Frank Znidarsic on fossil fuels and next-generation energy: “As one door closes, another opens”

Photo: Frank Znidarsic at George Miley’s lab.

His grandfather was a farmer who immigrated to America claiming to be a coal miner, but grandpa knew nothing about coal. He did know that the growing nation needed miners to extract the newly discovered cache of carbonaceous fuel, so he did what he had to, and settled in Pennsylvania coal country. His grandson Frank Znidarsic still lives there, working in the Pennsylvania energy industry, a third-generation coal miner whose own father left this world with a bad case of black lung.

When Znidarsic writes about coal mining, and the environmental damage it causes, he does so authoritatively. Now an engineer and author, Znidarsic was the first in his family to go to college, but he labored deep underground in the mines before landing a series of jobs above-ground in the power plants that burn fossil-fuels. The second edition of his book Elementary Anti-Gravity II is almost mistitled, for the first half of the book is a condensed survey of the major sources of energy in use today from the perspective of a miner and engineer who has worked directly in the field.

The world’s current power source is met just about wholly by burning fossil-fuels like coal, natural gas, and oil. Describing each of these fuels by its method of extraction and the processing needed for commercialization, he also shows how these techniques are leaving an ecological disaster for generations to come, though he seems willing to lose the battle in order to win the war. In weighing the consequences of extracting natural gas with the ecological damage it causes, Znidarsic supports the use of natural gas over coal.

Frank Znidarsic monitors smokestack emissions in 2011.
If you are interested in what kinds of pollution are emitted by coal-fired power plants, and the complex solutions attempting to make the emissions cleaner, this book gives a concise summary of the current methods applied to this problem. He describes how costly clean coal technologies are not quite the bargain they are advertised as.

Not limited to fossil-fuels, Znidarsic also describes a brief history of nuclear accidents, including the Fukushima-Daichi Reactor #4 explosion. Referencing M. King Hubbert‘s landmark June 1956 thesis of Peak Oil in which he predicted that nuclear power would provide Earth with a technological future, Znidarsic states that cold fusion will supplant any near-future hot-fusion technology, quoting as support Jed Rothwell‘s observation that “the introduction of a new technology often follows major advances within an existing technology”.

Frank Znidarsic and Yuri Potapov at Los Alamos
Marshall McLuhan describes this as technological reversal, when one technology “flips” into another through speed-up, the way a series of photographs, brought together in rapid succession form a movie.

William Draper Harkins gives personification to this idea. Born in Titusville, Pennsylvania where the American Oil Age began, he suggested that we might get our energy by the fusion of four hydrogen atoms to make a helium atom, using Albert Einstein‘s mass-to-energy equivalence.

The second half of Elementary Anti-Gravity II is a modern science lesson, including the associated math to derive the quantum condition for cold fusion to occur. Students of physics will enjoy his algebraic derivations and the unique perspective on quantum mechanics and relativity, as well as the answer to how anti-gravity fits in.

Frank Znidarsic graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1975. He is currently a Registered Professional Engineer in the state of Pennsylvania. In the 1980’s, he went on to obtain an A.S in Business Administration at St. Francis College. He studied physics at the University of Indiana in the 1990’s. Frank has been employed as an Engineer in the steel, mining, and utility industries. Frank has been investigating new sources of energy for twenty years. His papers have been published in numerous places including Infinite Energy Magazine and the Journal of New Energy. His work was documented in a series of videos by Seattle4Truth which you can view here.

Q&A with Frank Znidarsic

CFN You have been working in the fossil-fuel industry for years. What is your current position and what kinds of things do you do in your job today?

FZ Today I am retired, however, I am looking for commissioning contracts at power plants.

CFN Can you describe how energy returns from fossil fuels have decreased over the last century?

FZ Yes, the returns on energy were larger when the environmental costs were not considered. We use so much energy today that the environmental costs are paramount. We cannot go back to the old way of doing things, and clean energy is expensive.

CFN Talk a little about the environmental damages caused by mining practices. Is it possible to clean up the damage, and restore habitat to wildlife?

FZ Yes, strip mines can be reclaimed and water can be treated. However, I don’t believe that it is possible to restore lost streams and wells, or to stop the flow of acid water from abandoned mines. And no one really knows what all of the carbon that was released into the atmosphere will eventually do.

CFN Fracking pollutes water tables to the degree that some water supplies are combustible, and can be lit on fire right out of the tap. Wildlife has died as a result of poisonous chemicals that the industry has been allowed to keep secret. Yet it’s true that natural gas burns cleaner than coal or oil. Do you really think the benefits of natural gas outweigh the damages?

