1. HISTORY
Eleven years
have passed since Professors Fleischmann and Pons (FP) announced that they had
observed the fusion of two deuterium nuclei at room temperature within the
lattice of a metal. This announcement produced great excitement, and there were
many attempts to reproduce the experiment. It turned out that it was neither
easy, nor easily reproducible, and the eventual outcome was the growth of
enthusiasm and skepticism at the same time: the enthusiasm of those who
succeeded in repeating the experiment and the skepticism of those (the
majority) who did not. Within a few months the scientific community took the
"semi ‑official" position that none of, it was true and that
",Cold Fusion" (CF) did not exist,
This history has
created a very strange situation, a divergence increasing in time between
official science and a small group of researchers, most of whom have
participated in this Conference, who have continued to do research in this
field. They had the conviction, better the awareness, that the phenomena under
investigation were real and scientifically very interesting. The hope that this
research could also have an important practical result, mainly as a new energy
source, added charm and passion to this enterprise.
Research in CF
has been going on all these years, producing continuous, albeit gradual,
progress, mostly in USA, in Japan, in Italy, in Russia, in China, and, to a
lesser extent, also in other countries. There have been difficulties in
communicating the results obtained within and outside of the CF community: many
scientific Journals have a priori denied access to papers related to CF. In
this situation an important role has been played by the International
Conferences, of which the present, ICCF8, is the most recent. They have offered
an occasion to meet and exchange information among the researchers active in
this field, and have provided an important resource with their Proceedings,
amounting to a good archive, witnessing the development of CF. I think that it
is worthwhile, at this time of the CF history, to review them, thus producing a
concise outline of the main events in the field.
The first Conference was
sponsored by the "National Cold Fusion Institute" (NCFI), founded by
the University of Utah, and was held in Salt Lake City at the end of March 1990.
It was called "The first annual Conference on Cold Fusion". There
were already major difficulties: the official scientific community had already
pronounced its verdict against CF,. the NCFI would close shortly afterwards;
within the CF community there were two diverging schools, those who believed
only the nuclear evidence (mainly
neutrons),
barely accepted by the scientific community, and those who believed in excess
heat, spurned by the scientific community. I must confess that I belonged to
the first school. being quite skeptical about heat production, and I
participated in the organization of a "dissident" Conference, called "Anomalous
nuclear effects in deuterium/solid. systems", sponsored by "'The
Electric Power Research Institute" (EPRI), by the US Department of Energy
(DOE) and by the Brigham Young University at Provo (BYU): the Conference was
held in Provo, Utah, in October 1990.
At this point
two parallel initiatives were proposed: I was asked by the "neutron"
people to organize the next Conference in Italy and Giuliano Preparata was
asked to perform the same task by the "excess heat people. There were
discussions and correspondence was exchanged between the representatives of the
two schools, but eventually wisdom prevailed and it was decided that there
would be only one Conference, in Italy, covering all aspects of CF. This was
the "Second Annual Conference on Cold Fusion??: Tullio Bressani, Emilio
Del Giudice, and Giuliano Preparata were the Chairmen, and for the first time
an International Advisory Committee (IAG) appeared. The Conference was
sponsored by Italian universities, research agencies and industries, and was
held in Como at the end of June and beginning of July 1991.
I think that the
Como Conference was very important in the development of CF. There were at
least two results that have influenced future research: the statement that heat
excess in electrolytic cells with heavy water and palladium cathode could be
obtained only if the amount of deuterium absorbed in the palladium lattice (the
D/Pd ratio) exceeded a threshold value (McKubre), and the correlation between
heat excess and the presence 0f4 He, understood to be a nuclear ash of the
fusion process (Miles). Both these features were consistent with the theory
presented by Preparata, Bressani and Del Giudice in April 1989. The many
confirmations of the production of heat excess also had an important effect on
me and on the ENEA Frascati Group.. we decided to move from neutron and tritium
detection to calorimetry, and eventually we obtained very convincing evidence
of the existence of excess heat.
