"

You assume a lot. I don't ""support Storms,"" it's not personal. Storms is reliable source of a kind that requires caution: he is clearly affiliated with cold fusion research. However, who should write a book on the topic? Someone who has no experience with it? Storms isn't simply editorializing, expressing his opinions, he shows the basis for those opinions with meticulously referenced text. As with any review of the field, he cites research according to his opinion of what is relevant, and this, then, gives us a guide to what is notable in the field. There are thousands of peer-reviewed papers on cold fusion, and even more  much more  if we allow conference papers. He can use conference papers, we can't, but if he cites them, that makes them sufficiently notable for our reference. Because of the position of the field as to ""general opinion""  very unclearly defined  we have to present everything in the field as controversial, including what is quite well-established, such as excess heat. If you don't think excess heat is reasonably well-established, you should read the 2004 DoE review again, and I could cite reliable sources that the work is sound. The claim that it's all junk research, quite simply, can't be supported from any solid source, only from what are, really, tertiary sources as Hipocrite is now using at the article, in place of the much stronger Storms reference, which is a secondary source. It's like the media reports that Fleischmann's work was never replicated.

In fact, the core claim, that excess heat was found when setting up highly-loaded palladium deuteride, has been confirmed over and over. The original radiation claims were bogus. The research finding neutrons at moderate levels was bogus, artifact and error. The claim that the origin is nuclear, and in particular that it is ""fusion,"" is unproven. In other words, OCMV, I'm quite with the 2004 DOE review, except that the field has shifted since then, the evidence for nuclear effect is stronger, a clear and consistent pattern has emerged from a review of all the research, such that negative replications typically, now, can be seen as confirmations of a general hypothesis forming, but no clear proof that the basic process is fusion.

For example, the SPAWAR group shows energetic neutrons. The work is solid and published. Aspects of it have been confirmed, and I am, indeed, assuming that there will be more confirmation; their work, over almost twenty years, has been quite solid and conservative, they've done proper controls, etc. The levels, however, are very low, and this kind of phenomenon has always been used as an argument against cold fusion: there are all these apparently contradictory experiments. I was just reading yesterday one protest that ""all these experiments produce different amounts of heat, how come there is no consistency?"" ""So what if you find neutrons, this is inconsistent with the reported heat.""

Actually, it isn't. What that shows is that neutrons aren't involved in whatever is generating the heat, but that the energy source, what I call the black box, is capable of creating conditions where a little hot fusion takes place. For example, take the Be-8 hypothesis. That will generate energetic alphas at 23.8 MeV. These can cause some hot fusion to take place at a low level, indeed, it would be expected. The alphas are found, confirmed, Miles et al's work showed, way back, that helium generation is correlated with excess heat. No excess heat, no helium. Excess heat, helium, in an amount proportional to the excess heat, and the ration is at 25 +/- 5 MeV, as reported by Storms and others. Krivit thinks this is a bogus figure, but I'm not convinced that Krivit understands the problem. If you don't capture all the helium, you will get a higher figure, and that is, indeed, what is found, but with some experiments, great care has been exercised to detect all the helium, and that gets us tightly toward the expected figure from d-d helium fusion, 23.8 MeV.

One writer put this way: Fleischmann didn't just discover some isolated island, that could be specified by simple coordinates, he found an entire continent, and those who try to find the island find different things, their reports vary all over the map, literally. We do not know to what extent low-energy nuclear reactions are possible. Storms details a list of observations that it would be desirable for a CF theory to explain. This does not mean that he thinks all these findings are artifact-free.

Elemental transformation under conditions that produce the excess heat phenomena is now quite well confirmed, overall. The field suffers from a lack of highly specific confirmation; this results from the conditions under which the work has been done. Researchers don't want to, at this point, waste their time doing exactly what everyone else has done, they want to