I just tried to exclude all BH postings (using the "excluded terms" thing in the options settings) and when I do I don't see any stories at all. Is his name somehow attached to every single story on /.?

There is an excellent theory to explain the "excess heat" measurements: the people doing the research are some mixture of dishonest and incompetent. This theory also has the nice features that:

a) it is consistent with the spectacularly incompetent work we see whenever anyone attempts to carefully document an experiment, such as the one on the Rossi device we have seen recently

b) it is consistent with the litany of results that require well-established phenomenology to be turned off, for example the need to magically suppress neutrons and gamma rays that would otherwise be produced in any nuclear reaction or its aftermath, regardless of its origin.

After a quarter of a century with no reproducible results and no "positive" experiments that do not require the magical suppression of other laws of physics to account for the lack of radiation, no other theory is close to as plausible as this one.

Cold fusion has been heavily investigated. There is one striking thing about all of the supposed "positive" results: they are physically impossible.

Suppose I said I had invented a car that ran on water, and that my claimed proof was that I had driven this car along the streets of a distant city. I give a talk on my results and show a map of the route.

A person in the audience interrupts and says, "Hey, I know that city! That's my home town! The route you've shown is impossible: you say you drove it between 4:30 and 5:30 PM on Tuesday June the 6th, which is in the middle of rush-hour, and you've shown yourself going the wrong way on half-a-dozen one-way streets! Why didn't you collide with anything?"

I reply: "This car runs on water! Weren't you listening? It doesn't collide with other cars, because it is propelled by water!"

You would be correct to suspect that you need not take my claims very seriously after that, and this kind of exchange is typical of cold fusion talks.

I saw Pons give a talk at Caltech, where one of my colleagues interrupted with the question, "Where are the neutrons? You say you don't see any radiation because all the energy comes out in high-energy alpha particles, but if you make alpha particles move with that energy through the palladium lattice you will get neutrons? Where are they?"

Pons answered: "New physics."

But alpha particles don't care what made them move, and more than a car cares what fuel it runs on. You can't just invoke "new physics" and say that the lack of neutrons or gamma rays doesn't matter, because you aren't really invoking new physics, you are throwing out old physics: you are saying that high energy alphas don't produce neutrons, even though that would require all of nuclear physics to be wrong.

So while I agree that new phenomena are often difficult to reproduce and we should be cautious about dismissing them on that basis, cold fusion, after twenty-five years of testing, has proven to be:

a) impossible to reproduce (there is no reliably reproducible experimental setup)

and

b) what experiments that have claimed positive results have always (to the best of my knowledge) required almost all of nuclear physics to be wrong to explain the absence of radiation.

I cannot think of any other phenomenon that eventually proved to exist that shares anything like this history of failure. Maybe Lister's work on sterile technique in surgery, which had a decade or two of rough handling? But even it was frequently reproducible, even if not universally so, and it didn't contradict any well-established, empirically founded, reasonably comprehensive theories of the time.

No, it really doesn't. It's too hard to transmit, and almost certainly will remain so.

Saying it has "the potential" to wipe out half of humanity is mindless fear-mongering. The US has more guns that people, and therefore it is true to say that guns in the US have "the potential" to kill everyone, but I don't see anyone panicking about it, just arguing whether 30,000 deaths per year is an acceptable loss. To use "potential" in the sense you are is almost completely meaningless.

You (or the SEAL books you refer to) make several contentions:

1) Iraq was actively engaged in new WMD production prior to the American invasion

2) The "diplomatic process" was intended (by whom?) to give Hussein time to hide this

3) The evidence as dismantled and relocated, likely to Syria

4) And the one we all agree on: the old stockpiles were found in Iraq

I've heard these claims before, particularly the one about Syria. The problem for anyone who takes this line of attack is explaining why the Bush Administration didn't put any of this together to make a case for the invasion and occupation after it was all discovered?

So what's your guess as to why the Bush Administration kept all this quiet?

Were they completely incompetent and let the military cover things up? If that's the case, why did the military cover things up?

Did Administration officials know all this--including the stockpiles etc being moved to Syria--and cover it up for their own reasons? If so, what were they? "A momentary lapse of reason" won't cover it. What is the plausible strategic, tactical, diplomatic or political reason for an Administration that made the invasion of Iraq a signature policy based on a pretext that was widely believed to be false to cover up evidence that would have proven that pretext substantially true?

This is the question that has to be answered.

Finally: if all the WMDs were moved to Syria, why are these WMDs still all over Iraq? (they were presumably in a lot better shape in 2002 than they are today, twelve years later.)

The critical thing to understanding this is that fission reactors are (necessarily) full of heavy elements, which is where the long-lived stuff comes from. Fusion reactors are full of light elements.

There are very fundamental physical reasons why radioactive light elements almost always have much shorter lifetimes than radioactive heavy elements. If you've only got a few nucleons to play with, turning a proton into a neutron is a major change in configuration, so the energy gap between the radioactive isotope and the adjacent stable isotope is large, and in general the lifetime against beta decay scales inversely with the fifth power of the endpoint energy. In heavy elements, which have so many nucleons they can be adequately modelled as liquid drops in some cases, changing one neutron to a proton doesn't change the configuration very much so the energy difference is small and the lifetime can be very large. Unfortunately, although the energy of the beta particle emitted is small, the energies of the other particles in the decay chain (gammas and more betas in most cases) can be pretty much anything.

