Cold Fusion in KIJK Magazine

The following post has been submitted by Gerard McEk

An article in the popular science Dutch magazine ‘KIJK’ surprised me this week.

About two years ago KIJK published an article about hot fusion and they wrote as small remark in ‘Fusion Missers’ that fusion at room temperature has been proven impossible. Quite a few people made them aware that Cold Fusion (or LENR as it called now) is alive and that a lot of progress is made since Pons and Fleischmann. They promised to write an article about CF in the near future.

That was for me a reason to take a subscription then and I went to the redaction and offered them to help writing it. I got quite sceptical response and they said the article would not be written for the time being, so I cancelled my subscription after a year. To my surprise an CF article was published recently in the July/August issue (Nr. 8/2017). I bought it and decided to write a summary for ECW.

The heading starts with: “Is nuclear power possible at room temperature? THE NUCLEUS OF THE TRUTH”. (The question was already wrong: Of course it is, look to the fission reactors). They continue with another question: “Since the end of the eighties a small group of scientists think that they can initiate nuclear reactions at room temperatures. Many other academics totally ignore them, are they right?”  Mmmm… Promising, I thought.

Then they start to explain what Pons and Fleischmann (P&F) did in 1989. They talk about the need to overcome the repelling Coulomb force and the pressure and temperature you need to fuse hydrogen atoms and make helium and that hot fusionists were not able to do this during the decennia of research. But P&F found excess heat and they concluded that nuclear fusion took place. But in the three month after the publication no lab could find any of the effects P&F reported (like excess heat, gamma radiation and helium).

The article in KIJK also mentions that:

  1. P&F withdraw their article in Nature after feedback of Nature redaction and
  2. that they changed a picture drawn with metering data that had a fault and
  3. That the advocate of Pons would denounce a physicist that would publish that no gamma rays were found.

All quite negative toward P&F, whereas Eugine Mallove is more depicted as a conspiracy freak somewhere in the side-line of the article.

KIJK journalist  Jean-Paul Keulen talked with many scientists: dr. Jean-Paul Biberian (Aix-Marseille Université), prof. Dr. Graham Hubler (SKINR), dr. Roger Jaspers (TU Eindhoven), dr. Hugo de Blank and prof. Dr. Richard v.d.Sanden (both DIFFER) and a considerable list if literature including Edmund Storms’ ‘A student guide to cold fusion’.

Tree ‘important LENR papers, selected by Biberian were studied by some Dutch scientists’. They conclude:

  1. There is not enough detail in it to replicate,
  2. They are not consistent with each other,
  3. They do not refer to other (similar) papers
  4. The pro LENR scientist Graham Hubler confirms this quality problem with LENR papers

Nevertheless, although being sceptical one of the interviewed scientists does think there might be a possibility that there is something. “They can’t be all wrong, can they?”  The nano-cracks theory of Edmund Storms is mentioned, but Hubler thinks that the anomaly must be found in solid state physics and has no nuclear origin.

Rossi

The article mentions Andrea Rossi a few times. In a small side article called “Secret invention” he is pictured as “for many the most convincing example of cold fusion”. ‘Obviously’ it is mentioned that he was jailed for tax fraud and at another location again his “dim past” is referred briefly. The article confirms that independent researchers have ascertained that the E-cat seems to produce net energy and that the composition of elements changes. “Yet”, they continue, “Most scientist dislike Rossi because he does not want to reveal how his invention works” and “Biberian says: Rossi is a businessman who wants to earn money primarily. If he wants to gain support of the scientific world, he needs to publish all the required details”.

My conclusion: They have tried to write an balanced article, but were unfortunately too sceptical for this. Most people reading this will not become enthusiastic about the subject. A missed chance.

See: www.kijkmagazine.nl/artikel/koude-kernfusie

Gerard McEk