years later, and nuclear bombs only six years later.

            The analogy between fission and cold fusion is very poor. Fission was a a clear cut, easily demonstrated physical phenomenon. It had an intuitive explanation (using the liquid drop model of the nucleus) that violated no known physical laws. Once the news got out physicists all over the place were confirming it within days. The application to large scale release of energy was immediately obvious. Cold fusion is murky, quirky, irreplicable, and almost certainly some combination of experimental errors, incompetence, and outright fraud.

      • Re:Not so fast (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mcc ( 14761 )
        As far as I can tell, there is a pretty serious difference between doubt about nuclear energy in the 40s ("there's this natural force that we can directly detect the influence of, but we aren't quite sure how to harness it") and doubt about Cold Fusion today ("there's this process that *might* be resulting in energy production for some reason, or it *might* just be we're not measuring the outcome right").

        It's not like we should expect results immediately, and if there's some kind of unexplained effect occu

  • ColdFusion? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ponds ( 728911 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @08:51PM (#10970113)
    Only old koreans use cold fusion. Everyone else has moved to J2EE and then LAMP
    • If this new Korean spin on the Soviet Russia joke is going to take hold, it needs to be used carefully. That means using it sparingly at first, and getting the wording just right:

      In Korea, only old people <do/use/are something>.

      So in this case, it would be

      In Korea, only old people use cold fusion.

      or perhaps

      In Korea, only old people are pedantic [google.com].

  • Slashdot story summary gets it right (Score:4, Funny)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @08:52PM (#10970117) Journal
    Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

    How about the Department of Fish and Game releasing their report on Bigfoot? That coming soon?

  • Long live the true scientist! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SlashdotMirrorer ( 669639 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @08:53PM (#10970130)
    I think it is commendable that so much effort is being put into a field of research that there has been little result in in the past 20 years. The results simply are not important, as we have seen in the race to defeat The NP Problem, it is the struggle to further the scientific knowledge. Even bearded terminal hackers should bow to the (surely bearded) physics hackers who thanklessly work on this day and night

    We salute you!
    • The reviewers believed that this field would benefit from the peer-review processes associated with proposal submission to agencies and paper submission to archival journals.

      So it seems like the final opinion is that the field should be taken out of the scientific "dog house" and allowed back into the mainstream of peer-reviewed research. Admirable. The true test of a theory should not be how crazy it sounds, or how ridiculed it is in the popular press. Rather, we should consider all research with care

    • Here are their findings:

      (1) The existence of a physical effect that produces heat in metal deuterides. The heat is measured in quantities greatly exceeding all known chemical processes and the results are many times in excess of determined error using several kinds of apparatus. In addition, the observations have been reproduced, can be reproduced at will when the proper conditions are reproduced, and show the same patterns of behavior. Furthermore, many of the reasons for failure to reproduce the heat eect

  • I'm sorry (Score:5, Funny)

    by k4_pacific ( 736911 ) <k4_pacific@yahoo . c om> on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @08:55PM (#10970153) Homepage Journal
    DOE!
    Oh dear!
    Cold fusion here! /ducks

  • Bah (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TychoCelchuuu ( 835690 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @08:57PM (#10970166) Journal
    You want real progress? An X-Prive for cold fusion or something. Offer a million bucks and suddenly everyone's falling over themselves to spend 2 million in order to win.

  • Surprise! (Score:5, Funny)

    by WisconsinFusion ( 781006 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @08:57PM (#10970174)
    Actually, that was the second draft. I believe the first draft read: "Despite committing some of the best minds in Physics to the task, we seem to have been one-uped by a bunch of chemists who clearly know more about energy than the er, Department formerly known as 'Energy.' We apologize for wasting tax payer money." "Ok guys, shut those experiments down. Steve got cold fusion. Turns out that the reaction only occurs in people's basements." Damn. Time for a career change. -WF

  • Titanium foil hats (Score:5, Funny)

    by Psionicist ( 561330 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @08:59PM (#10970183)
    ... to provide evidence for low energy nuclear reactions. These experiments involved low energy deuterium beams impinging on deuterium loaded metal foils such as titanium.

    In moments like these I'm glad I bought the tin foil hat and not the more luxurious titanium one.

