Michael McKubre Reviews the E-Cat Report

Dr. Michael McKubre is Director of the Energy Research Center of the Materials Research Laboratory at SRI International, and is well known and well respected in the LENR community. He has been over the years a champion of LENR and a strong proponent of research in the fieled and has decades of experience in experimentation and study in the field. Today in Infinite Energy magazine he has written a review of the recent Levi et. al. report of their study of the E-Cat.

McKubre’s conclusion about the test is a qualified thumbs up. He finds plenty of experimental and methodological issues to complain about, but also seems to give the report an overall passing grade.

Some points of concern for McKubre are — what he considers to be insufficient pre- and post- test calibration, incomplete calorimetry, lack of detail in describing key aspects of the test (such as the sampling of the fuel mix), and some minor errors in calculation and notation.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the review which provide his overall judgment of the report:

Is there evidence of excess heat? My impression is “Yes” (but see below). Is this evidence unambiguous? Not as presented. Is there evidence of nuclear transformation? Yes, very clearly, but questions remain to be answered (or, in some cases, asked). Do the heat and nuclear production correlate quantitatively? Yes, possibly. Is the report perfect? No, no report is perfect, but this one is imperfect in little ways and large. There is curious inattention to detail—surprising for a document as delayed, anticipated and important as this. When asked to provide a review (sight unseen) I agreed; this is important. But I also realized that unless the report was perfect in every detail, whatever I wrote would annoy somebody . . .

On the whole I am encouraged. Considerably more work is obviously needed to validate the adopted mode of calorimetry and support better sampling and testing. But we are given something we can sink our teeth into both experimentally and theoretically: testable fuel(s) to products(s) nuclear burn at temperatures that have practical, economic and social potential. These are exciting times and Rossi (and his sponsors) and the research team of Levi, Foschi, Höistad, Pettersson and Tegnér, as well as Hanno Essén, are to be commended for their tenacious pursuit of what at times must have seemed a thankless job. The world looks forward to more.

After reading all this, I feel like McKubre would have made a valuable member of the testing team — he seems to have a keen eye for detail and a thorough understanding of the requirements of rigorous experimental protocol.