I have been scanning the news to the upcoming ICCF-18 conference in Columbia next week I have come across a comment from the well known LENR/E-Cat/cold fusion skeptic Mary Yugo that I am surprised to say I sort of agree with. Now please don’t think I have suddenly turned skeptical myself — I’m as convinced as ever about the potential for LENR as a superior energy source — but I have found a single paragraph written by MY that I think has some merit.
The comment by MY I am referring to is found attached to an article about LENR by Len Rosen at the World Future Society web site (interesting and encouraging that they are featuring LENR)
One interesting aspect to ICCF-18 is that if Rossi *or* Defkalion are telling anything remotely approaching the truth, the whole conference is obsolete. Who cares about vanishingly small arguable amounts of excess heat and abstract theories, when Rossi and Defkalion say they can generate 10 – 50kW in a gadget the size of a desktop computer? The whole conference should be about those two, should it not?
I realize that MY does NOT believe in the claims of Rossi and Defkalion, and the comment above is a facetious one.
Interestingly enough, this year’s ICCF-18 WILL be featuring a Defkalion demo, and it’s possible that if it is convincing, it could overshadow the other presentations made there. I was half hoping that some of the professors who were involved with this year’s E-Cat test might be presenting at the conference, but that’s not happening.
My point here is that for LENR to be anything other than an interesting phenomenon that can be demonstrated in a laboratory it needs to be practical on a commercial level where it can compete with the other energy sources out there.
Of course, the lab work HAS to be done before the commercial applications can be forthcoming, so I am by no means criticizing the work of very able and dedicated cold fusion researchers. I hope their work continues and that they are able to learn as much as possible about this phenomenon. However, it appears to me that the work of Rossi and Focardi has taken LENR to a new level where commercialization is now possible. Defkalion’s work branches out from Rossi’s, and it will be interesting to see what they present next week.
Since the days of Pons and Fleischmann, the cold fusion effect has been elusive and difficult to reliably reproduce. Things seem to have changed now, and I would expect that if researchers and scientists are convinced of the ‘super LENR’ effect, or LENR+ as some people label the E-Cat level of reaction, they would turn their attention to discovering what is going on there.