  • Got to wonder (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Belseth ( 835595 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:07PM (#10970229)
    After all the years and all the hundreds of millions spent you have to wonder if fusion is a practical answer. It appears that a commercial reactor is fifty to a hundred years off. By all accounts we have maybe fifty years before our energy needs hit a critical point with things starting to go down hill in another twenty. No one has yet proven that a reactor can function at better than break even. Should the efforts be redirected at existing technologies? Solar, wind and methane solutions exist now. Isn't it better to solve our short term problems before counting on long term solutions that can't be implemented in time to avoid disaster. Won't this force us to resort to coal and nuclear when oil runs out or is that the plan?
    • I think fusion reactors have gotten a little past break-even but not by a large margin.

      Oil isn't used much for electricity production if that's what you mean. IIRC, Coal and nuclear each are used to produce more electricity than oil.

      I think that it would be silly to completely abandon fusion, it would be best to try to keep research going for just about every current and promising technology to improve them.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • It's not a binary XOR here. Contrary to popular belief, some people can do research to meet short-term needs while others pursue long-term efforts.

    • Re:Got to wonder (Score:3, Insightful)

      by pfdietz ( 33112 )
      Actually, spending on fusion isn't very high. The total annual magnetic fusion budget in the US is about 1/2 the annual average cost of a single space shuttle launch.

      Even with the relatively small budget, fusion has made enormous strides over the past several decades. Relevant plasma parameters have improved by many orders of magnitude. Fusion energy output in reactors has increased even more (at a rate putting Moore's law to shame). Understanding of plasma behavior has massively advanced. Computers a

  • What a nothing document. (Score:5, Informative)

    by mosel-saar-ruwer ( 732341 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:09PM (#10970248)

    The "conclusion" is in this PDF document:
    CF_Final_120104.pdf [doe.gov]
    WARNING: PDF
    Looks like it's a mixed bag. Apparently 1/3rd of the reviewers were very intrigued by the new results [and at least one reviewer was convinced].

    Funding recommendations are similarly indecisive:

    The nearly unanimous opinion of the reviewers was that funding agencies should entertain individual, well-designed proposals for experiments that address specific scientific issues relevant to the question of whether or not there is anomalous energy production in Pd/D systems, or whether or not D-D fusion reactions occur at energies on the order of a few eV. These proposals should meet accepted scientific standards, and undergo the rigors of peer review. No reviewer recommended a focused federally funded program for low energy nuclear reactions.


  • Some excerpts (Score:5, Informative)

    by SiliconEntity ( 448450 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:11PM (#10970262)
    Charge Element 1: Examine and evaluate the experimental evidence for the occurrences of nuclear reactions in condensed matter at low energies (less that a few electron volts).

    Two-thirds of the reviewers commenting on Charge Element 1 did not feel the evidence was conclusive for low energy nuclear reactions, one found the evidence convincing, and the remainder indicated they were somewhat convinced. Many reviewers noted that poor experiment design, documentation, background control and other similar issues hampered the understanding and interpretation of the results presented.

    Charge Element 2: Determine whether the evidence is sufficiently conclusive to demonstrate that such nuclear reactions occur.

    The preponderance of the reviewers' evaluations indicated that Charge Element 2, the occurrence of low energy nuclear reactions, is not conclusively demonstrated by the evidence presented. One reviewer believed that the occurrence was demonstrated, and several reviewers did not address the question.

    Charge Element 3: Determine whether there is a scientific case for continued efforts in these studies and, if so, to identify the most promising areas to be pursued.

    The nearly unanimous opinion of the reviewers was that funding agencies should entertain individual, well-designed proposals for experiments that address specific scientific issues relevant to the question of whether or not there is anomalous energy production in Pd/D systems, or whether or not D-D fusion reactions occur at energies on the order of a few eV. These proposals should meet accepted scientific standards, and undergo the rigors of peer review. No reviewer recommended a focused federally funded program for low energy nuclear reactions.

  • Putting it in prospective (Score:5, Insightful)

    by geneing ( 756949 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:14PM (#10970279)
    Well, a search for philosopher's stone eventually lead to major progress in chemistry. An attempt to solve NP complete problems may one day lead to progress in quantum computing.

    Maybe one day this cold fusion nonsense would lead to progress in something - maybe calorimeters... I'm an optimist - so shoot me :)

  • [critical subject] (Score:5, Funny)

    by Zarf ( 5735 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:22PM (#10970341) Journal
    [comment on research]

    [faulty logic]

    [hope for future advancement]

  • Thank god for cold fusion (Score:3, Funny)

    by Striker770S ( 825292 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:28PM (#10970383) Journal
    all i could think of was the wonderfully done cinimatic on Starcraft where they open up the case to the bomb, and they have a bunch of beer cans being kept cool by cold fusion. Of course the beers would be completely frozen, but a funny cinimatic nontheless...
    • "Of course the beers would be completely frozen,"

      Hardly. When we say "cold fusion," we mean "cold as compared to how fusion normally is," like "colder than the surface of the sun" or "colder than an exploding hydrogen bomb." By those standards you could stick your head in an oven and still be "cold."

