Dr. T. Mizuno, a Japanese Academic at an Imperial University, has become well known for his work on what is misleadingly¹ called "Cold Fusion," — i.e., research upon Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, LENR.

The book is a very personal account of Mizuno's struggles to achieve success in this difficult area, totally against the opinions of his Japanese colleagues. He was thereby forced, to a large extent, to buy his own apparatus and equipment.

The book has seven chapters. The first two are preliminary, describing the field. Chapter 3 reports successful work on neutron production resulting in the characteristic energy spectrum which points to the presence of some D + D fusion (the origin of the word cold fusion). The fourth chapter contains a description of the finding of tritium. This gave me much joy because it was I who had suffered at the hands of the journalist, Taubes, who had written in 1990, an article in Science accusing me and my co-worker of fraud in respect to our 1989 claims to have produced tritium in the cold.

The fifth chapter concentrates on that part of Mizuno's work whereby he became famous in the field, the detection of anomalous nuclear heat in proton conductors. Then comes the description of the work on transmutation in which field Mizuno, and in parallel to independent work of his colleagues, Enyo and Omori, have generated more results than any other group, although George Miley at the University of Illinois seems to be rapidly catching up to them.

The seventh chapter is the most interesting. It presents a theory by the Italian physicist, Conte, as to how all this can occur against the apparent wisdom of the classical nuclear physicist. The theory presented is so simple that it is worth stating here. It relies upon the rapid acceleration of protons across the interfacial region of electrodes, and the idea is that protons or deuterons collide with electrons on the metal surface and a small fraction of the H isotopes has a velocity such that they fuse to neutrons. Thereafter, once the neutrons are produced, all the other phenomena, and in particular the production of an astounding number of new elements in the region near the surface is, in principle, explicable, because the neutrons know nothing of repulsion due to coulomb fields and can wander around, entering under other nuclei without limit.

A special feature of the book is the vividness and personal character of the writing. It is seldom that a scientist writes up his work with such a detailed description of exactly what happens at the key points. The author is great at describing the euphoria of the key moments. One is the discovery of the spectrum for neutrons, which can only come from a D-D fusion reaction. There are minute details of the experiments, but they are given in such a way that even non-scientists can go with the action and be thrilled by it.

"2.08 KeV! That is platinum," said Kurokawa, pointing out the peak on the screen. "9.46, 11.16, 12.96. These are all platinum. They are weak. You've got peaks at 6.4 and 8.0 KeV. It's gradually becoming clearer. This would be iron and copper, wouldn't it?" These are excerpts from the wealth of detail of what was said when the new elements were seen from transmutation in the cold. The ratio of the tritium to the neutrons of 10⁶ is another vital discovery, or confirmation, of results obtained in my own lab, proving for the first time that a new nuclear reaction was being observed here, because it is well-known that in the normal, high temperature D + D reactions, the concentration of tritium and neutrons should be nearer to unity, not 10⁶!

Mizuno is impartial and reasonable in his allocation of credit. For example, he brings out the fact that in the international conference on transmutation on "Cold Fusion" occurring in Maui in December, 1992, the Russians were already there with papers on cold transmutation. Mizuno, himself, gives a beautiful and exciting description of the observation of iron within a gold cathode by Ohmori: the absolute negativity of this latter scientist at first, his observation of excess heat, and his persuasion and gradual conviction that nuclear reactions were occurring by his repeated observation of iron atoms in gold after electrolysis, with the isotopic ratio of the iron being radically changed from that which is normally observed in natural iron.

Mizuno describes the horror of the interruption of the first international conference on transmutation at Texas A&M University when a professor from the inorganic group there insulted those standing outside the lecture theater of the meeting, calling out to them that they were all "gooks." He is also scathing in his revelation that the second international conference on cold fusion, intended for Texas A&M University, was refused by members of the Chemistry Department there who (in 1996!) still described the field as "either a joke or fraud."

By the time Mizuno arrived for the 1996 conference in College Station, he had observed a whole slew of nuclear products coming from his interactions of deuterons with palladium.

The book is extremely valuable historically because it describes the gradual development of ideas in the field of low energy nuclear reactions. For example, he points out the contributions made by George Miley and his team at the University of Illinois in establishing that endothermic reactions must also occur among the stream of reactions which arises within the palladium in the course of achieving transmutation. He documents several contributions made by the well-known metallurgist Richard Oriani of the University of Minnesota.

Chapter 7 is a wonderfully simple presentation of what he thinks happens. I say "wonderfully simple" because there are many papers in the literature describing theories of low energy nuclear reactions, and they are distinguished not only by the varied nature of the ideas presented, but also by their complexity. Thus, when protons and deuterons approach the surface of a charged metal in solution, an electrode, they undergo an extraordinary acceleration because of the field of 100 million volts per centimeter, which occurs over distances of the order of 1 nanometer near the metal surface. Then, Conte's idea can be expressed formally by the surface reaction:

d + e^-   --->   2n + neutrinos

(d the deuteron, e the electron in the surface, and n the neutron).

Mizuno also explains a concept well known to electrochemists: inside a metal the pressure of hydrogen molecules in voids may rise to extraordinary degrees. Thus, in the interior of the sun (where fusion reactions are the source of the energy produced), the pressure of hydrogen is more than 10¹¹ Ats. It is possible to show that when the electrode exceeds a certain potential, the effective pressure of hydrogen inside the palladium is greater than that! This may provide another mechanism for fusion.

So, as Mizuno makes clear, it is a matter of the battering ram (the methodology of the billion dollar support by DOE of techniques to achieve fusion); or the key in the lock, which is a fitting way to do describe the cold fusion field.

Low energy nuclear reactions have been established in metals, not only palladium but also titanium, tantalum and other transition metals where the concentration of protons can be high. There are other possibilities where the evidence is tenuous but very exciting, and that is the evidence for nuclear reactions occurring in biological organisms.

May the original promise, which was hinted at by Fleischmann in 1989, be achieved: clean nuclear heat with helium as the only byproduct? Are we seeing the beginnings of a possibility (claimed in one case from research at Texas A&M in 1992) of making any metal we want in the cold by nuclear transformation? Will we see the day when noble metals such as expensive platinum — so vital for the use as a catalyst in chemical industry — can be produced from cheap metals for less than 1/10th the cost of obtaining them from ores in the ground?

To say that this book is worthwhile would be an understatement. It is a gem and, historically, will be treasured when one looks back, in 2020, say, upon the very turbulent birth of a new field in science. The fluency and relaxed accuracy of the translation depends upon the happy accident that the translator is a significant figure in the field — and married to a Japanese.

---

¹ Thus, although there is evidence for D + D fusion, many of the observations are best fitted by other types of nuclear reaction.

John O'M. Bockris
4973 Afton Oaks Dr.
College Station, TX 77845

Table of Contents | JSE Home Page