New Energy News (December 2000)

Scientific Paper
Title	New Energy News (December 2000)
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Patrick G Bailey
Keywords	New Energy, Cold Fusion, scientific dissent, energy policy, climate change
Published	2000
Journal	New Energy News
Volume	7
Number	7
No. of pages	33

Read the full paper here

Abstract

The archive entry carries no abstract. This is a newsletter issue rather than a single paper; its contents are described below.

Overview

This is volume 7, number 7 of New Energy News (ISSN 1075-0045), the monthly bulletin of the Institute for New Energy, edited by Patrick G Bailey and dated December 2000. It is not a research paper but a compilation: reprinted book and video reviews, a technical report contributed by a working researcher, the president's state-of-the-organisation message, forwarded newswire items on climate and nuclear power, and a substantial dossier of correspondence arising from a dispute with the American Physical Society's public-affairs office. The scanned file repeats several pages, so the same material appears twice in the PDF.

Read as a document, the issue is a snapshot of the "new energy" community at the close of the 1990s: convinced that low-energy nuclear reactions are real and being suppressed, watching the incoming Bush administration's energy politics, and increasingly organised around the question of how mainstream scientific bodies police the boundaries of legitimate research. The unifying theme across the issue is not a physical theory but a grievance about scientific gatekeeping — who gets to be heard, on what evidence, and through which institutions.

Contents of the issue

Review of Robert Park's Voodoo Science

The issue opens with Charles Platt's review, reprinted with permission from Washington Post Book World of 25 June 2000, of Robert L. Park's Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud. Platt's complaint is procedural rather than doctrinal. Park's primary source, he writes, "is the nightly TV news"; none of the book's targets is allowed to speak, "apparently because Park chose not to talk to any of them"; and the dismissal of James Patterson as a "caricature of an inventor" on the basis of his appearance omits his role in developing gas chromatography and his consultancy for Dow, Fairchild, Lockheed and the AEC. Platt's sharpest charge is one of suppression: Park calls low-temperature nuclear fusion "no closer to being proven than it was the day it was announced" while, per Michael McKubre of SRI International, having received McKubre's papers and attended a conference where the work was presented. Platt is careful not to defend the claims themselves — "many of Park's targets have indeed made implausible claims, and may be guilty as charged" — but argues that a fair refutation is needed rather than a perfunctory dismissal, noting that superconductivity "remained inexplicable for 42 years, as Park himself admits."

Kozima's TNCF report

The one substantially technical contribution is a report by Hideo Kozima, then visiting professor at Portland State and professor emeritus at Shizuoka. He summarises his paper "TNCF Model — A Possible Explanation of Cold Fusion Phenomenon" (J. New Energy vol. 5, p. 68, 2000): a phenomenological model with a single adjustable parameter, applied to more than sixty selected data sets, on the argument that the aggregate has statistical meaning "even if each data set may include some faults or errors in it."

The interesting part is his attempt to shore up the model's premises from conventional nuclear-physics literature. He draws on Baym, Bethe and Pethick, "Neutron Star Matter" (Nucl. Phys. A 175, 225–271, 1971) and Negele and Vautherin (Nucl. Phys. A 207, 298–320, 1973), which by variational calculation find that a "Coulomb lattice" of neutron and proton clusters with Z/N ≪ 1 is more stable at sub-nuclear density than a uniform distribution, and that neutrons in a cluster are stable against beta decay. Kozima takes this to address the standing objections to his own model — the stability of trapped neutrons, the plausibility of his assumed trapped-neutron density of 10⁸–10¹³ cm⁻³, and gammaless de-excitation, which he argues is "not special but usual" among decay channels in his picture. He quotes Baym et al. on "the subtle interplay between nuclear and solid-state physics" and presents the borrowing as "a merit of exchanging relationship between different branches." The report also carries George Miley's farewell "Comments" as retiring editor of Fusion Technology, defending his decision to publish peer-reviewed cold-fusion papers as "the responsibility of a journal to publish scientific work related to its field of coverage that can pass through peer reviews", and closes with remarks on biological transmutation.

State of the INE

Bailey's president's message is candid about the organisation's difficulties — Hal Fox stepping back, the institute's non-profit status retained, the August 2000 INE/EEMF New Energy Symposium proceedings pending in the Journal of New Energy — and frank about its eight-year record: "We have read lots of papers. We have memorized lots of theories... We have seen intriguing results from promising experiments." His prescription is fundraising, and he announces he has taken accredited courses in proposal writing, aiming at investors, corporations, banks and oil-producing states. The tone is deliberately combative, quoting Tina Turner and the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition and adding his own: "Persistence + Facts = Profit."

