ABSTRACT
On 2 January 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 at SRI were conducting experiments in a relatively new, but widely controversial, field 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 (D
O). Some also measured the emission of conventional nuclear fusion signature species (such as neutrons,
H,
He, and prompt
γ
rays) accompanying the surplus heat, while others could not reproduce the phenomenon at all.
