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Re: Arthur C. Clarke on Cold Fusion



I'm quite behind on my readings of this group, but I wanted to give an
interesting reference on the cold fusion story that I haven't seen discussed
very much. Most people don't believe in the fusion part of cold fusion
anymore because there is little evidence of any fusion reaction products
(and many experiments show the same results using plain water). The only
"reproducible" result which has been hard to understand is the claim of
"excess heat" from apparently competent calorimetry measurements.
However, there are a number of assumptions which go into the calorimetry,
one of which is called the Faraday efficiency (a measure of the efficiency
of the electrolysis), which is usually assumed to be 100%. This paper,
measured the Faraday efficiency for these cells and found it to be less
than 100%. They then analyzed all the published data which showed excess
heat and showed that with the correct Faraday efficiency, all the excess
heat disappears. No excess heat, no cold fusion effect and nothing to
debate anymore.
The paper is "Calorimetry, excess heat, and Faraday Efficiency in Ni-H20
electrolytic cells", Zvi Shkedi, et al., Fusion Technology, Vol 28, pg 1720,
Nov. 1995.