The APS correspondence

The largest block of the issue is documentary. Robert Bass writes to Park about the disputed Pons meltdown, reproducing a calculation: on C. K. Li's figure of 6.8 × 10²² deuterons in a fully loaded 1 cm³ palladium cube, or 3.4 × 10²² D–D pairs at 2.4 MeV each, complete fusion would release about 1.3 × 10⁶ kW-s — comparable, he says, to 150 pounds of high explosive, so that one percent reacting would be about 1.5 pounds of TNT. He uses the same figures to argue that such a device could not be built by "backyard militants", and adds the familiar deuterium-from-seawater comparison of three cents' worth yielding the energy of over 300 gallons of gasoline.

Thomas Valone of the Integrity Research Institute demands a broadcast correction from the APS after Park's What's New described the institute's Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Educational Workshop as a "free-energy conference", threatening legal action. Scott Chubb of the Naval Research Laboratory submits a letter to APS News objecting that What's New too often aims at "cute" pot-shots "as opposed to seeking the truth", and citing the September 2000 issue of Accountability in Research (vol. 8, 1–2). The same What's New item reported the Circuit Court of Appeals rejection of Michael Swartz's cold-fusion patent appeal for "lack of operability". An anonymous former government official's reply to Bass supplies the conspiratorial register the issue does not otherwise adopt in its own voice, warning of "secret combinations" and vested interests.

Newswire, review and closing note

Bailey reprints coverage of the Pacific Institute / Department of the Interior report "Water: The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change", quoting lead author Peter Gleick that "humans are changing the climate", along with a European Commission climate report edited by Martin Parry, the BBC's report of the final shutdown of Chernobyl on 15 December 2000, notes on Chinese air pollution, and a Purdue item on plant oils replacing petroleum. Hal Fox reviews Peter Lindemann's video The Free Energy Secrets of Cold Electricity, on the late Edwin Gray Sr's motor and its claimed connection to Tesla's "cold electricity" and high-voltage capacitor discharges. The issue ends with a note on Paul Marmet's "Discovery of H-2 in Space Explains Dark Matter and Redshift" (21st Century Science and Technology, Spring 2000), which argues that the abundance of molecular hydrogen in space can account for both dark matter and the redshift, and points readers to Anastasovski et al. on the redshift and the cosmic microwave background in J. New Energy vol. 1, no. 2.

Assessment

The issue is valuable chiefly as a primary source. Anyone wanting to understand how the low-energy nuclear reactions community saw itself in 2000 — its personnel, its finances, its journals, its adversaries — will find the raw material here rather than a retrospective account of it. The procedural critique of Voodoo Science also lands: whatever one concludes about cold fusion, a book-length indictment whose author did not interview his subjects and did not engage the peer-reviewed literature he had been sent is open to exactly the objection Platt makes. The insistence that the burden on a critic is a fair refutation rather than a dismissal is a sound principle, and it is stated here without claiming that the disputed results are therefore correct. Kozima's report is likewise the most scientifically serious item, and it does the right kind of work: it tries to ground the model's premises in independently published calculations rather than merely asserting them.

The weaknesses are those of the genre. The model Kozima defends carries "a single adjustable parameter" fitted across more than sixty heterogeneous data sets, and his own summary concedes that individual sets "may include some faults or errors"; a single free parameter tuned per experiment is closer to a description than a prediction, and no independent measurement of the trapped-neutron density is offered to test the assumed 10⁸–10¹³ cm⁻³. The transfer of results from neutron-star matter — densities of order 10³⁸ cm⁻³ — down to a palladium lattice is an extrapolation of some twenty-five orders of magnitude in density, and the report does not establish that the variational stability results survive it. The Bass energy calculation is arithmetically fine but conditional throughout on an eyewitness account of the Pons event at several removes; it computes what would have been released, not what was measured, and no calorimetry is cited. And the central empirical difficulty of the field is nowhere confronted: the absence of the commensurate neutron and gamma flux that d+d → ⁴He at the claimed rates would produce, which is precisely why "gammaless de-excitation" has to be assumed rather than observed.

There is also a tonal cost. Placing careful technical correspondence alongside Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, unnamed ex-intelligence sources describing "secret combinations", and speculation about Royal Family funding does the serious contributors no favours — it hands critics the caricature the issue is protesting against. The best material here, Platt's review and Miley's editorial defence of peer review, argues for procedural fairness; the surrounding editorial voice repeatedly undercuts that argument by adopting the register of the aggrieved outsider. The issue's most durable contribution is documentary, and it is worth reading on those terms.

See also

• Patrick G Bailey
• New Energy News
• New Energy
• Cold Fusion
• Hideo Kozima
• Journal of New Energy
• Hal Fox
• Paul Marmet
• Nikola Tesla
• Martin Fleischmann
• Stanley Pons