is it cold fusion or just a scam, revisited

Last year, I wrote about Andrea Rossi’s claim to have created a cold fusion reactor and suffice it to say that I wasn’t very optimistic about the prospects. Not only did it seem to defy some basic laws of physics but its inventor was exceedingly cagey about how the device worked, claiming to have simply stumble on the wondrous reaction at first, then claiming to protecting a trade secret behind a new 1 MW power plant he was building for a client. The paper he and his partner sent to physics journals and the patent they tried to register were both rejected for the same reason: in place of a basic diagram of how their cold fusion reactor was supposed to work they placed a black box. Without plausible explanations of how they were getting the reaction they claimed was taking place and without a formal, qualified third party validation of their results, there just wasn’t enough for reviewers or the patent office to conclude that the results were legitimate. And there were the two tiny little problems of Rossi being a convicted con man whose engineering degree came from a now defunct diploma mill, making it hard for him to establish credibility.

But it seems that Rossi is quite persistent and he’s kept his experiments going. The Pop Sci story really tries to keep an open mind when talking about cold fusion, or as its advocates refer to it, low energy nuclear reactions (LENR) and tried not to be too hard on Rossi, but what it portrays is very unflattering nonetheless. Rossi steadfastly refuses to release any details, hand-picks the audiences for his demonstrations, doesn’t unplug his device during these demos, and refers only to “important institutions” and “major technical reports in progress” when pressed for some specificity in his claims. Not only that but he is almost pathologically paranoid of criticism, so much so that he refused to meet with the story’s author several times because he got wind of the fact that his critics would be asked to weigh in as well, finally consenting to be interviewed in one of the pettiest ways imaginable: at the exact time the author booked his critics’ interviews. If I were a potential investor in his business, this would definitely spook me. And considering that we aren’t told who may be interested in investing, there may be no real takers for Rossi’s E-Cat.

After the first post on Rossi, several people posted and sent me links to cold fusion sites filled with papers claiming to see low energy reactions in a variety of improbable machines, arguing in favor of keeping cold fusion in mind as a potentially viable power source. However, none of the papers seemed to make a whole lot of sense from either a physics or an engineering standpoint and the vast majority of them reported the kind of energy that could’ve easily been created by a random chemical process or impurities in the materials used to construct these test reactors. To claim viable cold fusion you need more than a small temperature rise. You need to have a major spike in energy and some radioactivity to prove that the reaction is indeed nuclear in nature. On top of that, you need the reactor to clearly be scalable, enough to get a 15 to 30-fold return on the initial energy investment so plans for power plants could be drawn up. A lot of weird stuff can happen on very small scales, but that weird stuff is not cold fusion or anything like it as far as all the verifiable, consistent evidence we have tells us.

What seems to be happening is that LENR advocates see small temperature bumps and a wide variety of anomalies they can’t explain, and because they so badly want to do what science said cannot be done, attribute it to the first stirring of cold fusion. And since they’re so invested in the idea, they refuse to take no for an answer and reject any alternative explanation for what they’re seeing in small scale, insisting that with just a little funding their table top experiments could be turned into energy farms. But because they can’t explain what they’re seeing and how it works, a scientist with access to the cash they need isn’t going to be swayed into hobbling his or her own research for a gamble on an unexplained anomaly. After all, the LENR enthusiasts are asking us to do the equivalent of buying a car that doesn’t seem to have wheels or a gas tank, with a hood that’s welded shut without test driving it first, claiming that they’ve driven it and while it wouldn’t do 0 to 60 in 5 seconds, it can waddle along by some wondrous phenomenon they can’t explain which is why we need to buy it and invest in modifying it into a cargo ship. It’s simply too much to have to buy into before writing a check, which is why cold fusion has been long mothballed.