FZ Yes. Gas produces half the amount of carbon dioxide per kilowatt and the majority of the deep gas wells have caused no problems at all. I am hoping that the new wells remain in production for a long time.

CFN You’ve stated that carbon-capturing systems for coal-fired power plants can use as much as 25% of the power generated by that coal. What do you see is the future of clean coal?

FZ The price of natural gas has been unstable. Unstable prices upset the investment markets. The price of coal has been stable. On this basis, the use of coal must be continued. I don’t know if our economy can sustain the costs associated with carbon capture. I am not sure that the Earth can sustain its environment without it.

CFN Can you describe your idea of cold fusion in layman’s terms? How does this relate to anti-gravity?

FZ Yes, just as soft iron increases the strength of the electromagnetic field, the active areas in a cold fusion cell appear to increase the magnetic component of the strong nuclear force. This force is known as the nuclear spin orbit force. This increased spin orbit component tends to flip nucleons and induce Beta decays. Remarkably the same condition seems to increase the intensity of the gravitomagnetic field. I have found that this condition is fundamental to the quantum jump. I am anxiously awaiting comments on my Amazon book page.

CFN How sure are you that cold fusion will be able to provide power to the planet for a technological human future? What time-frame are we looking at, years or decades?

FZ It hard to say when could fusion technology may emerge. I have been waiting since 1989. In comparison, the production of deep natural gas arrived quickly and surprised many in the energy industry.

As with any revolutionary technology, the result rides on the shoulders of the prior work of others. The technology has now reached a point were experiment, theory, and finance are coming together. I am hoping that Dr. George Miley or Andrea Rossi will surprise us soon with commercial units. I expect commercial cold fusion products within five years.

CFN Thank-you!

FZ My pleasure.

Related Links

Youth keeping the new energy movement alive with constant creations investigating non-conventional science by Ruby Carat October 29, 2010

Major Peak Oil figure leaves Collapse-mind to help “birth new paradigm”; is cold fusion next?

Former Los Angeles, California police officer turned Uber-Doomer Michael C. Ruppert is leaving Collapsenet, the organization he helmed that was developed as a response to Peak Oil. [visit]

Collapse by Michael C. Ruppert
Named after his book Confronting Collapse and the documentary movie Collapse that he starred in, Collapsenet gathered resources where one could connect with others preparing “lifeboats” for a post-petroleum world.

In a video farewell posted on the site, he said, “My usefulness is at an end here……There’s a major evolution occurring right here, right now.” [watch]

Citing major cyber-attacks that almost took them down, the drying up of cash-flow, and serious illness in the core leadership, he ultimately realized, “I don’t think it does you, or me, or anybody, any good, anymore, to have me reading all these stories everyday to tell us things we already know: multiple systemic failures are occurring everywhere.”

“Fukushima is the single greatest threat to human existence, it’s uncontrolled, it can’t be fixed by the Japanese; climate change is out of control; the Gulf of Mexico is destroyed; economic collapse is absolutely irreversible; Peak Oil is here; and I now live in a country that’s an open fascist dictatorship.”

“I don’t need to talk anymore about that.”

“I know what’s coming after these next few absolutely amazing months that lie before us, is going to be upheaval, like none of us have ever imagined, or ever experienced.”

Crossing the Rubicon by Michael C. Ruppert
Mike Ruppert has written several books including Crossing the Rubicon, the meticulously researched and referenced account of how oil, power, and politics connected events surrounding 9/11. He published a newsletter From the Wilderness for many years and posed the Nine Critical Questions to Ask About Any Alternative Energy, which we asked cold fusion researcher Jed Rothwell to answer. [read]

Now, Ruppert will be traveling alone to focus on writing a new book. He says, “I get to go and live in my spiritual world…. That’s where I’m being called right now.”

“I see no need to fight in this world or to live in it anymore from the material standpoint. There are other types of consciousness that are equally, or more, effective in helping to change or accelerate this change of consciousness that I see taking place on this planet.”

In exiting the Collapse mind-set, Ruppert is following former Life After the Oil Crash‘s Matt Savinar, who left curating gloom headlines to focus on more positive pursuits of sustainable living. Tom Whipple, the Falls Church News-Press writer who regularly assessed collapse action, also diverged from the message of doom by writing about the recent developments in the low energy nuclear reactions LENR field.

Even Gerald Celente had broken from painting the maddening portrait of a corrupt marketplace to highlight the one bright spot by stating how cold fusion and new energy “is the greatest investment opportunity of the 21rst century.” [read]

However, few Peak Oilers have abandoned the focus on surviving the coming crash to even consider a future with abundant energy. Cold Fusion Now has contacted several senior members of the collapse and post-carbon community to alert them to new developments in the cold fusion sector, to no avail.

