ABSTRACT

On January 2, 1992, an explosion in an electrochemistry laboratory at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, killed scientist Andrew Riley, injured three others, and caused extensive lab damage. Riley and others atSRI were conducting experiments in arelatively new, but widely controversial, –eld of study termed “cold fusion.” Beginning with a report by Pons and Fleischmann in 1989 [1], investigators around the world reported the production of small quantities of excess heat in electrolysis experiments with heavy water (D2O). Some also measured the emission of conventional nuclear fusion signature species (such as neutrons, 3H, 4He, and prompt γrays) accompanying the surplus heat, while others could not reproduce the phenomenon at all.