“Over 2 decades with over 100 experiments worldwide indicate LENR is real, much greater than chemical…” —Dennis M. Bushnell, Chief Scientist, NASA Langley Research Center
Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) using nickel and hydrogen is a clean, very very cheap, and super abundant new energy technology. It would be fair to say that it is the silver bullet for our current continual energy crisis – and as a consequence sounds too good to be true.
In November of 2009 the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) published Defense Analysis Report DIA 8-0911-003 titled “Technological Forecast: Worldwide Research on Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions Increasing and Gaining Acceptance” ( http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/BarnhartBtechnology.pdf ).
The paper gives a rundown of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction work being done around the world. Among other things it notes: “DIA assesses with high confidence that if LENR can produce nuclear-origin energy at room temperatures, this disruptive technology could revolutionize energy production and storage, since nuclear reactions release millions of times more energy per unit mass than do any known chemical fuel.”
“Energy density many orders of magnitude over chemical.” —Michael A. Nelson, NASA
Here is a detailed description of a LENR generator and formula that was producing energy over unity. In the March of 1994 US government contract F33615-93-C-2326 titled “NASCENT HYDROGEN: AN ENERGY SOURCE” ( www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GernertNnascenthyd.pdf ), “Anomalous heat was measured from a reaction of atomic hydrogen in contact with potassium carbonate on a nickel surface.”
This phenomenon (LENR) has been confirmed in hundreds of published scientific papers as is shown by this document titled “Tally of Cold Fusion Papers” ( http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf ). It gives readers a sense of the scale, variety, and sources of the material available about this subject. It also gives some indication of how much has been published on cold fusion, and where they were published.
“The modern history of cold fusion begins with the premature announcement made in the United States by the two electrochemical Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, who in 1989 convened a press conference…there were numerous attempts to replicate (their) result, but for some years had little success, so that soon the question of cold fusion was labeled by the media and mainstream science as a “hoax.”
Menichella continues, “The probably better experimental work…carried out in Siena since the early Nineties, by a group of physicists composed by Sergio Focardi (University of Bologna), Francesco Piantelli (University of Siena), Roberto Habel (University of Cagliari), but it did not lead to a system capable of generating useful amount of excess energy for normal industrial or domestic applications. In Siena, in fact, the three scientists – using hydrogen and nickel as the two only “ingredients” of the reaction, plus an appropriate amount of heat supplied to the system – managed to get out a double thermal energy than the electrical energy provided in input.”
You may be wondering why the ebook is called “Secrets of E-Cat.” As you can see, LENR (otherwise loosely known as “cold fusion”) is a proven scientific phenomena, but the excess energy from this exothermic reaction was not large enough for normal industrial or domestic applications. In comes Andrea Rossi, the e-cat fusion developer, an Italian inventor who has a Masters Degree in Engineering from Milan University.
“In 2007, Andrea Rossi arrived at the very critical point in his research and concentrated his time on his invention. He also hired Sergio Focardi, a physicist from the University of Bologna who is an acknowledged expert in field. The physicist’s work on nickel hydrogen reactions proved to be invaluable…In 2009, Mr. Rossi introduced to the public a process and a device called the E-Catalyst. This is a revolutionary process in energy production and is also called low energy nuclear reactions. It could be a breakthrough invention since it can solve some of the energy problems of our planet.”
I recommend watching the video contained in this article titled “Nobel laureate touts E-Cat cold fusion” (http://pesn.com/2011/06/23/9501856_Nobel_laureate_touts_E-Cat_cold_fusion/ ). Dr. Brian Josephson, winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics, stars in the video whose stated purpose is to wake up the media to the E-Cat story, which has not been widely reported on in the mainstream media of the English-speaking world.
The subject of LENR, a clean, very very cheap, and super abundant energy technology, is too deep to comprehensively cover in this limited space. Using only nickel and hydrogen, both very abundant and cheap, in a LENR exothermic reaction, could be a source of almost unlimited energy for humanity, with a cost close to nothing, and no environmental pollution. Hopefully the limited evidence for LENR cited above will go part of the way toward convincing an open minded reader of the validity of this too good to be true energy technology.
“Total replacement of fossil fuels for everything but synthetic organic chemistry.” —Dr. Joseph M. Zawodny, NASA
Continuing the Cold Fusion Radio series of interviews with the researchers and policy makers in the field of new energy, Brillouin Energy‘s Chief Executive Officer Robert George and Chief Technical Officer Robert E. Godes joined James Martinez on Ca$h Flow Tuesday, March 27, 2012.