Many still do not know the phenomenon is real. Many remain skeptical of any “technological fix” that claims clean, dense energy. Also, a lack of understanding of the word ‘nuclear’ frightens many, unaware that ‘nuclear’ does not equate to ‘radioactive’.

It was in 2004 that I myself learned about Peak Oil at a movie screening of The End of Suburbia at which Michael Ruppert spoke afterwards. I remember the audience response: stunned to a stupor at the consequences. Many people had their world changed that evening, including myself. It wasn’t until later that year when Media Ecologist Bob Neveritt told me that cold fusion was real did I then see the possible future ahead.

“How can it be that we have this imminent doom and gloom, as well as what I feel in my heart is the coming of a golden age?”, Ruppert asks. “Well that’s a mystery that we’ll have to find out. But we all have to find out in our own ways.”

Now, Ruppert is correctly identifying the current Mystery Landscape, the ground from which the figure of cold fusion is emerging. But do humans really have a second chance at a “golden age”?

Media ecology reveals the feedback loop between technology and human behavior. “We shape our tools, and our tools shape us”, said Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan.

Cold fusion will not ‘save’ Petroleum Man. The set of services and disservices of fossil fuel technology will rust away, as will the Mind of Man who built it.

Instead, like wildflowers through the sidewalk cracks, a new set of services and disservices will emerge, composed by a new technology that sets a different mental imprint on humans.

The consciousness of a new paradigm is intimately connected with an ethical energy source, free, and democratic, with access for all: ultra-clean energy from cold fusion.

The rest is up to each and every one of us, to evolve in kind.

C’mon over to our house, Mike! Welcome!

Cold Fusion Now!

And hey – WE’RE OVER HERE!

[latexpage]
We are living in a world dependent on a finite source of fuel subject to M. King Hubbert’s production curve over time. This graph is from his 1956 Nuclear Energy and Fossil Fuels. It shows an increase in petroleum production, the production reaching a peak, and then, production falling.

Since 2005, global oil production has remained flat.

The Post Carbon Institute‘s video YOU ARE HERE: The Oil Journey recounts the century-and-a-half Oil Age and gives a context for Peak Oil, whose effects we live with now on the down-slope of the curve. Narrated by the great documentary voice of Peter Coyote, the half-hour video profiles the relationship between the economic and social benefits gained from fossil fuel energy, benefits that are now altering as access to fossil fuel becomes more difficult.

Fossil fuels are “concentrated and portable”, but most of the easily accessed oil, coal and gas is gone. What remains is harder to retrieve, of a lower quality, more costly to produce, and coming with a continually diminishing Energy Return on Energy Invested ERoEI.

The PCI comprises a group of researchers and writers gathered together to sound the alert on Peak Oil, the condition of a peak in production in oil, and develop strategies that will allow human communities to survive a post-petroleum world. They believe a Renewable Energy Economy based on conventional alternative energy is inevitable, but it will be “smaller, slower and more localized”.

Alternatives “should be invested in”, but a problem remains. The ERoEI for conventional alternatives like solar and wind is not nearly as high as fossil fuels like oil, coal, or gas. According to their 2009 report, PCI concludes that “None of the conventional alternative energy sources will maintain our current energy level of use” and “The amount of investment capital to develop the technology is just not there”.

Like many in the Peak Oil-Collapse community, PCI is wary of believing there will “always be a new technology to come along” to keep the economy going. They are skeptical of the attitude that “only innovation and investment can solve our environmental problems”.

And I would too, if I didn’t already know of the solution that cold fusion offers.

Cold fusion scientists generally refer to Energy Return, a simple ratio of thermal Energy Out to equivalent electrical Energy In. The first prototypes of commercial cold fusion are steam generators that have demonstrated energy returns of 400 and higher.

However, as the technology is based on a not-fully-understood reaction between hydrogen and a bit of metallic powder, initial technologies for agency and industrial use are claiming more modest 6 to 25 times thermal energy return over the equivalent electrical energy input.

But the potential is even greater. This is a nuclear fusion-sized power which could provide an energy density a hundred-million times greater than the chemical burning of fossil fuels.

Cold fusion uses a fuel of hydrogen H and its isotope deuterium D, both found in water. One in every 6400 hydrogen atoms in the ocean is a deuterium atom. Deuterium combined with oxygen makes heavy water D20, just like hydrogen combined with oxygen can form regular water H20.

