Science and Technology

Sci-Tech: 18th Int. Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science at Univ. Missouri

The 18th International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science (ICCF-18) begins on Sunday at the University of Missouri in Columbia.

This is the first time the ICCF has been held at a major US university. The field is gradually overcoming the notoriety of the “cold fusion” label as growing numbers of  researchers find interesting phenomena that falls under the general category of low energy nuclear reactions or LENR.

The conference chair is Robert V. Duncan, Professor of Physics and Vice Chancellor for Research at MU. He had no connection to the field until he was asked a few years ago by the CBS 60 Minutes news program to take an independent outsider’s view of it . He came away very impressed and eventually started a program at MU to investigate the phenomena.

Here is Duncan’s intro to the conference:

We at the University of Missouri (MU) are delighted to team with ENEA and National Instruments to review and explore developments in condensed matter nuclear science. There have been great advances in this discipline over the last five years by research labs and private institutions around the world, and this work will be explored at ICCF-18.

The Naval Research Lab (NRL), and many other excellent laboratories have confirmed that the excess heat effects reported by Fleischmann and Pons are real, and roughly one thousand times larger than can be attributed to a chemical process. Other phenomena, such as transmutation and nuclear process of geologic origin, remain at the forefront of current inquiry.

There have also been developments and confirmations of nuclear process in other condensed matter systems, and many of these reports come from outside the traditional ICCF Community. For example, NASA, using its FERMI gamma burst satellite has confirmed antimatter ejections from major thunderstorms many hundreds of times.

In the past, we have seen the development of pyro-electric hydrogen fusion at UCLA, and the development of piezo-electric hydrogen fusion continues at MU today. Clearly, condensed matter nuclear science is undergoing a renaissance. Join us here at the University of Missouri as we review the state of our understanding of these systems, and as we apply the scientific method to understanding anomalous phenomena that are based upon reproducible empirical reports.

In this video of a panel discussion at the 2012 National Instruments NIWeek event, Duncan gives an introduction to the field. The panel also includes Dr. Andrea Aparo  (Ansaldo Energia SpA), Dr. Akito Takahashi (Osaka University), Frank Gordon (Co-chair International Conference on Cold Fusion, US Navy SPAWAR Systems Center), and Dr. Michael McKubre (SRI International).