A cold fusion economy is happening right now. Listen in as an independent, new energy company emerges from the Left Coast to talk about what’s next for their Brillouin Boiler, a hot-water heater based on clean cold fusion reactions. A partial summary of the conversation follows.
They had initially turned down an interview over a year ago but, as Robert George says, “After ten years of work by Robert Godes, he’s duplicated a control system in the laboratory that is able to start and stop the reaction to get the boiler to run steady state and sometime later next month, we will be working with SRI International to do another version which will operate at a higher operating temperature. So its an exciting time for the company. But the situation as far as financing remains very difficult. We’ve had angel investors and we’ve been very fortunate. We have circled a million dollars right now, and we’re trying to close on the other half of that two million dollar financing so we can basically bring this thing to market and get strategic partners lined up.”
Robert E. Godes says the big difference between Brillouin Energy and what others are doing is control. “Brillouin Energy designs all of its reaction systems based on the hypothesis that was published in Infinite Energy and is available on our website. But we’re actually driving the underlying physics, which gives you control over the reaction. Once you understand the physics, you can turn it on, you can turn it off, and to some extent you can control how much heat you’re getting out of the system.”
James cut to the heart of the matter and asked why and how their system generates consistent output, starting and stopping on-demand.
Godes says, “I think probably alot of your listeners may have heard of Rossi and that there’s copper and natural copper showing up in his thing. I think if they were to do an isotopic analysis of the copper that’s showed up in Rossi’s reaction systems, and is probably also showing up in Defkalion’s, although I don’t think anybody’s actually seen anything from them yet, I think that the preponderance of copper that shows up there would probably be Copper 63 and Copper 65 which are the two naturally occurring isotopes of copper.”
“The reason for that is the LENR reaction is a weak interaction. It’s a two step reaction. The first step is actually endothermic, which means that it absorbs energy. The exothermic part, which is much more exothermic than the endothermic part, is when neutrons accumulate onto another nucleus within the lattice. Ideally you have them accumulate onto other hydrogen nuclei that are within the lattice, which is always an exothermic event, or it doesn’t matter whether it accumulates on a nickel or palladium, that’s also an exothermic event, it releases alot of energy.”
“We actually call our system a Controlled Election Capture Reaction. What you do is you want to control the creation of the neutrons, and you generate a neutron by causing a proton to capture an
electron.”
James asked about the timeline for bringing a product to the market.
George responded, “We have two systems, one is what we call a wet boiler, that’ll operate at 140 degrees Celsius, and the second system, which we’ll be doing with SRI International, will operate in the 400-450C.”
“We’re looking at 12 to 18 months to bring it to strategic partners. We don’t plan to become a manufacturer, we’re going to be a licensor. Obviously, the boiler manufacturers already have the ability to do the heat exchangers and so forth, and what we’ll be providing is a system that will be the new boiler, it’ll be the heat source, and they’ll do the heat exchangers, and heat your domestic hot water in your home, your commercial building, and the other system should actually be capable of generating electric power out of some of the retiring coal-fired electric power plants.”
George continued “It’s an exciting time. With our dependance on oil, it couldn’t come at a better time. I’m really excited to work with Robert Godes. I’ve basically adopted the philosophy that he has, that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. He’s basically invented a control system to capitalize on a system that was originally discovered 23 years ago by Pons and Fleischmann and people have been unable to make it work consistently. Alot of people have gotten alot of heat out of it, but they haven’t been able to control it.”
“I really admire Robert Godes because he’s an electrical engineer. He basically started from the ground up, and worked up a system that can actually control the reaction, which is what his area of expertise is. That’s where he’s filed his patents. You gotta admire the guy, he’s stuck to it for the last ten years, sacrificing home and family to get this to market. You really have to respect somebody that’ll do that.”
“That’s how you change the world, a little bit at a time.”
“I was very passionate about America leading the world in this”, James said, “and should lead the world, since it started here.”
“Well I gotta say, because of your position and your philosophy, that’s the one reason why Robert Godes and I wanted to do the interview with you first and foremost, because we agree with you. All this activity in Israel and Italy and all these people making outrageous claims, it helps the field a little bit and hurts alot.”