Researcher Jed Rothwell, author of Cold Fusion and the Future, writes of the abundance of deuterium, the first form of hydrogen to be used in cold fusion:

There are $2 \hspace{1 mm} \times \hspace{1 mm} 10^{13}$ tons of heavy water on earth, enough to last 3.2 billion years at present energy consumption rates.

But since simple hydrogen also works, this guarantees a virtually inexhaustible fuel source.

Regarding energy density, he writes:

Deuterium fusion yields $3.45 \hspace{1 mm} \times \hspace{1 mm} 10^{14}$ joules per kilogram (345 million megajoules).
Gasoline has 45 megajoules per kilogram (or 132 megajoules per gallon).
Therefore, a kilogram of deuterium gas has roughly as much energy as 7.6 million kilograms of gasoline (2.6 million gallons).
” [p 33]

The metals that “host” the reaction are transition metals like palladium and nickel. Only a few grams are needed for tens of kilowatts of thermal energy. The 1.25 grams of nickel contained in one US 5 cent piece could generate as much energy as in 5 barrels of oil. Only a tiny portion of the metal is consumed in the reaction; the rest is recyclable.

The first commercial cold fusion generators make steam, not electricity. Currently, independent labs are working to make the steam viable to turn a turbine, and create electrical power. When the electricity generated is used to power the generator, then we have a new level of energy return.

Peak Oilers have verified the predictions of M. King Hubbert’s fossil fuel production curve, but haven’t looked to the right-hand side of the graph, and our nuclear energy future.

There is no fission nuclear future using dangerous and dirty radioactive fuel.
There is no hot-fusion mega-facilities ready to come online any time soon.

But there is a third choice in nuclear power. Cold fusion.

Clean, abundant, energy-dense, and revolutionary.

Thanks to Peak Oilers, we now know where we’re at.
Let’s start looking at where we want to be.

Oil Age and the Era of Cold Fusion
The Oil Age is a blip. Cold fusion can take humanity beyond what is foreseen.

Cold Fusion Now!

Related Links

M. King Hubbert on Nuclear Energy by Ruby Carat March 22, 2011

New PCI Study Concludes No Combination of Alternative Energy Systems Can Replace Fossil Fuels by Richard Heinberg November 13, 2009

Answering “Nine Critical Questions to Ask About Alternative Energy” by Jed Rothwell January 20, 2011

Cold Fusion and the Future by Jed Rothwell download .pdf

Oil to Nickel: The Ecat Energy Equivalence by Ruby Carat October 4, 2011

LENR and the Paradigm of Abundance

We undergo periodic ”paradigm shifts” rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way. These paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what was considered invalid before. This implies that the notion of truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria and is defined by consensus reality.

For instance, most people’s notion of the truth is the “Scarcity paradigm.” An example of the Scarcity paradigm is the belief that while food production expands linearly, population grows exponentially.

In other words, comparing worldwide population growth rates to global resource consumption rates it seems clear that we are running out of resources (and time). Right now there is almost seven billion people and by mid-century it will probably be around ten billion.

We are running out of food, water, fish, and oil to satisfy this rapidly growing population.

Since 2005 the price of wheat, corn, and rice has more than tripled, which reflects a dwindling of global food stocks. We are already farming around 80% of the arable land with reports on climate change showing crop production declining by ten to twenty percent in the next ten years. By 2030 demand for food is expected to increase 50%.

Only half a percent of the world’s water is fresh, and many aquifers have been nearly pumped dry, so demand will far outstrip the supply in the next 30 years.

Bottom trawling destroys about 6 million square miles of sea floor each year, and according to most projections we will be the generation that will run out of wild fish.

But worse is running out of oil because the modern world was built with it and runs on it. It takes about ten calories of oil to produce one calorie of food. Around half of the fuel consumed is oil product and more than half of that oil is used for transportation, a very fast growing sector of the world economy. It is estimated that demand for oil will increase 50% by 2025.

On the other hand, oil production has been flat since 2005. Peak oil, the point when maximum oil extraction has been reached (after which it will go into terminal decline) is near.

Such facts bring about cynicism, pessimism, and despair. Most people believe that the world is going downhill fast and there is nothing anyone can do about it. The hole is too deep to climb out of, and any information that confirms that suspicion will be remembered, while conflicting data will not even register – a confirmation bias.

Furthermore, there is a direct link between imagination and perception. We are saturated with “if it bleeds it leads” news reports. Our brain evolved prioritizing immediate threats, and while many dangers are probabilistic, our mind can’t easily differentiate between the improbable and the likely.

This knee jerk things-are-going-down-hill moaning pessimism is incredible from people living amid luxury and security that their ancestors would have died for. Innovation has played a huge role in averting disaster.