  • One of the nice things (Score:3, Informative)

    by CodeWanker ( 534624 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:29PM (#10970392) Journal
    for basement mad scientists is that the attachment to the doc finally has a clear diagram for building a cold fusion cell. I know that when this all splashed fifteen years ago, the biggest gripe other scientists had was the lack of a clear experiment plan to replicate. Well, now we've got the diagrams and the electrolysis Palladium loading protocol. So if you really wanna find out for yourself, you can.

  • The Answer's Been Available for 12 Years (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:41PM (#10970477) Homepage Journal
    Twelve years ago fusion prize award legislation [geocities.com] was proposed. It had the support not only of cold fusion researchers but of one of the three primary founders of the US fusion program supported the legislation. Prizes [bbc.co.uk] actually [charleslindbergh.com] work [xprize.org]. Let the DoE go ahead and do its skeptical measurements and the let private sector do what it does best -- take risks and compete -- peacefully -- while we still can compete peacefully.

  • mad scientist (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:44PM (#10970500) Homepage
    Something over a year ago I came up with an alternative to the Pons-Fleischman testing apparatus that eliminated some of the problems with their design. (The biggest problem is that the operation of the cell pumps large amounts of heat into it, orders of magnitude larger than the amount being measured, making it difficult to detect the effect.) I was too lazy to set it up as an experiment so I made it available to the public [shambala.net]. I also sent it to a few of labs doing research in cold fusion. Never heard back, so I guess they're deluged with ideas from other crackpots too. :-D

  • Cold Fusion never happened, period. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Silverlancer ( 786390 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:51PM (#10970547)
    Even Pons admitted it. A few months into cold fusion's hayday in the 1989s, a scientist asked them to use regular water instead of heavy water, as a control. They did--and got the *exact same results*. Hydrogen will NOT fuse with hydrogen except under extreme circumstances--deuterium might. Of course Pons covered it up and cold fusion went from foolishness to fraud.
    • Here, here!

      I wish I had a mod point right about now. Repeat after me: "there is no such thing as a free lunch".

      To fuse any nuclei one has to provide enough kinetic energy to them (ie heat) to surpass the electromagnetic repulsion barrier that exists due to their positive charge.

      Cold fusion rests on the belief that an environment exists in which this energy barrier is reduced in magnitude, allowing for two slow-moving nuclei to fuse.

      I'm putting my money on the fact that such an environment would requir
    • Give me a break. We have an example of new physics here - a new sort of reaction and you already have it all figured out, how it works?

      Remember, according to standard nuclear physics, the deuterium should not be doing anything either. So, what is there to forbid and H-H reaction? It would have to be something like,

      H + H = D+ positron

      OR

      H + H + electron = D + Energy

      Where the energy is released into the lattice as a whole, which is one of the better CF theories out there, imho. If we don't know how s

    • Unless you post your sources, including a handwritten and signed statement by Dr Pons himself, your comment will be considered hogwash. After all you're making an extraordinary claim here, so we want extraordinary evidence.

    • Re:Cold Fusion never happened, period. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @11:53AM (#10975430)
      Well, read the appendix of the report, and specifically look at the graphs. They run perfectly parallel experiments with H2O and D2O and consistently get very different results. So if Pons "admitted" there's no extra effect from heavy water, he made a mistake. Why is that so hard to believe? We've now had 15 years to check it out, and the results are repeatable and the effect is pretty large. Of course, you might be right in your conclusion, but your reasons are either ignorant or stupid.

  • excerpts since server overloaded (Score:5, Funny)

    by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:58PM (#10970587)
    "Two-thirds of the reviewers commenting on Charge Element 1 did not feel the evidence was conclusive for low energy nuclear reactions, one found the evidence convincing, and two disappeared in a pair of 340 kiloton thermonuclear blasts"
  • My first though reading this article was "Why the hell would the DOE care about ColdFusion [macromedia.com]?"