. Next Conference was organized in
Japan, with the strong encouragement of IMRA, the research enterprise that owed
its existence to the determination of Minoru Toyota, an influent member of the
Toyota "dynasty". It was sponsored by many Japanese scientific
institutions, was held in Nagoya in October 1992, and was chaired by Prof Hideo
Ikegami. This was the first for which the present name and acronym were used:
"3rd International
Conference on Cold F sion g (ICCF3). The IAC was also active in this
Conference, and a general rule was informally accepted about the frequency and location
of the subsequent conferences: there would be a rotation among the three most
active continents.. Asia, America, and Europe, with roughly one and a half
years between successive conferences. Thus we had ICCF4 in December 1993 in
Maul, Hawaii, USA, sponsored by EPRI and by the Stanford Research Institute
(SRI), chaired by Drs. Tom Passell and Michael McKubre, followed by lCCFs, in
April 1995, in Monte Carlo, (almost) France, Europe, organized again by the
INIRA laboratories, chaired by Prof Stanley Pons. Then came ICCE6, at Toya,
Japan, in October 1996, organized by the Japanese government enterprise,
"The Institute of Applied Energy" of the "New Energy Technology
Development Organization" of MITI (the Ministry of International
Trade and Industry): it was chaired by Prof. Makoto Okamoto. Finally ICCF7 was
held in Vancouver, Canada, in April 1998, and was organized by Eneco, a private
company that has always followed attentively the development of CF. Fred Jaeger
was its Chairman.
After Asia and
America, it was once again the turn of Europe. In Vancouver I was appointed by
the IAC to be Chairman of ICCF8, to
be held in Italy. The period envisaged was October 1999, but a number of
management problems that I had to face in Frascati forced me to propose to the
members of the IAC to postpone ICCF8 to the Spring of 2000. They accepted and
it seemed advisable, in order to avoid the congestion to be expected in the
Rome area during the Holy Year, to have it in a different site. Antonella De
Ninno proposed Villa Marigola, a beautiful 18th century
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villa upon a
hill in a delightful park in Lerici, which is a small town on the Tirreman sea
not far from Genoa. In retrospect it seems to me that this choice was
appreciated by the participants in the Conference. In the course of these years
many new features of CF have appeared, only a few of which I will mention here:
In FP‑type experiments, the "heat. after deathh, i. e., the production of
excess heat after the total evaporation of the electrolyte, the possibility of
having CF phenomena by coupling hydrogen and nickel (rather than deuterium and,
palladium); the increasing evidence of "transmutations", i.e., the
appearance, after the CF experiment, of nuclei that were absent before; the
increasing accuracy in the evidence of nuclear emissions, both in passive and
"active" experiments, where by active I mean those in which a
stimulation is applied to the system under study (energetic particles, e.m.-radiation,
ultrasound). Much theoretical work deserves to be cited: I will limit myself to
stating what is, in my opinion, the most important notion, presented first by
Preparata as early as in 1989: a collective and coherent interaction among the
entities that participate in the CF phenomena is required in order to explain
them. The multiplicity of phenomena, together with the limited resources
dedicated to this research activity, results in a sparse but fascinating
panorama, with many holes still to be filled. Furthermore, all these features
have continued to be haunted by the old ghost of the lack of
reproducibility". But in this direction too important progress has been
achieved. I will mention here just one episode: at ICCF6 the ENEA Frascati
Group presented a measurement in electrolytic cells with heavy water, in which
an easily measurable heat excess was obtained with quite good reproducibility;
what is most important is that this had been obtained by facing and solving
material science problems connected with the absorption of deuterium in
palladium, and by carefully designing the samples and the protocol of the
experiment.
It is worth
remembering that in these years there were three major initiatives:
1 . EPRI
made an important investment in CF research, initially in a number of areas,
eventually mostly in excess heat experiments with D/Pd systems, that were
performed at SRI. This project was active for many years and, in spite of good
results, was terminated in 1995.
2. I
already cited IMRA, an institution tied to the Japanese industry Toyota: three
laboratories were created, two of them in Japan (in Sapporo and in Nagoya), and
one in Europe, at Sophia Antipolis, near Cannes. This project, too, has been
terminated quite recently.
3. Another
important Japanese initiative was taken a few years later by the MITI, with an
additional contribution from a consortium of industries. A specialized
laboratory was built for the purpose, and universities collaborated on more
fundamental aspects. This project was terminated in 1998.
One could be
tempted to interpret the end of these three important projects as a
demonstration that CF research is failing in its objective to become a well
defined discipline in science. I am convinced that this interpretation is
wrong. Let me explain why. One of the common characteristics of these projects
is that they were promoted by agencies (in a general sense) highly interested
in the potential energetic applications of CF. Thus, their expectation was to
be able to develop practical applications of CF in a few years. This has not
happened: in spite of the indubitable scientific realities, progress in CF
research has been quite slow, both because of the intrinsic difficulties of the
field, and of the very scarce resources that have been dedicated to its study.