So: heavy elements (fission) bad; light elements (fusion) good. Fusion reactors are designed with this in mind. They will produce a lot of nasty stuff, but almost all of it will decay rapidly, so given that the engineering issues of fission waste are pretty much under control (the political issues are not) we can be confident that fusion power will be OK in that regard.

Petrol is ~40 MJ/kg, obviously, not whatever "MG/kg" might mean.

It also doesn't say what the energy density is, and there is a comment that something called the "power density" needs improvement.

Searching around a bit, it looks like this is a bit of incremental improvement on Lithium Titanate to facilitate faster charging. The theoretical energy density is 175 mAhr/g at 1.5V or about 1 MJ/kg (petrol is ~40 MG/kg): http://www.the-cryosphere.net/...

This is at the top end of current Li-Ion batteries, so faster charging makes sense. I see also that there are "power densities" in W/kg reported for some battery types, so I guess that's a term of art in the battery business (it has been my experience that applied physicists routinely blind themselves to what they are doing by adopting such terminology, as it typically pertains quite restrictively to the state-of-the-art at the time the terminology was thunk up.)

These measurements indicate the researchers have created an almost cartoonishly bad "open calorimeter" that they do not calibrate at anywhere near the operating temperature despite their estimate of heat balance being acutely dependent on making multiple temperature-dependent corrections accurately.

If a fourth year engineering student handed this experimental setup in as a design project, and included the low-temperature "calibration" as part of the design, I would fail them.

They were not making continuous measurements. They were not allowed to look inside the device. Rossi was present during the "fueling" of the device.

So: ideal conditions for fraud. I wonder why that is?

If it was me doing it, I'd pre-load the device with isotopically enriched nickle when I constructed it. This would be mixed with and come out with the added "fuel". There are various ways of ensuring the mass balance is right (making sure some of the added "fuel" stays in the device) so the device would weigh the same before and after, but the extracted "fuel" would have an excess of 62Ni.

In this case, the claimed energy density is far outside the realm of anything achievable by chemistry, so if it was real it would be prima-facie evidence of something non-chemical going on.

That said, this this work is so obviously of poor quality--to the extent that I wonder if it was designed that way--I don't think it matters if anyone can look inside the box.

If the designed a closed calorimeter that they put the entire apparatus into, including an inverter, ran DC power into it, and measured the subsequent temperature rise, I could be convinced that something interesting was going on even without knowing what was inside.

Although I do agree that the claims being made are so extraordinary that even then it would be difficult to credit it as a real phenomenon.

The data on isotopic abundances were a result of tampering with the "fuel" at some point in the process, which is pretty simple to do. The fact that the "inventor" was present during "fueling" is a huge red flag.

For the rest: the work is of extremely low quality. The excess heat production is huge, and any simple closed calorimeter would have shown it in a matter of minutes. They instead built this bizarre "open calorimeter" (an oxymoron if there ever was one) and didn't even calibrate it at the operating temperature! This is particularly important when you consider the functional form of the Stephan-Boltzmann law: radiated power goes as T^4, so at half power they were "calibrating" at a temperature far below the one they operated at. And yet their energy-balance calculations require a whole raft of temperature-dependent corrections.

The experimental design is so bad--and I am saying this as an experimental and computational physicist--that I can't help wondering if it was deliberately designed to gull the gullible.

They did nothing of the kind, and if you read the paper you'd know it.

Their "calibration run" was at half-power (which given Stephan-Boltzmann and all is likely about 1/5th temperature) and their "calorimetry" depends on a number of complex temperature-sensitive estimates, so their "calibration" is meaningless.

They excuse themselves from doing a proper full-temperature calibration because they worried the iconel heater wires might melt in the absence of "fuel" which is a bogus and contrived claim.

There were preprints of both the P&F paper and Steve Jones' papers circulating the day after the press conference. They were sufficiently detailed to reproduce what P&F had done (the Jones paper was much sparser) and there was no clear statement of any "loading" requirement. There were a few cases reported where "loading" seemed to have occurred, but there was nothing like an unequivocal two month loading period.

Your comment implies that P&F ever described "the experimental protocol" but of course they never did any such thing. They described a whole range of things, and then claimed anyone who didn't get their results hadn't done it right.

Furthermore, as we dug into the work, it became more an more obvious that phenomenologically for the P&F result to be correct then both a) all of chemistry had to be wrong and b) all of nuclear physics had to be wrong. The work as reported was full of contradictions.

Koonin is on the right side of history with this "crime". P&F were wrong. They were wrong then. They remain wrong today. There have been no reproducible excess heat production experiments that have withstood ordinary academic scrutiny. The intriguing possibility of solid-state fusion has not been realized (more's the pity).

They aren't any more.

Seriously, the number of things they do wrong is huge, starting with the oxymoron of an "open calorimeter", which is what they have tried to build.

The odds of this result being experimental error are far, far higher than the odds that any new physics are involved.