For instance, mankind was reaching the limit of our ability to feed ourselves when early 20th century chemists invented a technology to produce fertilizer. The Haber process sustains one-third of the population today, and it is estimated that half the protein within human beings is made of nitrogen that was originally fixed by this technology.

Optimism rather than pessimism is a sounder basis for a paradigm accessing reality. A true measurement of something’s worth is the hours it takes to acquire it, and we undoubtedly have more free time and more ways to spend it than our ancestors.

We’ve seen enormous progress in the last couple of centuries. Today, most poverty-stricken Americans have a TV, telephone, electricity, running water, a refrigerator, and indoor plumbing, luxuries the richest men on the planet didn’t have one hundred years ago.

In particular, there is a new clean, very very cheap, and super abundant energy technology emerging called “Low Energy Nuclear Reaction” (LENR for short). It uses hydrogen and nickel to produce heat. No nuclear materials are used for fuel, and none are produced.

“A volume about the size of a #2 pencil eraser of water provides as much energy as two 48-gallon drums of gasoline. That is 355,000 times the amount of energy per volume – five orders of magnitude.” ( http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/New-LENR-Machine-is-the-Best-Yet.html ).

This phenomenon (LENR) has been confirmed in hundreds of published scientific papers: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf

“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

“Total replacement of fossil fuels for everything but synthetic organic chemistry.” —Dr. Joseph M. Zawodny, NASA

Unfortunately, the Scarcity paradigm is preventing people from believing this. The real possibility of electricity too cheap to meter is dismissed due to a confirmation bias. People’s minds can’t readily imagine this new energy technology being real, so they perceive that it is impossible.

Since any new technology needs investment for research and development, this Scarcity paradigm is a self-fulfilling prophesy. While there are new technologies emerging to address a score of scarcity issues like clean water, food availability, sewage disposal, security, housing, communication, education, information, environmental degradation, and transportation, many hinge on the abundance of cheap energy.

To summarize, most people believe that the world is going downhill fast and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Our mind can’t easily differentiate between the improbable and the likely. The tragic result is that we have difficulty imagining things getting better, which leads to the knee jerk rejection of likely solutions. If we could make the shift from the Paradigm of Scarcity, which so many people have so much invested in, to the Paradigm of Abundance, which seems too-good-to-be-true, a positive feedback will occur, where every new innovation will speed the next.

Our future will be so bright we’ll have to wear shades. The only catch is that we have to believe.

The Rossi 45MW LENR Power Plant is a Real Bargain Compared to Nuclear

Rossi made the following comment on his blog:

Dear Dr Joseph Fine:
– In a 45 MW plant, if Siemens gives us 30% of efficiency, the COP is not 6, is infinite: the energy to drive the resistances will be made by the E-Cat: if we make 45 thermal MWh/h, 15 electric MWh/h will be made, of which 7.5 will be consumed by the plant, 7.5 will be sold, together with30 thermal MWh/h.
– The price of a 45 MW plant will be in the order of 30 millions.
– the price of the energy made by our industrial plants will be made by the owners and by the market.
Warm Regards,
A.R

To put the above into perspective, the following is a chart listing the power density of typical engine types:

Power density of typical engine types
combustion gas turbine 2.9 kg/kw
medium speed diesel 10 kg/kw
nuclear gas turbine (including shielding) 15 kg/kw
nuclear steam plant (including shielding) 54 kg/kw

A Rossi 45MW LENR power plant is estimated to weigh 200 tonnes (in other words about 180,000 kilograms). Since 45 megawatts is 45000 kilowatts (I always got marked down in math class when I didn’t show my work on the test, but just wrote down the answer), a Rossi 45MW LENR power plant yields a 4 kg/kw power density.

Furthermore, a nuclear plant averages about 1,000MW of heat, the heat generated by about 22 Rossi 45MW power plants. The cost of a 1,000MW nuclear plant is conservatively estimated to be around 2.4 billion dollars, while the cost of 22 Rossi E-Cat plants (at 30 million dollars each) is 660 million dollars – a little more than a third of the price! With no cost for nuclear fuel, no cost to clean up and get rid of the nuclear waste, and no risk of Fukushima type of accident!!

I think it is safe to say that the Rossi 45MW LENR power plant will be in heavy demand both by the maritime and utility industries. It is difficult to understand why both the US military and international corporations aren’t beating a path to Rossi’s door.

At the very least, you would think that the Japanese, who suffered terribly when their nuclear power plants (that furnish something like one third of Japan’s electricity) suffered catastrophic damage during the recent natural disasters, and who still suffer from the after-effects of the nuclear bombs dropped on their cities during WWII, would be intrigued by Rossi’s business plan.

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