From: Frank Close <FEC@v2.rl.ac.uk>
Subject:  Cold Not-Fusion and Not-secret labs.READ/NEWabs
Reply-To: Frank Close <FEC@v2.rl.ac.uk>
Organization: Sci.physics.fusion/Mail Gateway
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 14:29:44 GMT

Several people have asked me about the "secret lab" and the contact numbers.
As Jed and others have often given the impression that a lot is happening in
the FP CN-F experiments, that the Japanese are pouring in resources on a
large scale and we had to take all these claims on trust, I decided to do some
investigation for myself.I traced FP to a technopark (Sofia Antipolis
by Valbonnes in S.France) which was set up a few years ago with public money
to stimulate what was hoped would be a French Silicon Valley. Several of these
parks now exist, the Valbonnes one was the first. It was made financially
attractive for industries to relocate there. One of the many groups with
offices there are IMRA who has an association with Technova, a Tokyo based
speculative research group.

Currently they are funding research into many speculative ideas, such as
magnetically levitated transport, domestic refrigerators that are CFC free
(good idea), microscopic devices for medical diagnostics and a host of
other ideas. Their Tokyo HQ are quite helpful if you get the right
introductions. CN-F (or CF, it was not clear to me quite which of these they
believe they are funding) is *not* a big part of their operation; it is one
out of many and the strategy of the company is to hope that one out of
a million ideas pays off. CN-F is regarded as a long shot and not top
of their agenda. The picture of intense Japanese supervision, assessment of
progress, peer review, call it what you will, that Jed Rothwell has
painted on occasions to support his position that "there must be
something important going on or why would the Japs be pouring in these
millions, tens of millions" (the amounts seem to go up and down like the
stock market as Dieter has noticed) is rather far from the actuality.
Apart from making videos of bubbling cells no significant progress has
been made in establishing CF as other than CN-F.
(BTW, MF informs me that a new video of a bubbling cell will be presented
at Nagoya. Move over Madonna; your hype machine has met its match).

The fax number that I originally gave was for the president of IMRA;
as he has better things to do than redirect messages to participants in
minority pieces of their overall programme please do not use that number.


MF pointed out to me that FP have just had a paper published in Nuovo Cimento
105A,763(92)."Concerning the detection of neutrons and gamma-rays ----"
This is the paper that "establishes" the 5-50neutrons per watt (the shortfall
of a thousand billion is like the size of an atom compared to the height of
the Empire State Bldg). Examine figures 3 through 5; they are underwhelming.
Its a pity that FP seem not to have recorded the atmospheric pressure as it
is well known that at Utah altitudes a change of a few mm of mercury in
atmos pressure causes significant fluctuations in the background cosmic
neutron noise,quite comparable with these small molehills that FP choose to
interpret as signal.

(When perusing fig 3, the three clear peaks are gamma rays from natural
background; the neutron induced peak is the molehill to the right and its
relative size to the other peaks is typical of cosmic backround. So the
fluctuations in this size do indeed appear to be comparable to those expected
from atmos pressure effects. Bill Johnson (are you there Bill) co-authored a
paper demonstrating this very point and the care necessary in interpreting
low level neutrons. Perhaps Bill can remind us of the reference.
A pity that FP have not absorbed more of Dick Blue and other technical
advice that occasionally appears here when not lost among H-bomb stuff.

Can I add my voice to those of Dieter, Tom and others: please post that stuff
elsewhere and leave this net some room for signal. Those of us who have to
travel frequently in connection with our research, return home to find our
computer saturated.


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