At 02:12 PM 5/22/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Google Alerts brought me this gem:
<http://www.guidetothecosmos.com/radio/radio_show_1021.html>http://www.guidetothecosmos.com/radio/radio_show_1021.html
Yellow journalism. The story isn't science, it's people and their LIES!!!
Unfortunately, Krivit, as we can see from the beginning in the images
presented, misrepresents what "cold fusion scientists" claim. Because
no theory has been accepted as sufficiently explanatory and
predictive, "cold fusion" is merely a rough concept of what might be
happening. What the scientists claim is excess heat, beyond that
possible with known chemical reactions, helium that is correlated
with the excess heat, and, a possibly misleading fact, the
correlation is roughly that expected from deuterium-helium fusion. In
addition, nuclear transmutations and radiation are reported, but the
main reaction does not generate the expected gamma radiation from
detuerium fusion to helium.
While direct d-d fusion cannot be ruled out entirely, because some
lattice phenomenon might possibly shift the branching ratio to the
helium branch, and at the same time suppress the gamma radiation, few
now think that the reaction is simple d-d fusion, whereas Krivit
presents this as what they believe and promote.
Listening to the conversation, the first part isn't a problem. Krivit
is correct that evidence for nuclear reaction is "unequivocal." He
does not seem to have understood that, for popular speech, and "cold
fusion" is a popular term not a precise scientific one, "fusion" can
refer to the overall process, not necessarily the specific reaction
path. If the input is deuterium and the output is helium, the energy
released will be that expected from deuterium fusion. If, in the
middle, neutrons are juggled, palmed, mixed with this or that, it
doesn't matter. The released energy will still be the same, except
for whatever energy is shoved into other reaction products. Further,
except for whatever other reaction products exist, the overall
process is "fusion." Krivit has had plenty of opportunity to
encounter this fact.
Because of this, and because helium is clearly the most prominent
reaction product, and the neutrons in deuterium cells would almost
certainly be coming from deuterium, cold fusion researchers sometimes
use the d -> helium energy ratio as a kind of benchmark, causing
Krivit to complain that a report from Italian researchers improperly
"concluded" that the energy was 23.8 MeV, when no such conclusion was
even part of the report. It was an organizing parameter, a way of
presenting data on a chart showing heat and helium with the same
units, making a comparison of obvious import easy. Indeed, the result
that Krivit seems to think was the point of this "misrepresentation"
was an outlier. If we wanted to prove "d-d reaction" from the
energy/helium finding, we'd want to get rid of that report (almost
exactly on 24 MeV), because it is extremely difficult to capture all
the helium, and thus measured helium will always be above 23.8 MeV
unless extreme measures are taken, and nobody has ever nailed this
down to the last MeV except maybe one experiment from McKubre, over
which Krivit makes much fuss. I don't know anyone who considers that
single report conclusive, there are lots of ways it could have gone
astray, such as additional generation of helium during the "cleaning"
process that involved loading and deloading the lattice. We will
eventually know, I'm sure, this work is merely difficult, not impossible.
Krivit reports the Hagelstein paper as misrepresenting the data to
support "cold fusion." But that paper supports "low energy nuclear
reactions." Some kind of fusion is a hypothesis only. Most
researchers, my impression, now think that some kind of cluster
fusion is involved. Not straight d-d fusion. Krivit is attacking a
straw man and claiming that people are lying. He has yet to uncover
anything that could justify even a suspicion of lying.
I've come to the conclusion that he truly does not understand what's
going on, and his personality leads him to paranoid conclusions.
Thus, "lies."
Krivit presents the researchers as if they were denying the obvious
facts about fusion and cold fusion:
1. Low energy fusion of deuterium through muon catalysis branches the
same way as hot fusion, and generates tritium (50% branching), easily
detected, and copious radiation, enough radiation that, commensurate
with the observed energy, would be fatal for unprotected researhers
running a Pons-Fleischmann cell showing the reported excess heat.
Instead, tritium is found, to be sure, but only at low levels, and
radiation is likewise detected, but only at very low levels. There is
no particular reason to think that electron-catalyzed d-d fusion, for
example, would have a different branching ratio. However,
muon-catalyzed fusion is not fusion in a solid lattice, and sometimes
things can happen in a lattice that are different. The Mossbauer
effect, as an example, allows coupling of recoil energy from gamma
decay of a nucleus that is "locked" into a crystal, to the whole
crystal domain, instead of seeing individual nuclear recoil. Some
early theories attempting to explain how d-d fusion to helium might
accomplish this were proposed, but, shall we say, it's thin. Not dead
yet, because if fusion takes place, for example, within a
Bose-Einstein Condensate, what happens to the energy released? Would
it be shared among the constituents of the condensate? If so, this
could be a Mossbauer-like effect.
2. Uncomplicated fusion of single deuterons to helium has a huge
Coulomb barrier to overcome, the repulsive forces between positively
charged nuclei requires high energy, normally supplied by high
temperature (or velocity, same thing, effectively). Some theories
attempted to propose that this was happening in the lattice, the
energy being supplied by, say, the formation of cracks in the
lattice, this is called "fractofusion." But this would simply be hot
fusion, not cold fusion, and there would be no reason at all to think
that it would behave differently from hot fusion. It would be like
"sonofusion," where extremely high temperatures are proposed to be
created when an ultrasound-created bubble collapses. Definitely, high
temperatures are created, that's clear from sonoluminescence, for
example, but it's controversial whether or not these temperatures are
adequate for fusion. If so, though, this is, again, simply hot fusion
in an cool overall environment. In the reports claiming sonofusion,
the evidence is neutron radiation!
3. Where everyone is on the same page, in fact, is that the
experimental reports show some kind of nuclear reaction. Krivit,
however, is attacking the heat/helium research, which is the
strongest evidence for this. His approach seems to be that d-d fusion
is impossible, therefore there must be something wrong with the
research reports. And he's like a bulldog on this. He does not seem
to be aware that even if there are inaccuracies in the research data,
a rough correlation between heat and helium is an astonishing result,
and that this has been conclusively shown. Even Huizenga realized the
importance of the early publication of Miles' work on heat/helium
correlation, and was able to dismiss it only on the basis of, "of
course," it not having been confirmed yet. And then he ignored the
confirmations.
By attacking, with aspersions against the integrity of researchers,
every possibly incorrect detail of the heat/helium research, Krivit
creates his story of "lies." For example, McKubre provided certain
measurements to EPRI in the 1990s, and later published this material
at a Conference, and some of the data made it into the 2004 DoE
report. In reviewing that data, McKubre reports, he realized that the
volume estimates involved in converting measured helium to generation
rate were incorrect, and he thus modified the later report of
heat/helium ratio. He also claims that he reported this to EPRI, but
informally, and no correction of the EPRI report was ever issued. It
was a private report and not published until later, as part of a
general release of this research. The independent publication by
McKubre was of the corrected data.
Note that if McKubre were trying to illegitimately prove "24 MeV," he
would have preferred his incorrect data! The value he ultimately
reported was over 100 MeV/He-4, which is anomalously high, not closer
to the magic number.
So there is Krivit's story, and he thought this so important that he
asked leading questions about it at the 2010 ACS press conference,
grandstanding. And then presenting McKubre's response, in his
following coverage, as "inconsistent" with what he was told when he
asked EPRI. But he asked someone at EPRI who would would have known
nothing about the details, such as informal correction; basically, he
asked the wrong question of the wrong people.
It's poor, agenda-driven reporting, no longer serious, objective
journalism. He's lost it.
