ICCF-17 Shaping Up to be Notable Event

This year’s 17th International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF-17) in Daejeon, South Korea on August 12-17 is shaping up to be a high profile event with many of the prominent names in the LENR field scheduled to be presenting there. Some of the plenary and invited speakers listed on their site are names familiar to many who are following LENR developments, such as Frank Gordon (SPAWAR, ret.), Peter Hagelstein (MIT), Michael McKubre (SRI International), George Miley (Univ. of Illinois), Francesco Celani (Frascati National Laboratory, ITALY) and David Nagel (George Washington University).

In addition, while not listed on the ICCF-17 web site, Infinite Energy magazine is reporting that Defkalion Green Technolgies and Brillioun Energy will be making presentations at the conference. IE’s web site reports, ‘Representatives from Defkalion will make two presentations: A technical presentation entitled “Technical Characteristics & Performance of the Defkalion Hyperion Model 0 Module” and a general presentation on “The Potential Contribution of LENR in Resolving the World’s Energy Problems.” Robert Godes, the President and Chief Technology Officer of Brillouin Energy, will make a presentation on their technical results and also participate in the theory panel.’

So it’s looking to be a very interesting event. Noticeably absent from the list of attendees is Andrea Rossi, probably the most widely discussed person working on the LENR field at the moment — but given his preference for working alone on his own terms it is not really surprising that he wouldn’t want to be there.

I thought the following segment from the conference’s welcome message was very well stated and worth repeating here.

“Cold Fusion” has sometimes been referred to as an example of bad science. We agree. It was bad science when Galileo agreed with Copernicus that the Earth orbited the sun and he was charged with heresy and placed under house arrest It was bad science with Roemer announced that contrary to the prevailing belief, the speed of light was not infinite but was actually 186,000 miles per second. He was ridiculed by the scientific establishment and driven out of a scientific career. It was bad science when doctors continued to go from patient to patient without washing their hands, leading to childbirth mortality rates as high as 28% even after clinical studies had shown that washing between patients could significantly reduce mortality. It wasn’t until many years later after Pasteur had identified bacteria that could be transmitted from patient to patient that hand-washing was widely adopted. These are just three examples of a long list of’bad science.”

In each of these cases.it took in excess of 20 years after the initial announcement and compelling experimental evidence before the mainstream scientific establishment accepted the change. In this light/cold fusion’is another example of bad science. And as with the examples listed above, after more than 20 years it is getting harder to deny the experimental evidence of “cold fusion.” We believe “cold fusion” is well on its way to becoming an accepted scientific fact and that ICCF-17 will be a pivotal event in answering the question of whether “cold fusion” can become the safe, low-cost nuclear energy source to meet the world’s growing energy demand