Part 2 of 4 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
     In 2004, there was a second review of cold fusion by the DoD which included research during the 1990s and early 2000s. They reached the same conclusions of the 1989 DoD review and did not believe that the U.S. government should fund any research into the subject. Currently, articles about research into cold fusion or LENR are seldom published in peer-reviewed mainstream scientific journals. Because of this, such research does not attract the level of scrutiny that is expected of research published in mainstream scientific publications.
     However, there many researchers believe that there is something going on with LENRs and that the subject deserves a serious second look. In the Scientific American guest blog in 2016, an article was published with the title “It’s Not Cold Fusion… But It’s Something.” This blog post claims that “Hidden in the confusion are many scientific reports, some of them published in respectable peer-reviewed journals, showing a wide variety of experimental evidence” for LENRs, “including transmutations of elements.” The same post says that studies have shown that LENRs “can produce local surface temperatures of 4,000-5,000 K and boil metals (palladium, nickel and tungsten) in small numbers of scattered microscopic sites on the surfaces of laboratory devices.” A more recent theory suggests that the LENR reactions have nothing to do with nuclear fusion. Instead, they are produced by weak interaction and are perfectly consistent with known physics.
    The Naval Surface Warfare Center, Indian Head Division (NSWC-IH), intends to finally find definitive answers as to the nature of LENR phenomena. The NSWC-IH will take an unbiased look at all the available data and will also conduct new experiments. The NSWC-IH specializes in energetics which is a branch of research involving the development and testing of explosives, propellants, pyrotechnics, fuels, and other reactive materials with regard to propulsion and weaponry.
     Oliver Barham is a project manager at NSWC-IH. He says that despite past controversies regarding LENRs, the laboratory believes that the science behind these poorly understood reactions is worthy of a second serious examination. He went on to say, “I’m not as worried about looking into something that is considered controversial as long as there’s good science there. The whole point of our effort is we want to be doing good science. We’re not out to prove or disprove anything, we’re out to assemble a team of scientists who want to take it seriously.” Barham added that he hopes the lab will serve as an “honest broker” in the examination of decades worth of data collected by the U.S. Naval Academy, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
     Carl Gotzmer is the Chief Scientist at NSWC-IN. He remarked that researchers risked ending their careers if they even mentioned “cold fusion”. However, since NSWC-IN is a government funded laboratory, the researchers there have a little more freedom to pursue controversial subjects if there is a possibility of obtaining important scientific results.
Please read Part 3 next