“That’s why we’ve been quiet because we wanted to get our system operational, we wanted to be able to show people a system that’s running, and we wanted to make sure our technology is sound. So we’re moving in that direction, we’re excited about it, and this next round will bring us, we believe, to the goalpost.”
“How many people does Brillouin have working on your system now?” James asked.
“Technical people, we have about nine engineers,” said Mr. George, “then on our advisory board we have a group of scientists that basically advise us on everything from fluid dynamics and thermodynamics to configurations. We have Dr. Michael McKubre from SRI International who is one of the world-renowned experts on cold fusion. We have a variety of people.”
“He was a skeptic originally when Robert Godes first talked to him and he’s come over to believing on our side. He’s been doing alot of work with heavy water reactions for the controlled electron capture,
and now he believes as we do that you can use it with regular water in a pressurized system, and that’s what we’re working on.”
James then wanted to know how they would be able to meet a commercial demand that would be strong, and immediate.
“There are any number of different sizes of pressure vessels which we use in our wet boiler, and so we expect that the commercial systems will probably be 20-30% more than a current boiler and about the same size. We’re talking about, for a residential application, a pressure tank about the size of a scuba tank, the electronics which Robert Godes has developed and patented through Patrick Townzend, basically a heat exchanger which the boiler manufacturers all over the country have the capability of doing, that’s why we don’t want to become a manufacturer, we won’t become a competitor. And they’ll be able to substitute Brillouin Boilers in where you now have a coal-fired, oil-fired, gas-fired, electric boilers providing the heat, and maybe you have additional heat exchangers to transfer to the building. But this system is basically going to be a one-on-one replacement.”
Robert Godes was asked about the status of his patents.
“Currently the patents are applied for. We have one large patent applied for and that initial application was actually granted in China. We’re ??? in Japan right now. We recently filed an update with the USPTO to keep the US application alive.”
“Until somebody comes out with an actual product, it’s unlikely that USPTO will grant a patent to Brillouin Energy or to anybody, even to Zawodny at NASA, which is a another story.”
“We actually just had a significant interaction with the examiner of the USPTO. The guy that’s examining our patent worked quite a bit in the plasma fusion arena for a number of years, and now is in semi-retirement working as a patent examiner, he’s kind of rooting for the cold fusion crowd, but the edict has been handed down from on high that they’re not to grant any patents in this field, which is a really sad state of affairs. The fiasco that happened in 1989 is still bogging us here in the United States.”
Given the state of the world, and what the potential is with this technology, James felt that “there should be an international consortium where all the major players in cold fusion to come together and make some decisions on how to proceed” in regards to intellectual property.
“Well, you know, between two people you can have friendship, between three or more you wind up with politics,” said Godes. “We’ve been approached by somebody whose trying to put together a conglomerate of everybody that’s got intellectual property involved in the field.”
“And we’re in the process of talking to them,” continued George, “because the exchange of ideas is always helpful. The US has consistently been a leader in technology and it seems that between the Naval Research Lab and NASA, the US government has taken a serious interest in this. We’ve had visits from the Naval Research Lab folks from Washington, DC. They’ve come out to the lab to look at our system. They’re planning to come back in the next several months with additional test and analysis equipment.”
“And probably due to your efforts, there’s been alot of commercial interest. We’ve had alot of major corporations coming to meet with us in the last couple of months. Creating an awareness that there is a technology here that makes sense and there’s an alternative to fossil fuels, is probably the biggest challenge.”
James remarked that most people he talks too go straight to ‘how much is it going to cost me, and can I charge my electric car with it’. “What do you say to that?”, he asked.
Robert George answered, “The high-end system that will easily generate electricity, we’re looking at potentially, from our cost analysis, about 1 cent per kilowatt hour, but that’s on a commercial system. For a residential application, to get a higher R-value, or COP on it, we’re talking about a turbine, not something you don’t currently have right now. We’re talking about just having the boiler.”
After the half-time break, James wanted to take it back to the patents. “What do you think of the patent application of Dr. Zawodny?”
Godes responded, “Well, I was actually a little disappointed at they way that was submitted. From what I can tell, he looked at Widom and Larson, which I think you’ve covered them on this show, and I know that Steven Krivit of the New Energy Times is a big fan of Widom and Larsen, and I think they have the part where they say its a Weak Nuclear Reaction going on is absolutely correct.”
“Then the other kind of pivotal work that Zawodny drew on, which was disclosed publicly many years ago, is Dennis Cravens and Dennis Letts that did alot of work using lasers and interference beats to excite the lattice and stimulate the reaction, and then the group at University of Missouri has been doing alot of work with patterning the surface.”
