Cold Fusion Pioneer says LENR is not Fusion

The man who invented the term “cold fusion” now says that the effect popularly described as cold fusion or low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) is not fusion. Professor Emeritus Steven E. Jones told Sterling D. Allan of Pure Energy Systems that he’s not sure what to call the effect.

Jones is the man who came up with the term cold fusion in a Scientific American article in July 1987. Jones was actually researching the phenomenon two full years before Pons and Fleischmann put it on the map. Yet he is still unsure of what to call it after nearly thirty years of research.

Like many researchers Jones has been able to create excess heat in electrolytic cells but hasn’t been able to explain where it comes from. Jones told Allan that he thinks the process should not be called “fusion” because it doesn’t exhibit the characteristics of fusion. He thinks the use of the term fusion makes it easy for naysayers to ignore and shutdown LENR experiments.

Jones doesn’t like the term LENR either because he thinks that a lot of the processes involved are not nuclear. If that’s true it means a lot of LENR researchers have been looking in the wrong places. In other words it is a chemical or electrochemical process. It also lends credence to Andrea Rossi’s recent claims that he can achieve LENR reactions through a gas fired device.

Jones proposed that LENR be called “Freedom Energy” which is a misleading term because it lends credence to the misleading notion that cold fusion is free energy. There is no such as free energy because a device has to be built and energy has to be fed into to achieve the reaction. Since you would have to pay for the device and the energy neither is free. A better term might “anomalous xs heat” which would enable researchers to examine the phenomenon without getting lynched by physicists.

Jones attempt to replicate Peter Davey's World War II era research courtesy Pure Energy Systems

Jones has managed to replicate Pons and Fleischmann’s famous experiments and create excess heat in a bell shaped electrode apparatus. Interestingly enough Jones copied his design from Peter Davey a scientist from New Zealand who performed similar experiments in the 1940s. Jones believes that Davey produced amounts of energy that were several times what he put into his device over forty years before Pons and Fleischmann got together in Utah.

More of Steven Jones' back room experiments

Jones has been invited to give a lecture on his work and theories at the Sidney Kimmel Institute for Nuclear Renaissance (SKINR) at the University of Missouri. Jones apparently gave the lecture in October although Allan doesn’t say whether he did or not. A Power Point of Jones lecture is available online. Jones lecture is evidence of the importance of openness to LENR at a major university. His revelations also indicate that the future of LENR is in the hands of garage researchers and not the scientific establishment.

Continue reading here: Dick Smith and his Million Dollar LENR Challenge

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