In an article published in the Hindu BusinessLine science section yesterday there’s a report about a meeting of scientists held in Bangalore (Bengaluru) on April 7th hosted by the Indian Ministry of New and Renewable Energy to discuss cold fusion/LENR, which has been getting quite a lot of attention among senior scientists in India, especially since the journal Current Science published a special section on LENR in February of this year. The meeting was instigated by the Indian Power Minister, Piyush Goya.
The author, M. Ramesh writes:
About thirty scientists from all over India met in Bengaluru on Tuesday to discuss ‘the way forward’ in an emerging cheap and clean source of energy, called ‘low energy nuclear reactions’, or simply ‘cold fusion’. The meeting was chaired by Dr Anil Kakodkar, former Chairman of the Department of Atomic Energy.
The meeting was held at the instance of the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, said Dr Baldev Raj, Director, National Institute of Advanced Studies, who co-chaired the meeting.
According to the article the outcome of the meeting was that there was felt to be a need to study LENR more, and one of the attendees, Dr. Mahadeva Srinivasan, reported that “four groups of institutions and scientists would get into cold fusion research and there would be an informal oversight committee”. One of these institutions is named as the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR)
The article also includes a brief overview of the history of cold fusion, from the Pons and Fleischmann announcement to the present, mentioning Rossi’s E-Cat, Alexander Parkhomov’s replication work, Texas Tech University’s Center for Emerging Energy Sciences (where they will study LENR) and the upcoming ICCF19 conference in Padua, Italy.
One statement in the article is to me still questionable. It states that the Bill Gates Foundation is taking part in the ICCF19 conference, but I see no mention of them on the meeting agenda. Perhaps they will be sending people to the conference, I suppose we will find out soon.