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National Cold Fusion Institute Director Fritz Will told council members of a growing body of evidence around the world in support of cold fusion, but he acknowledged that most of the work nowadays is not in pursuit of the mysterious "excess heat" which the University of Utah hoped would lead to commercial energy production.
Other researchers around the world have reported evidence of nuclear products, including neutrons, tritium and X-rays. But even if their results are taken as evidence of nuclear fusion, the amounts are far below the energy put into the system to create the effects, meaning its value as an energy source is limited.
Dr. Will and other institute scientists, excluding Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, presented summaries of their results from the past year Thursday to the state Fusion/Energy Advisory Council.
Haven Bergeson, who heads the institute's physics group, presented evidence of small amounts of tritium, which is produced in nuclear fusion reactions. Although the amounts were only slightly above background levels, the experiments did appear to solve one of the most frustrating parts of the research, reproducibility. Dr.
Bergeson said the effect was seen in eight out of eight cells.
The results still did not convince Douglas Morrison, a physicist from the European nuclear laboratory CERN and cold fusion skeptic who was present at Thursday's meeting. He said the amounts of tritium are so small that they cannot be taken as evidence of fusion.
Besides Drs. Pons and Fleischmann, who have so far declined to release their results, only one group of institute scientists, the engineering group, reported seeing any excess heat in the past year.
That was only one event lasting about 10 days last February. It occurred in one of seven cells run in the experiment, and the others turned up nothing.
Drs. Pons and Fleischmann originally reported getting four watts of excess heat for every one watt of electricity coming out, a 300 percent increase, and "bursts" of heat that reached up to 5000 percent.
But their more recent results have claimed only in the 20 percent to 30 percent level, according to Dr. Will.
Most scientists attributed the lower amounts to scientists, including Drs. Pons and Fleischmann, perfecting the experiment and eliminating many measurement errors contributing to the high results.
But Dr. Will is not ready to dismiss the earlier, higher results.
It is his hypothesis that those early "dirty" experiments provided the unknown catalysts to trigger the large amounts of heat. He said he has an idea about a triggering mechanism, but he did not want to discuss it with the press. "I think the group in India is already on to it."
One recent excess-heat experiment which has buoyed Dr. Will and others is the unusual work of two University of Hawaii researchers who ran their device using molten salts at about 650 degrees fahrenheit. They claimed to produce heat levels around 600 percent, with peak levels of 1500 percent.
But Dr. Morrison said he saw a paper on that work presented in Hawaii, and "they haven't made all the checks. It's still too early."