“All of that has to do with stimulation of phonons. They call them, Zawodny and Letts, surface plasmons, which is a form of a phonon. A phonon is a vibration in the lattice. The kind of funny thing is when you use a laser, you can really only stimulate surface phonons, the plasmons on the device, and they’re looking at patterning the surface to try and improve the reaction, using lasers.”
“But the reality is that you need to stimulate just a little bit below the surface. You can get it going with plasmons, but of course that causes the water to boil, and boiling water has bubbles in it, and bubbles make great lenses, and its going to be really hard to build an industrially useful system where you’re using lasers to stimulate it and get it to go.”
“So its great. I’m really glad that Zawodny filed the patent because it made kind of a big splash, it’s like look, NASA is serious about this stuff – it’s real! And it is real.”
James “Yes, thank you! You know I still deal with people to this day who don’t believe it, even when you show them the evidence!”
Godes continued, “Robert George was part of that crew. Rob Duncan in the 60 minutes interview, when he first went to check out Energetics Technologies when they were still in Israel before they moved to the University of Missouri said ‘Well that was completely debunked back in 1989, wasn’t it?’. And you know, most people still think that’s what it was.”
“It’s real people. The phenomenon is real. It’s just that nobody understood the physics behind it. Once you understand the physics behind it, then it’s really just a matter of engineering to make it real, and that’s what Brillouin Energy is engaging in, engineering work.”
James asked him why has the technology been so difficult to understand?
“The reason for that is that, is it’s very multi-disciplined in nature. The only conference that I’ve actually taken my work to was ICCF-14 in Washington, DC. The people I was working with indirectly introduced me to our CEO Robert George. They asked me ‘are you going to go to ICCF-14’, it was two weeks before the deadline, and I said ‘no they’re all barking up the wrong tree, and they don’t want to hear from me, because I’m saying it can work with ordinary water and palladium, and I’ve got the data to prove it’. And they said ‘no, you have to go to that conference…..'” So I submitted my white paper which was actually published in Infinite Energy Magazine issue #82 and the pre-print of the article is actually on the website.”
“So I went and they were glad to have me on the one hand because I was bringing new ideas, but on the other, they were a little suspicious, kind of like McKubre when I first went and I talked to him, and said this is with ordinary water and palladium. Yeah! You can really run it with ordinary water and palladium.”
“At the conference, they can communicate with people in their own field, but the problem is this is a very multi-disciplined action in the LENR reaction. So I put together this whole powerpoint which is actually available on the website. Click on the Technology link at the bottom of our website.”
“There’s slides on chemistry, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, mechanics of materials, …..you don’t have to be an expert in all those areas, you have to be able to understand at least some aspects of all those different areas.”
“Unless you put all that information together, you cannot have an industrial useful product.”
“When people come to the lab and technical people come to vet us about the technology I always ask what’s your discipline, what’s your background, so I can tailor the discussion so they can understand it from their perspective, because everyone has a different perspective.”
Later in the interview, Mr. Godes states that he knows how to control the E-Cat, and its there for Mr. Rossi to look at in his intellectual property filings. A lack of system control, and other critical components needed to stabilize the reaction which are missing in the E-Cat, is why he doesn’t believe that Leonardo Technologies or Defkalion Green Technologies have an actual product.
“There’s something with process variation you can do called binning, and he sees that as one of the solutions for Mr. Rossi to issues of control and on-demand power.”
Godes “You take everything that operates between A and B and put that in one bin. And you take all the other bits and pieces that operate between B and C and put those in another bin, between C and D put those in another bin, so you can assemble modules that are going to operate in the same range. But I don’t think he can reliably turn his units off and then back on again.”
“I love it. Your changing the world right on the radio!” James laughed.
“I’d like to see these guys actually start shipping something! It will really explode the field! People, money would start pouring in, and I would get the money that I need to engineer a system that is really, truly, industrially useful and we’d have something that people could put under the hood of their car!”
James asks, could America lead the world on this, like when the car was first built.
“America could, but right now politics in America would rather shoot each other in the foot”, said Godes. “There’s so many things that they could do, they absolutely will not. Michael McKubre who is working at SRI is one of the top people at one of the top research institutions in the country, and he can’t get any money to study this phenomenon.”
And yet, “Soyndra goes belly up with half a billion.”
