Origin

On Aug. 13, 2013, Michael Ravnitzky, while serving as development editor for my book Fusion Fiasco, located a new Web page on the Department of Energy's Office of Science and Technical Information online library catalog . The page described a collection of records and documents regarding the "cold fusion" conflict. He submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the documents.

The processing of his request seems to have been handled in an atypical  manner. The catalogue reference was removed from the internet. Then, OSTI refused to accept the request for about one year, until the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) intervened. Once the request was accepted, it took more than 2.5 years for his request to receive a response, and the response was simply a blanket denial. He then submitted an administrative appeal . On Aug. 10, 2016, he received 96 documents from OSTI FOIA O fficer Madelyn M. Wilson.

Organization
The original documents had unique but nondescriptive filenames. I examined, date-coded, and identified each document. In some cases, I combined multiple related documents into single PDF files.

For ease of access, I sorted the files into four categories:

Group 1: The 1988 Pons-Fleischmann Funding Proposal to the DOE. This collection includes the first public-release of the Pons-Fleischmann proposal as well as the peer-review communications. The proposal, and the ensuing conflict with reviewer Steven E. Jones at Brigham Young University, precipitated and forced the public announcement by Pons and Fleischmann on March 23, 1989. (14 docs/283 pages)

Group 2: Documents directly related to the DOE, DOE labs, DOE "cold fusion" review, or information requested by the federal government. (25 docs/486 pages) Note that this archive includes very few records relating to the DOE-sponsored 1989 review of "cold fusion" research. A separate New Energy Times archive collection, contributed by Richard Garwin, a member of that review panel, is listed on the New Energy Times home page.

Group 3: Steven E. Jones documents (5 docs/112 pages)

Group 4: Letters and documents from the public and unsolicited proposals (34 docs/819 pages)

Steven B. Krivit
June 19, 2017

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We found another batch in 2022.

Group 5: More internal memos and reports from within DOE. More letters to DOE.