What starts a nuclear reaction when hydrogen meets a tiny piece of metal?

Low-energy nuclear reactions LENRs do not occur often in Nature. We generally do not see spontaneous heat energy erupt before our eyes in ordinary material. It is a rare phenomenon and historically difficult to reproduce in the lab.

This is what has led Edmund Storms, a twenty-three year veteran of cold fusion research and formerly of Los Alamos National Laboratory, to speculate that the reaction cannot occur in ordinary material, but requires some special environment that operates independently of the larger metallic structure. He calls this special environment the Nuclear Active Environment NAE.

According to Storms, the NAE must be present for the energy-producing reaction to occur. His fullest survey of the field yet was summarized in the recently updated A Student’s Guide to Cold Fusion May 2012. [visit] In it, Storms has pushed the idea of the NAE further by proposing a model.

To reproduce the excess heat effect between hydrogen and various metals maximally and efficiently, the recipe on how to perform the steps must be clearly stated. What elements must we put together to initiate the power-producing reaction on demand?

This recipe exists experimentally for a few lucky leaders in the race to commercialize a technology. Labs like Blacklight Power, Brillouin Energy, JET Energy, LENUCO, Leonardo Corporation and Praxen-Defkalion Green Technologies all have recipes to initiate LENR with a particular key element which also happens to be a trade secret. Ironically, each of these successful laboratory breakthroughs uses a different theoretical model as a guide.

If there is no one definitive theory that tells us how to make cold fusion work for all the varied forms of energy cells and transmutation generators that have been discovered, why not go back to basics and look at the source of all that’s known about these systems, the experimental data?

And that’s exactly what Edmund Storms did, deciding that “Identification of the NAE can start by finding a single condition that is present during all successful LENR studies.”

So what environmental factor appears in all successful experiments?

All successful experiments have some kind of rough, broken topology in common. Cracks, crevices, or microscopic mountains of material built-up on a surface that create tiny canyons at their feet are all present in some form or another.

Cracks can form through repeated stress. Most metals used in cold fusion show cracks, if not until after repeated loading and de-loading of hydrogen. Thus, Storms’ idea of the NAE is absence of material, like a crack.

The material deposited on the surface electrodes from the original style palladium-deuterium Pd-D electrolytic systems came from contaminants both in the Pyrex container and the heavy water salt solution. The stacking of contaminant particles makes ‘hollows’ where hydrogen (deuterium) could be become trapped.

Slide from Navy SPAWAR Twenty Year History of LENR Research Using Pd-D Co-deposition showing bumpy surface where hydrogen can hang.

Thin-film electrodes have measured transmutation effects between the interfaces of the different layers, places that may enjoy a thin space for hydrogen to collect.

Nano-particle powders may be generating just the right-sized spaces between the tiny spheres to create the NAE.

Slide from Navy SPAWAR Twenty Years of LENR Research Using Pd-D Co-deposition showing mottled surface of electrodes.

With the electron screening the positive-charge, the protons can migrate closer than they normally would. Of this arrangement, Storms says “This is obviously not a conventional relationship.”

Given the NAE of a crack, Storms is proposing a three-step framework to describe the reaction.

Storms 3-Step Model
1. The nuclear active environment NAE is formed.
2. The NAE is populated with hydrogen and electrons.
3. Resonance initiates the nuclear mechanisms that cause fusion.

Through some endothermic process, meaning it requires energy to perform, the NAE of a crack or space is created first. Then, hydrogen is introduced to the space, perhaps through pressure. After the hydrogen is introduced to the NAE and it’s all stacked up, an energy is applied.

Irving Dardik's Superwave pulse activates Energetics Technologies generator.

Whatever the source, the added energy makes the hydrogen dance back and forth in step with the frequency of the applied pulse.

When the energy applied is at the resonant frequency of the hydrogen/NAE combination, then the nuclear mechanism initiates. The resonant frequency is determined by the size, shape and mass of the H-stack. But like Ella Fitzgerald singing just the right note to make the glass shatter, the resonant frequency applied to the crack and its contents will increase the response exponentially.

But what is the nuclear mechanism that ensues? Storms leaves the nature of that open at this time, though he considers the idea of some special type of matter forming, like a Bose-Einstein Condensate BEC, a Lochon, hydrinos, or Rydberg matter.

Whatever mechanism occurs in the third step to set-off the mass-to-energy conversion, he believes it is initiated by resonance. Further, as the resonance process turns mass into energy following Einstein’s E=MC2 equivalence, the energy dissipates not explosively, but by a emitting series of photons, light-energy, that over a period of time, both disperse in the atomic lattice and are focused and emitted along the axis of the crack.

Hydrogen has one positively-charged proton at the center. Deuterium has an extra neutron, tritium has two extra neutrons at the center. All have a negatively-charged electron orbiting the nucleus to make an atom.

The electron which shielded the positive-charge of the protons in the stack performs double-duty as it is sucked into the fusion process, and occasionally, emitted back out as a Beta decay during the process in which tritium is formed.

Hydrogen, deuterium or tritium present at the ends of the stack would be available to interact with other elements, producing the observed transmutations.

JET Energy diagram of palladium atomic matrix when filled with hydrogen. The palladium atoms are bonded together through their outer electrons in what's called a lattice.

Storms’ model gives testable claims along with a proposal on how to create the NAE and he’ll be working with colleagues in the coming months to test this hypothesis. Only experimental confirmation of a model will determine its usefulness in engineering energy-producing cells.

If Edmund Storms is right, and creating cold fusion is a matter of resonance, then the possibility exists that the transition metals need not be the only host to the reaction; any material could create cold fusion. All we need do is create the little space, add hydrogen, and apply the proper frequency, and there is clean, dense, portable, and next-generation energy technology that leaps above the hard-won trial-and-error achievements thus far, and the energy revolution we seek will be delivered.

Cold Fusion Now!