  • I saw some of this presented at APS last year (Score:4, Insightful)

    by romer ( 836469 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @11:22PM (#10971201)
    APS is the American Physical Society. They had a short session on cold fusion, and Chubb was the session chair. The skepticism surrounding this research is so great; my impression was that these people are driving themselves half mad with their efforts to get anyone to take them seriously. But addressing the data presented at that session alone, I would agree with the DOE's findings. I think it is good for the DOE to recommend funding for peer reviewed research. But, I cant imagine what clear eyed researcher with a sufficiently broad perspective would be tempted to invest their time and reputation in this research, given the attitude of the scientific community in general. Too risky.

  • DOE would have no interest in CF (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Gewis ( 717661 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @02:29AM (#10972129)
    They agreed to review it, and the composition of the reviewers was understandably nuclear physicists... many of whom are deeply in hot fusion research. That means they stand to lose a lot by CF's successes.

    Whether or not there is enough excess heat to be useful is one question. Whether there is nuclear transmutation is yet another. I've spent the past year doing research with Steven Jones at BYU, and in surveying the literature and conducting our own experiments, we've seen some very intriguing results. Sr + d -> Y, Zr, Mo. If you look at Japanese research, Iwamura has had Cs -> Pr, which is a rare earth and you DON'T get Cesium dropping in proportion to Pr's increase by any sort of environmental contamination. Especially not when it's in a sealed vacuum chamber with d2 gas permeation through the metal complex (Pa, CaO) the Cs is deposited on.

    There's data from a Japanese researcher (Ikegami) in Sweden (University of Uppsala) who has found that with deuterium ion beams at various target metals, the nuclear cross sectional area for capture increases dramatically at 10 keV and just gets larger the lower you get. He wasn't even doing CF research, but it's quite interesting to see that you don't require enormous energies in order to achieve d+Z transmutation.

    Perhaps at this point it would be smart to realize that foreign researcher are leaving us in the dust. Myself, I have real doubts about the usefulness of any supposed excess heat, but low energy nuclear transmutation has a lot of intriguing stuff. At the very least, we need to look at the effect of electronic structures in metal lattices on the coulomb barrier for d+Z reactions. In Iwamura's experiments, for example, he got null results when he did it without CaO, when he used H2 instead of D2, etc. What did the addition (in thin film deposition) of an impurity like CaO do to enable a reaction that straight palladium couldn't do?

    Anyway, yeah, there's SOMETHING going on.
    • the composition of the reviewers was understandably nuclear physicists... many of whom are deeply in hot fusion research. That means they stand to lose a lot by CF's successes.

      Uh ? Nuclear fusion is interesting, but the basic mechanisms are known. Right now it's more R&D than fundamental research - frontier of technology more than frontier of science.

      OTOH, whoever comes first in actually demonstrating cold fusion will probably set the new record for the quickest Nobel prize ever (remember, Nobel priz

  • There's Still Hope! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Shafe ( 72598 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @04:02AM (#10972398) Homepage
    Well, I guess we're out of luck for cold fusion, so now let's all throw our support to zero point energy [zpenergy.com]! Come on, Tesla believed in it! And he invented the radio and alternating current!

  • Half the reviewers found the studies convincing. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02, 2004 @05:55AM (#10972724)
    A break down for those who didn't read the article. . .

    There were no new experiments done. Scientists selected by the Department of Energy simply did a peer review of several experiments which had been done over the past ten years by various labs.

    18 scientists were selected to review the collected studies.

    According to the report. . .

    "Evaluations by the reviewers ranged from: 1) evidence for excess power is compelling, to 2) there is no convincing evidence that excess power is produced when integrated over the life of an experiment. The reviewers were split approximately evenly on this topic. Those reviewers who accepted the production of excess power typically suggest that the effect seen often, and under some understood conditions is compelling. The reviewers who did not find the production of excess power convincing cite a number of issues including: excess power in the short term is not the same as net energy production over the entire time of an experiment; all possible chemical and solid state causes of excess heat have not been investigated and eliminated as an explanation; and the production of power over a period of time is a few percent of the external power applied and hence calibration and systematic effects could account for the purported net effect."

    So basically, the jury is split. And if the DOE's sampling of experts is a fair yard stick, then it would seem that when the question is put forth, about half the scientific community would say that there is compelling evidence supporting Cold Fusion. --And given the massive bias and fear related with the subject, (where scientists do not want to be associated with unpopular theories for fear of losing their jobs and professional credibility), the results of this peer review are especially intriguing.

    In any case, this is a rather different picture than the one usually painted around here where most Slashdotters foam at the mouth and yell absurdities about it being impossible to get something from nothing, despite the fact that there was never once made any such claim regarding Cold Fusion.

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