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The ICCF conferences, which began in 1990, have been held with a three continent rotation: North America, Europe and Asia. It is the primary venue for the international community of involved and interested scientists to give and critique papers that describe what was done and found. The papers are then published in the proceedings of the conference.
The field of this conference was called cold fusion at the announcement of its discovery during a press conference by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons on 23 March 1989. The term cold fusion was already in use to describe muon-catalyzed fusion, an understood physical mechanism in which fusion of two deuterons occurs at relatively high rates in the presence of muons. Deuterium is the mass two isotope of hydrogen. In 1989, the term "cold", as used for the new and mysterious effect, was meant to apply to deuteron fusion at ordinary temperatures, and to contrast with known fusion processes at high temperatures in plasmas, which have temperatures far in excess of one million degrees K.
As time passed during the 1990s, processes other than fusion of two deuterons were reported. These transmutation reactions involved and produced isotopes of nuclei with moderate and high atomic weights, that is, they are nuclear reactions not involving only two light nuclei, such as fusion. Because of this, and to emphasize their viewpoints, some researchers in the field sought other names for the effect announced by Fleischmann and Pons. These names include Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR), Chemically Assisted Nuclear Reactions (CANR), Lattice Assisted Nuclear Reactions (LANR), Cold Nuclear Transmutations, Cold Fusion Nuclear Reactions and New Hydrogen Energy
None of these names has gained universal acceptance. In the minds of some workers in the field, they suffer from various shortcomings. For example, "cold" and "low" are relative terms without precise meanings. The variety, and indeed confusion, over terminology is also promoted by the lack of a clear understanding of the basic mechanism (or mechanisms) active in this field. The overall terminology situation was not aided by the foundation of a software company called Cold Fusion, which often shows up in computer searches.
In 2002, a new and broader name was introduced, namely "Condensed Matter Nuclear Science" (CMNS). “Condensed matter” is a term, which has been employed by the American Physical Society for a few decades to embrace the characteristics and mechanisms of both solids and liquids. CMNS was meant to focus on the science of nuclear effects in systems involving solids (always) and liquids (often). It is an appropriate description for the current and continuing science of the field, but will fail to embrace anticipated engineering work based on that science. The International Society for Condensed Matter Nuclear Science was founded in the U. K. in 2003. It remains the primary intellectual scientific society for the field.
At present, given all the problems with the name of the field, many people are simply and clearly referring to the mechanism(s) active in the experiments that followed from the 1989 announcement as the "Fleischmann-Pons Effect" (FPE). That effect is the production of heat and other products in a deuterium-in-metal system under unusual circumstances of very high densities of hydrogen or deuterium. The amount of heat produced per reaction can be 1000 times the energy released per known chemical reaction. The power densities (measured in watts per cubic centimeter of the metal) occasionally exceed those from fission nuclear power systems. Associated with this heat in many experiments is the production of helium-4 at levels that account for the heat, if each atom of helium is associated with about 24 million electron volts of energy. Small amounts of tritium, the mass three isotope of hydrogen, plus other nuclei, energetic particles and photons, and low energy quanta, such as infrared radiation, have been reported for many experiments.
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