In 2012, Mitchell Swartz, a long-time LENR researcher, made claims of a “significant energy gain” of 10 times the amount of heat output than the electrical input. He published these claims on his Cold Fusion Times Web site, which he claims is an objective news source about his and other LENR researchers' work.

At that time, because of Andrea Rossi's bogus claims, people were talking about, and thinking of gains in the megawatt range.

But in the claim Swartz made on his Web site, he did not state the absolute level of his excess heat gain, only the relative level. Nor did Swartz state his input power. Therefore, readers had no idea how much — or how little — Swartz’ gain really was. Naturally, people would have expected Swartz’ “significant energy gain” to be somewhere in the same range as Rossi’s — megawatts.

At the time Swartz made this claim on his Web site, he had not published any data to support this heat claim. I sent Swartz a news inquiry to seek more facts, but he did not respond. I then began talking with other sources to learn what I could.

I quickly learned that Swartz’ “significant energy gain” was less than one-tenth of one Watt. One source that I spoke to said that Swartz had measured 18 milliwatts of heat. I later learned that that source had misread one of Swartz’ graphs. Swartz had measured 80 milliwatts of heat, not 18. Of course, it’s a trivial difference: neither 18 nor 80 milliwatts of heat is a “significant energy gain.” Another source had misread the duration of the heat excursion. They are not the first LENR researchers to have difficulty reading or understanding Swartz’s reports.

Only after our first news story published on Feb. 3, "Swartz Makes Misleading Claim of LENR Excess Heat," did Swartz release his data — which then revealed how trivial his “significant energy gain” was. It also revealed that our source made the 18/80 milliwatt mistake and the other source made a mistake about the duration. Both relatively minor errors.

We published two more articles on this matter. The first was "LENR Researchers Reject Significance of Swartz’s Claim," (Feb. 4). After Swartz published an article on his Web site we published "Swartz Responds to Our Reports About His Claims" on Feb. 6.

New Energy Times exposed the fact that Swartz made a claim of a “significant energy gain,” leading readers to think his results were comparable to the claims of Rossi, in the megawatt range. In fact, Swartz' heat level was only a trivial 80 milliwatts. This level of heat is in the same range as that of every LENR researcher who has measured excess heat in the past two decades.