Thus, it is not surprising that enterprises that were born with the aim of a
practical fall‑out in short time would give up.
I am convinced
that a lot of basic research is still needed in order to better understand the
science underlying CF, before practical objectives can be seriously addressed..
this can be better pursued by small groups that proceed with this idea clearly
in mind. And this is, in my opinion, what is happening. As an example, let me
note that at this Conference there were 15 communications by Japanese
scientists (more than 20% of the total), mostly from universities, in spite of
the disappearance of the two big initiatives quoted above. The research program
at ENEA Frascati, funded by the Italian Government, is another meaningful
example, which, I hope, will be followed by other initiatives of this kind.
2. ICCF8
2a. Generalities
The Italian
research agency for energy and environment, ENEA (Ente per le Nuove tecnologie, ‑l'Energia e l'Anibiente), accepted
the task of organizing this Conference. There were other important sponsors. One
of them was CNR (Consiglio Nazonale delle
Ricerche), the largest public research agency in Italy. The others were the
INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare),
an important research institution, operating in symbiosis with Italian
universities in the field of nuclear and sub-nuclear physics, and the Italian
physical society, SIF (Societe Italiana
di Fisica). The latter is
responsible for publishing these Proceedings. The decision of ENEA to sponsor
ICCF8 is part of a more general initiative, taken by the Board of
Administration of the Agency in 1998, including the start of a research
program, proposed by Giuliano Preparata, with a new laboratory to be built at
the ENEA Center of Frascati. This program was started in 1999, and the first
results were reported at this Conference.
Unfortunately,
on April 24, less than a month before the beginning of ICCF8, Giuliano
Preparata died, leaving a sad void in our Group, in the world of CF, and in
science. We decided that we would memorialize him in this Conference, dedicating
to his memory the very beginning of the meeting. On Monday, May 22, after a brief introduction by me,
Martin Fleischmann gave a speech in his memory. The reader will find both texts
in the Proceedings.
In organizing
ICCF8 I benefited from the expert advice of the IAC, which helped me take the
difficult decision to delay the Conference by half a year. When the real work
started, I could not have succeeded, without the efficient and intelligent
contributions of Dr. Antonella De Ninno. Becoming the head of the Secretariat,
she set up and directed a wonderful team, and all together we worked out all
the stages of the Conference, from the decision about where to hold it to the
editing of the Proceedings. Last, but not least, I wish to recall here the very
important contributions of the Scientific Program Committee (SPC): initially a
small group of Italian colleagues, it was then enlarged, substantially doubled,
by representatives of other countries, in order to help take decisions on the
program of the Conference, on its format, and on the publication of the
Proceedings.
2b. About criteria
The experience
accumulated from the past conferences prompted us to have a single session and
to divide the contributions into orals and posters. We decided also to repeat
once more the well tested technique of the "poster presentation ‑sessions‑,
preceding the poster discussion sessions~ for each poster there would be a
three‑minute oral presentation, the whole session lasting one hour. We did not
have invited talks, and divided the oral presentations into longer ones, the
majority (35 minutes, including discussion), and shorter ones (25.minutes,
including discussion). We had a total of 26 oral presentations and 51 posters,
out of 110 abstracts presented. These criteria were founded on the awareness
that, in spite of the eleven years that have passed, this discipline is still
young, and it is important to do our best to allow the maximum p,~s~ible number
of participants to communicate the results of their research work.
Knowing that
ICCF8 would take place at the end of May at an appealing sea‑side site, we
decided that we would leave the participant free time to enjoy the place: thus,
we concentrated all the oral presentations in the four mornings, Monday to
Thursday, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m,. Then the participants were free for three
hours. The afternoon sessions, for three days (we left the Wednesday afternoon
free) started at 4 ‑p.m. with the poster presentation session, and continued up
to 7 p.m. with the poster discussion. We had three social gatherings: on Sunday
afternoon we had a get‑together party, on Wednesday evening we had the social
dinner, and on Friday 26, after a session on conclusions", we had a brunch
offered to all participants and to their companions.