Is the Brillouin Boiler going to be conventionally priced compared to existing fossil fuel systems?
“Absolutely”, said George, “the raw cost of the system should be about 30% higher than a conventional fossil fuel boiler. The system is quite simple, the electronics are complex, but you’re talking about a pressure tank, a heat exchanger, and the electronics to drive the reaction. We’re using nickel as the catalyst, not platinum or palladium, so there’s no exotic metals so it’s not an expensive device to build.”
“The electronics are complicated, but it’s less complicated than the cell phone I’m talking to you on”, added Godes.
James asked, “What’s the reaction of people who stop by and see the reaction, some of them for the first time?”
“Robert Godes has worked on [the electronics] for a long time”, said George, “that’s what the patent is covering. The proprietary information that is not disclosed is the actual frequencies that the electronics use to drive the reaction.”
“I keep wanting to mount a video camera in ‘the cube’ where the actual reactor is sitting and operating, said Godes. “I love seeing people who have done things, who’ve actually built things and worked in a laboratory, they come around the corner and they look at it, and they go Wow!”
James wondered who was the family involved in Brillouin?
“You can look at the advisory board which is an extensive list of very prominent people that know the field and know different aspects of the field from the electronic circuit board with Roger Fuller to Dr. McKubre to Edward Beardsworth. We have a variety of angel investors, we don’t have any institutional investors involved in the company at this point.”
“We have alot of potential strategic investors, corporations that have come to the forefront recently because they’re looking at this technology as a game-changer and they’re seeing that for a minimal investment you can get involved in it very early. But as you know most corporations would rather pay ten times as much two years from now rather than do an investment now.”
George has these closing comments.
“You look at all the green energy from solar to photovoltaics, they’re going to make an insignificant change in the overall consumption of energy and the addition to the use of power in the United States and worldwide. But something like the Brillouin Boiler where you can generate and process heat, whether its domestic hot water, heating your home or a building, that can make a significant difference over the next ten years on our oil dependence.
“The fact that people are becoming sensitive to it is a good thing, but we really appreciate your effort, because calling attention to it, people seem to be a little apathetic, a little oblivious. If its not really put in their face, they’re not going to pay attention, because they don’t think they can make a difference. We’re out here everyday making a difference.”
Godes ended with this consideration.
“When people say ‘what are you working on?’, I say “building a practical fusion reactor”. Then they say ‘oh that will cost billions of dollars’. And they’re afraid to touch it.”
“But the reality is, just a few million dollars could actually bring this technology to the point where OEM’s Original Equipment Manufacturers could start producing these in large numbers for general consumption.”
“We could start re-powering coal plants with LENR.”
“That’s when you take an old plant that is no longer functioning and you re-power it. Right now, they do most re-powering they go from coal to natural gas. But that’s still ancient carbon that you’re dredging up. This technology could go and power these coal plants with LENR with the new hydrogen boiler project we’re working on. It really only takes a few million dollars to bring this technology to bear on the energy problems of the world.”
“Just a couple million dollars could make a huge, huge difference. Think if you had the opportunity to buy Apple at $30 a share. You have the opportunity right not with Brillouin Energy.”
The following is a further posting in a series of articles by David French, a patent attorney with 35 years experience, which will review issues of interest in the field of Cold Fusion.
On March 12, 2012 Ruby Carat of ColdFusionNow personally interviewed Andrea Rossi in his home in Florida. That interview is available in video format on the ColdFusionNow.org website. [watch] The following is a summary of some of the significant remarks made by Sr Rossi during this interview.
In the last 2 years Rossi has changed his theory as to what’s happening. He’s filed a patent application for the new idea. It’s not yet published.
He is still using a powder. He does so because it has more surface area, more contact with hydrogen. He believes that surface area is important for the reaction so that the hydrogen will be able to access active sites on the nickel. And he still has to preheat the reactor which he does using electricity to increase the temperature.
He believes that when the cold fusion reaction is occurring within the particles, temperatures as high as 1500°C are being reached deep in the active matrix. He recognizes that this is getting close to the melting point of nickel, but that’s OK: if the nickel were to melt it would stop the reaction. This is a safety effect.
Even though he believes he’s getting such high temperatures in the core of the active regions, he’s only achieving output temperatures of 110-200°C. He cannot deliver steam over 200°C (This is still very, very valuable!)
