The Columbia Daily Tribune, newspaper from the hometown of the University of Missouri is carrying an article by Karin Spory on the the upcoming International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF-18) which will take place at the University starting on July 21st.
Key quotes in the article come from Mark Prelas, professor of nuclear engineering at Mizzou, who was prevented from conducting research in LENR at the university in 1991 after the scientific community turned sour on cold fusion. Things have changed now with the Sidney Kimmel Institute for Nuclear Renaissance now hosted at the university. Prelas states, “What we’re doing is developing tools to just look at very basic things occurring in this event.”
Robert Duncan, Vice Chancellor of Research at MU states:
“The fact that we’re seeing something here that we don’t understand — I see it as a huge opportunity for basic physics research to try to understand why we don’t understand it . . . I would like to understand the underpinning physics because once you understand what’s going on, you have a way of predicting and designing things that may be useful.”
It’s articles like this that could interest people outside the small (but passionate) community of LENR supporters. My guess is that probably less than .1 per cent of the general public around the world has heard of the recent developments in the LENR field — and so are unaware that we could be on the cusp of a flowering of a very important new energy source. It will be interesting to see how much coverage the conference gets from the press. My understanding that this year is the first time the ICCF will be hosted at a research university, so that could bring it more attention than usual.