2c. Attendance
There were 145
participants in the Conference: 41 from Italy, 40 from USA, 24 from Japan, 12
from Russia, and smaller numbers from 14 other countries. We succeeded in
helping colleagues who had financial difficulties plus a number of students (a
total of more than 20 persons), by waiving the Conference fee, by providing
free lodging in Lerici during the Conference, and, in a few cases, we also paid
travel expenses.
2d. The
scientific outcome
Here, of course,
I am expressing my own point of view, for which I take full responsibility. I
think that the picture of CF that I described briefly at the beginning of this
foreword has been substantially confirmed, but there have also been many
important new results, and I would have difficulty in quoting all of them. Let
me just mention a few items that, in my opinion, deserve to be emphasized:
There have been
quite convincing confirmations, at least three, of the detection of 4He,
understood to be a nuclear ash, in experiments with palladium and deuterium,
obtained with different experimental procedures. In some cases the correlation
with the heat produced gives support to the figure of 24 MeV per atom as a
consequence of a D+D reaction. There was also an interesting evidence of 3He
production. The presence of these nuclei is the indubitable signature of a
nuclear reaction.
‑ We
had the first presentation of the effect proposed by Giuliano Preparata with
the name of Cohen‑Aharonov effect, which it has been proposed to rename as the
Preparata effect. There was also the first experimental evidence of this
effect. This effect could represent a shorteut to most of the material science
problems, with the aim of achieving high loading ratios in palladium.
‑ There
were many reports on problems of material science, most of them worked with
very advanced techniques and with a sound scientific approach.
But there was
such a variety of different experiments and fascinating theories that I would
have difficulty in quoting them here. The Conference was quite lively,. with interesting discussions.
Given these observations of
the state of the art of this discipline, and the indubitable progress that has
been achieved in these eleven years, I am still astonished by the lack of
communication between the CF world and the "official", scientific
community. This is also witnessed by the absence of research on CF in most of
the European Countries and by the ostracism to CF publications in most
prestigious scientific journals (we are very grateful to gIl Nuovo Cimento"
for its open position in all these years, witnessed once more by the decision
to publish these Proceedings), In my opinion, there is no doubt that we are
facing a subject of enormous scientific interest: it can no longer be denied
that there are many different kinds of nuclear reactions that take place at substantially
low energies, and that this implies the existence of collective and coherent interactions
among the participants in the events under study. Following Preparata's
suggestion, one
can envisage a totally new way of looking at most of the problems of condensed
matter. This should stimulate the "curiosity" of all scientists:
physicists, chemists, biologists, and engineers.
Another
stimulating aspect is the hope that CF could lead to the solution of the very
serious problems that mankind is facing concerning the production of energy. I
have no doubts that we, are producing ‑particularly "clean" nuclear
energy, without nuclear emissions and wastes, On the question of practical
energy sources, my opinion diverges from that of many enthusiastic supporters
of CF. As I said before, I am convinced that much research has still to be
performed in order to better understand the physics at the basis of CF.
Considering practical applications will become more and more sensible as we
progress in this kind of understanding, and thus it is too early to foresee
important practical applications. But, even if there is no certainty that we
will succeed in this task, it seems to me that the target is so important that
the scientific community should feel the duty of working at it, and this is my
invitation to all those who will read this foreword.
4.
TFIESE PROCEEDINGS
On 24th and 25th of February this year at the ENEA Center at Frascati there was a meeting of the (extended) SPC, mostly dedicated to examining the 110 abstracts submitted for presentations at ICCF8. We decided which would be the 77 presentations accepted, and their distribution between oral (long and short) and poster presentations. We discussed the program of the conference and its format. Finally, we discussed the procedure for the publication of the Proceedings. The first decision was to shift the deadline for the presentation of the manuscripts from the date of the Conference to the end of June: it was stressed that in a Conference the authors should be allowed to take inspiration from what they learned during the Conference, if this can
help them to
produce more up to date and more critically conceived manuscripts. The other
important decision concerned refereeing the manuscripts before accepting them
for publication. Here a compromise was necessary, to assure good quality
manuscripts but still bring out the Proceedings promptly. It was decided that
every manuscript would be submitted to one referee, and that there would be
only one interaction between referee and author. Thus, the procedure would
consist in sending the manuscript to the referee, obtaining comments,
transmitting the comments to the author., and if the referee required a
revision of the manuscript, a second version would in turn be sent to the
referee, who would give a definitive "yes" or "no" to the
publication. In case of controversy, the final decision was left to the editor,
i.e., to me. We would use e‑mail communication wherever possible. It worked
rather well on the average. But I did not succeed in sending the final
manuscripts to the publisher before the end of September, as promised in the
program. I had to have a one‑month delay.