Recently Siemens has introduced a turbine that operates with 30% efficiency operating off a heat source at 251°C (or 261°C). Using this turbine, Rossi will be able to generate all the electricity that he needs to make his process continue indefinitely. As a system, it will be self-contained. It’s not clear whether the Siemens turbine can produce 15 MW, but he used that as an example.
He also answered “Yes!” in response to a question as to whether his system is capable of operating in a “self-sustainable” mode.
Rossi has, for safety reasons, eliminated the external hydrogen tank. His reactor now includes a source of hydrogen bound in molecules contained in a “tablet” which is sealed in the reactor. It is this tablet which releases the necessary hydrogen for the cold fusion reaction. It is this feature which is the focus of his most recent unpublished patent application.
Once the cold fusion reaction stops, the hydrogen is recovered back into the tablet where it is either chemically stored or re-fixed somehow, available for future use. During the cold fusion reaction only a slight amount of hydrogen is consumed: pico-grams. The result is that his reactor will have a six-month lifetime without having any need for refurbishing.
His biggest barrier has been having the system certified for safety. He received great resistance to safety certification as long as he had been using an external bottle of hydrogen as the hydrogen source. The new tablet arrangement has overcome this problem. He is awaiting certification for safety and will be on the market as soon as he receives that certification.
He says that his units are under production presently. But where this is occurring is a big secret. He doesn’t want his Manufacturers hounded by cold fusion enthusiasts.
Actual products are not being manufactured at this time. The “lines” of production are being assembled, and the computer software being programmed. Actual manufacturing of the E-Cat will begin after certification as there will most likely be more design changes during the certification process.
Asked why his industrial units were to be more expensive than commercial home units, said to be delivering power at a cost of $60-$90 per kilowatt, he said that the industrial units were more of a “craft” product at this time: less parts ordered cost more. The industrial units were being produced in low-volume whereas the price quoted for home units was based on a theoretical high volume level of production.
The interview lasts for a total of 29 minutes.
David French is a retired patent attorney and the principal and CEO of Second Counsel Services. Second Counsel provides guidance for companies that wish to improve their management of Intellectual Property. For more information visit: www.SecondCounsel.com.
David French is prepared to address questions included as commentaries to any of his postings or by direct email. In particular, he would like to learn what people need to know in order to better understand patents.
The following is a further posting in a series of articles by David French, a patent attorney with 35 years experience, which will review patents of interest touching on the field of Cold Fusion.
March 23, 2012 –One would think that the above title should be a headline in the newspapers following a live webcast originating from CERN in Geneva on March 22, 2012. This CERN Colloquium entitled: “Overview of Theoretical and Experimental Progress in Low Energy Nuclear Reactions – LENR” was presented by Drs Francesco Celani and Yogendra Srivastava. Dr Celani is an Italian physicist at the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics, Frascati National Laboratories, Italy and the Vice-President of the International Society of Condensed Matter. Dr Srivastava is an emeritus professor of physics at Indiana University in the U.S.
These two scientists have devoted their careers to studying the phenomena originally announced by Pons & Fleischmann in 1989 and discredited in the media and amongst the community of nuclear physicists in the years following. But, as the speakers confirmed, there are still 1000 researchers around the world who have been studying the phenomena of: “unexplained excess heat” and they have produced results that irrefutably indicate that something real is happening.
Professor Srivastava addressed his preferred theory as to the source of the unexplained excess heat. He was clear that it had to be nuclear and argued that it arose from a weak force effect. Essentially, he supported the Widom & Larsen theory that neutrons can be formed in a solid matter matrix by the capture of an electron by a proton:
This presumably requires overcoming a 780 KeV energy barrier based on the mass difference between the neutron and the combined masses of a proton and an electron. But once a neutron is formed, it’s available to carry-out all sorts of nuclear reactions, including transmutations of available background metals in the crystal lattice and the conversion of hydrogen or deuterium nuclei trapped in the crystal lattice into tritium, helium 3 or helium 4. These processes result in the releasing of substantial amounts of heat.
Professor Srivastava did not address the alternate theory, originally proposed by Pons and Fleischmann, that the source of unexplained energy was arising from the fusion of two deuterium nuclei trapped in a metal lattice. The prospect remains that this process may still be occurring.
“D-D fusion produces a 2.45 MeV neutron and helium-3 half of the time, and produces tritium and a proton but no neutron the other half of the time. D-3He fusion produces no neutron.”
