Richard Garwin (IBM), and Nathan Lewis (Caltech), Prominent U.S. Scientists, 
Observe Excess Heat in SRI International Cold Fusion Experiment 

The memorandum, (see below) written by EPRI's Tom Passell states:
"Garwin's draft report marks a major shift in thinking by crtitics of the SRI [cold fusion] work and is a credit to the investigators at SRI under McKubre's leadership."

Various comments from the 1993 report to the Pentagon from Garwin and Lewis are excerpted below:

"Neither Nate Lewis nor I has any reluctance to entertain and recognize a purely experimental discovery. We don't need a theory to make us believe our eyes. But we do need a significant, reproducible effect, and that is what McKubre and his colleagues are attempting to produce."

"... we held one [a cold fusion cell] in our hands and are now quite familiar with its construction. We also had extensive discussions of data from one of these cells, which according to a summary chart has provided about 3% excess heat. This is not a derived kind of excess heat, related to the minimum electrochemical energy required to electrolyze water to produce dihydrogen(g) and dioxygen(g), but an honestly phrased fractional excess over the total power delivered to the electrochemical cell itself."

"The uncertainty in excess power measurement is about 50 milliwatts, but the excess power appears to be on the order of 500 milliwatts or even 1 watt peak. [10:1 signal to noise ratio.] However, excess power is still a deduced quantity and depends upon the calibration of the calorimeter."   [Note: McKubre's first principles closed-cell, mass-flow calorimeter, features a 98% heat recovery and an absolute accuracy of < ±0.4%]

"... on cells L3 and L4, we note that a chemical reaction involving the Pd at perhaps 1.5 eV per atom would correspond to about 3.5 kJ of heat; this is to be compared with the 3 Mj [One thousand times greater] of "excess heat" observed, so such an excess could not possibly be of chemical origin."

"We believe that there are a few things (probably irrelevant) not very well understood by the experimenters."

"While cells that do not "load" the requisite 0.92 D:Pd level would indeed serve as controls, we believe it highly desirable to run a number of cells on light water equal to the number of experimental cells."

"This is a serious effort to obtain reliable calorimetric data on heavy water electrolyzed in a cell with a palladium cathode. It is larger in scale and has more electrochemical expertise than the work of Tom Droege of Fermilab, who obtains excellent data but no excess heat.

We have found no specific experimental artifact [i.e. error] responsible for the finding of excess heat, but we would like to see eventually (as would the experimenters) a larger effect and one that can be more reliably exhibited."

Page 3 of the report is displayed in the graphic image below. Adobe Acrobat images of all pages of the report and cover letters follow after the image.

All Pages of the Report including Memo and Cover Letter (PDF Files)

Memo (Page 1)

Cover Letter (Page 2) 

Report Page 3

Report Page 4

Report Page 5

Report Page 6

Report Page 7

Report Page 8

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