| 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.
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