Arguing against the proposition that D-D fusion is occurring deep in the host crystal lattice is the evidence that apparently indicates that the low energy nuclear reaction effect – LENR tends to occur on the surfaces of active metals such as Palladium and Nickel.
On the other hand, Professor Peter Hagelstein from MIT, who continues to defend the deuterium fusion concept, has argued, with some effect, that if helium is the resulting material that forms through fusion at critical vacancies in a metal lattice, then the accumulation of helium can choke-back the reaction by plugging the vacancies. However, helium formed near a surface has an opportunity to defuse out of the metal lattice, freeing up the vacancies in the same region to continue the LENR effect. Hence even the deuterium fusion theory can fit with the observed phenomena that high surface area contributes to the production of excess heat.
The original experiments done by Pons and Fleischmann produced excess heat on the order of 10-20%. That is, for every unit of electricity consumed in the electrolysis experiments that they were running, the driving of deuterium onto/into Palladium, an additional 20% of heat was appearing in the system. A problem with results of this nature is that the measurement of an excess heat of only 20% requires careful instrumentation. A great deal of criticism was made of the calorimetric procedures followed by Pons and Fleischmann. However, Professor Celani produced data on experiments in the 20 years following 1989 that show heat gains in excess of 50% to 200% and, on occasion, infinite, in the sense that heat was produced even though no electricity was being run through the reaction vessel.
A lot of the objections to the demonstration of the production of excess heat would necessarily be met if it could be reliably shown that heat gains in excess of 100% are being achieved. Errors in actually measuring the precise amount of excess heat would then be irrelevant.
There are a number of Golden Goals that one would like to see achieved if the LENR effect is to become the gift to humanity that many believers insist is possible. The critical parameters are:
1. Gain. If electricity or another energy source is needed to precipitate an LENR effect, then gain has to be significant. It costs 3 calories of thermal energy to generate 1 calorie of electrical energy. This means that the gain, if electricity must be used, has to be at least 300%. Gain is important.
2. Power. Power is important because if the phenomenon collapses at higher power rates, then this energy generation source will never be of service to mankind. Instead, it will be a curiosity. It is known that a pair of deuterium nuclei can be made to fuse by introducing a Muon in place of an electron in orbit around at least one of a pair of deuterium nuclei. This is called a “muon catalyzed fusion“.
This produces heat by way of fusion. But Muons are extremely difficult to generate and have a very short half-life. The phenomenon is interesting but it’s not likely to be useful to produce power at any relevant level of interest to human society. Test results shown by Professor Celani indicate results, by solid scientific researchers, in which energy is being generated at rates up to on the order of 20-50 W. This is promising. The claims by Andrea Rossi and Defkalion that they are producing energy at the rates in excess of 1 kW are suspect as they are not been scientifically evaluated and proven. But more than trivial power has been produced. Power is important.
3. Temperature. Temperature is important because of the Carnot principle. If you’re going to generate work using thermalized energy, then the Carnot theorem sets a limit on the proportion of thermal energy that can be converted to work. Electricity is equivalent to work energy. The Carnot formula depends on the temperature difference existing between a heat source and a heat sink. Thus the maximum energy, the absolute theoretical maximum, that can be extracted from a heat source at 273°C using ice at 0°C as a sink is 50%.
Typical power generation stations that burn coal, gas or oil rely on temperatures in excess of 800°C and have difficulty achieving efficiencies in excess of 40%. Many of the experimental tests done in the past were carried-out in electrolytic cells that contained water or heavywater. Only modest temperature increases were being measured, and the presence of water set an upper limit on any temperature increase that could be created. More recent experiments in the gas phase have actually been running at 300°C, 400°C and experiments have been attempted by Professor Celani at temperatures as high as 900°C. Achieving high temperatures will be extremely relevant to providing mankind with inexpensive electrical power. Temperature is important.
4. Duration. The duration of the unexplained excess energy effect has been the bane of most researchers. Generally, it has taken a long time to turn-on an LENR effect. And then in most cases the effect has only lasted for a limited period of time, in some cases only minutes. However, more recent tests have demonstrated a heat generation duration of many days, sometimes weeks. To be an effective source of energy the active materials have to be able to continue to produce energy beyond a trivial short interval. Accepting that a nuclear effect is the source of the energy, the prospects for extended periods of heat generation are theoretically possible. The amount of heat that can be provided through nuclear effects is enormous. Technology must resolve the issue of how to sustain an LENR reaction over an extended period of time. Duration is important.