Most of the
manuscripts were properly prepared and respected the length limit of 6 pages that
we had asked to the authors. However,: some were presented with 4,11 excessive
number of pages. 'There were also some papers that were presented using a quite
poor English,, and sometimes the logic of the presentation itself needed to be
improved. Yor each of these cases we asked the authors for a correction: in
some cases we succeeded, in some others not. As far as the length is concerned,
I decided to accept the papers that exceeded the six pages in the second
version (I want to make clear that the paper by Martin Fleischmann was accepted
in a version 15 pages long for intrinsical reasons: without all the figures
included, he could not have presented his arguments). For the persistent poor
presentation of some papers I decided to adopt another "compromise"
between pursuing a most thorough and complete diffusion of the information
presented at the Conference, and satisfying the quest for a rapid publication
of its Proceedings. Thus, in those occasions in which I had not succeeded in
obtaining a clear version of the paper in English, and the final decision on
its publication was demanded of me, I decided to adopt the following criterion.
Let me forget about good English and ability in presenting a scientific paper.
I'll just ask the following question: after reading the manuscript, more than
once if necessary, do I succeed in understanding what the author is trying to
communicate? If the answer is yes, and what the author is communicating is
scientifically sound, then I will accept the paper for publication. This
happened in a few cases, and I hope that the reader of these Proceedings will
forgive me: I thought that the most important issue was to have the information
as complete as possible.
In editing the
Proceedings I had to decide whether to divide it into categories (chapters), to make it easier to consult. We had not tried to make separate
sessions in the Conference on purpose, both because many papers touch different
aspects of CF research, and because we thought that a certain variety within a
session was recommendable. The former feature occurs also in the editing of
manuscripts. In spite of all these considerations, I decided to divide the
papers into the seven categories that the reader will find, trying to evaluate
in those papers referring to different items which was the most meaningful one.
Also here I ask for the clemency of the reader for any mistake that I might
have made.
xix
5. ICCF9
On Wednesday May
24 there was a meeting of the IAC. The most important item of the agenda was
the decision to be taken for next Conference, ICCF9. It was unanimously decided
that next Conference will be held in China, presumably in Beijing in the Spring
of 2002: Prof Li, Xing Zhong, will be its Chairman. This decision was announced
to the participants in the Conference both during the dinner party and at the
session on conclusions on Friday 26, where Prof Li gave a short speech in
accepting the nomination.
6.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want here to
thank warmly the members of the IAC, of the SPC, the referees and the chairmen,
who made this Conference rational and well conducted, and the Proceedings
accurate and appealing.
I also thank the
sponsors for their much appreciated help. Besides the great Agencies that I quoted
above, I want to thank ST Microelectronics, an advanced multinational industry
operating (in Italy among other countries) on semiconductors, and BaIzers, the
well known vacuum industry from Liechtenstein.. both gave a financial
contribution to the management of the Conference, and both participated with a
presentation in the Conference.
A specially warm note of thanks goes to the Secretariat, starting from its head, Antonella De Ninno, to Ms. Maria Luisa Ciceroni, who, together with Ms. Simona Ferri, helped during the Conference preparation, during the Conference itself, and in the editing of the manuscripts. I want here to express my gratitude to Ms. Franca Vinciguerra, who to‑ ok charge of all administrative procedures, and Mr. Fabio Simoni, who was in charge of the information technology aspects of ICCF8, including the webpage.
A sincere thank
goes to the personnel of the ENEA laboratory in Santa Teresa, close to Lerici:
their help has been really precious during the development of the Conference.
We want to thank in particular Ms. Patrizia Maffei, who gave invaluable help,
and the Director of the Center, Dr. Glovanni Scabbia.
Thanks also goes
to the personnel of Villa Marigola, starting from the very efficient Mr. Bruno Di
Stefani, always ready to solve every problem, and to the personnel of the
Symposia Agency, who took care of most of the management problems of ICCF8.
Last but not least, I want to express my gratitude to
all participants in the Conference, who made it lively, interesting, and pleasant.
Franco
Scaramuzzi
ENEA Consultant
Frascati,
October 31, 2000
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