Historical research guide · 0896 · 2007

The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction

Edmund Storms

In one minute

Edmund Storms spent his career as a radiochemist at Los Alamos, was there when Fleischmann and Pons made their announcement in 1989, and kept working on the problem in his own laboratory after he retired. This book is his attempt to gather what several hundred researchers worldwide actually found, and to sort the well-documented from the imagined. The phenomenon he describes is nuclear reaction inside special solid environments at or near room temperature: energy released without dangerous radiation, and helium-4 as the main product when deuterium is present. Storms is careful about where it happens — not in the bulk metal but in unique and very small places, cracks and nanoscale particles and dendrites — and equally careful about what is not yet understood, devoting a whole chapter to theories and their limits. The book is built to be checked: 104 figures and over a thousand citations, with chapters on how each effect is initiated and how each is measured.

Connection

Chapter 12 rests on a single physical idea — that nuclei in the right solid environment tunnel far more often than a naive barrier calculation allows — and this book is the largest single assembly of the measurements that idea has to explain. Chapter 1’s evidence ladder is exactly what Storms is building here: observation first, explanation second, and every rung numbered with a citation.

From the source

The central empirical claim is a class of nuclear reactions that take place within special solid environments at or near room temperature, producing a wide range of nuclear products, the main one being helium-4 when deuterium is present in the environment. Helium as the dominant ash, correlated with the heat, is the load-bearing observation of the whole field.Publisher’s description of the book; developed in chapter 4, sections 4.4 and 4.4.2
The energy release is substantial and clean. Storms states that the fusion reaction produces considerable energy without emitting harmful radiation — which is why the effect is hard to detect by the instruments hot-fusion physics reaches for first, and why calorimetry rather than neutron counting carries the burden of proof.Publisher’s description; developed in chapter 4, sections 4.3 and 4.6, and chapter 7, section 7.9
Ordinary hydrogen also works. Similar nuclear reactions can result when normal hydrogen, rather than deuterium, is present in a suitable environment — a separate line of evidence with its own products, and one reason Storms prefers the wider name low energy nuclear reaction to the narrower one.Publisher’s description; developed in chapter 4, section 4.3.2
Place matters more than bulk. Storms writes that the novel effects occur only in unique and very small locations, and gives them a chapter of their own: cracks, nano-sized particles and dendrites, together with the roles of lithium and other alloys, deuterium flux and hydrogen-isotope content. This is why the effect is difficult to replicate — the active region is a rare special structure, not the sample.Preface; chapter 5, sections 5.2 to 5.7
The book is built to be audited rather than believed. It rests on 1070 citations to published papers and 104 figures, and Storms sets out his method plainly: this field is driven by observation rather than by theory, so his main effort is to show what is known empirically and separate that clearly from what is not known, without filling the gap with imagination. Chapter 7 does the same job for instruments, walking through every calorimeter type and the accuracy each one can deliver.Publisher’s description; Preface; chapter 7, sections 7.9 and 7.10
What to watch: Storms argues that the explanation has to be looked for in the right place. Cold fusion is not cold, except in comparison to hot fusion, and it is not normal fusion — so an explanation should be based on solid-state physics and chemistry rather than on the high-energy physics used to rule it out. Chapter 8 evaluates the proposed mechanisms against that standard and chapter 9 sets out what should happen next; the measurement that would settle the mechanism is a reproducible active structure, made on purpose, that produces heat and helium in the ratio the reaction requires.Preface; chapters 8 and 9

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1142/6425

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

LICENCE. Published in full as The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction: A Comprehensive Compilation of Evidence and Explanations about Cold Fusion, World Scientific Publishing Company, 2007, under the publisher’s copyright; Crossref deposits no licence for the DOI and OpenAlex and Unpaywall both report the record closed on 2026-09-08. The book is for sale and no text of it is reproduced here. SOURCES READ. LENR-CANR.org — the cold-fusion library run by Jed Rothwell with Edmund Storms, and the author’s own posting place — hosts an openly downloadable extract of selected pages from the book, StormsEthescience.pdf, which was downloaded and read in full on 2026-09-08. That extract carries the publisher’s own description of the book, Storms’s complete Preface signed at Santa Fe, New Mexico in January 2007, and the full table of contents with page numbers for all ten chapters and appendices A to F. The summary and every claim below are written from those pages together with the bibliographic record, and each locator names the chapter or section of the book where the point is developed. NUMBERS. The publisher’s description says the book rests on 1070 citations to published papers and 104 figures; Storms’s own Preface says more than 1060 publications are cited. Both figures are given here as the two sources give them. A reader who wants the evidence itself should buy the book from World Scientific.

How to cite it

Edmund Storms (2007) The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction doi:10.1142/6425

Where it sits in the curriculum

Lattice confinement fusion