5. Control. From the beginning and even today, the turning-on of an LENR effect has been a sometimes proposition. Apart from the extended delays that are required before the effect appears, it’s not even clear whether the effect is precipitated by:
– electric current passing through a host crystal LENR environment
– the presence of an electric field applied to the LENR environment
– oscillations in such an electric field
– magnetic fields, whether static or oscillating
– thermal energy present in the form of vibrations present in the host atom nuclei forming a crystal matrix; in electrons present in the crystal matrix, possibly in the conduction band or otherwise; or in protium/deuteron nuclei nesting at critical locations in the crystal matrix
All of these effects represent “handles” by which a low energy nuclear reaction might be controllable. Ideally, controls should exist to not only turn-on an LENR event but also to adjust its rate, including preventing runaway, and allowing for shutdown. Control is important.
Professor Celani indicated that in one of the experiments that had been carried-out a heat flux of 1500 W per gram of Palladium was achieved. This compares favorably with the heat flux at the core of the sun:
“At the center of the sun, fusion power is estimated by model to be about 276.5 watts/m3, [2] a power production density which more nearly approximates reptile metabolic heat generation than it does a thermonuclear bomb. [3] Peak power production in the Sun’s center, per volume, has been compared to the volumetric heats generated in an active compost heap.”
A key comment in the presentation by Professor Celani addressed the effect of loading of the metal lattice. It has been known that as hydrogen is forced into a nickel or palladium lattice, the electrical resistance of the lattice initially rises, but then falls after a loading ratio of approximately 0.7:1 is passed. Thereafter, approaching a loading of approximately 1:1 the resistance can drop by 50% from its peak. Information on the effects of loading beyond this limit is not readily available. But Professor Celani did observe that the observation of the appearance of excess energy appears uniquely associated with loadings in this negative resistance region.
The suggestion is that loading is a critical parameter for these phenomena to occur. Any technology which could generate high loadings and maintain high loadings over time could be key to a practical application of the LENR effect.
Post presentation questions
After the speakers had concluded their remarks, questions were invited from the audience. One particularly persistent questioner insisted repeatedly that the numerous failed attempts by scientists to replicate the ColdFusion effect following the Pons and Fleischmann announcement in 1989 should be given as much weight as the more recent identification of concrete, incontrovertible, excess energy experiments from numerous sources around the world. The relevance of this objection can be compared to the example of announcing to children at a birthday party that there is a special treasure source of gold foil covered chocolates to be found somewhere in the house. The children proceed to effect an exhaustive treasure hunt throughout the house. Many many children come back reporting that no such gold coin chocolates have been found. But a few report that, while they didn’t find the treasure source itself, they did find some sample chocolate coins which they then place on the table.
Would it be appropriate to argue in these circumstances that a treasure source does not exist? Unfortunately, the style of this questioner has predominated in the general physics community since 1989.
Twenty-three years ago on March 23, 1989 Dr. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons made an announcement of their astounding discovery of a new form of energy then dubbed cold fusion.
One of the first scientific discoveries born of the modern mass media, the world buzzed with fax machines and satellite TV as scientists dropped what they were doing to try to reproduce their results. A deceptively simple apparatus was more difficult to handle than thought, and very brilliant people became brilliantly emotional at their inability to accomplish the Fleischmann-Pons Effect FPE.
Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons were since abandoned by their universities and disowned by their colleagues. They have yet to be recognized for their work by mainstream science even as, more than two decades later, independent labs are close to developing a commercial technology that could change the future of humanity.
We honor these two Lions of Science who had the courage to face the unknown with honesty and integrity. Sirs, you have no peers!
These videos are from the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour of that day, when the pair were interview by journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault. They come compliments of the New Energy Foundation which provides direct support to new energy researchers and was founded by Eugene Mallove, an early defender intellectual honesty and a champion for those scientists who were shut out from the community they so loved.
Robert E. Godes is the man behind Brillouin Energy, a company developing a hot-water boiler based on cold fusion. But he doesn’t stop at experimentalist; he is also the originator of Quantum Fusion Theory, a theory of the atomic and nuclear events that comprise the reaction. Published in Infinite Energy #82, you can download a copy here.
Recently released animations seek to visualize the phenomenon.
Four videos have been uploaded to the new QuantumFusionChannel on YouTube.
Ain’t nuthin like a video to help imagine a dense, clean, and safe new energy technology.
