Cold nuclear fusion: we immediately went our own way

This is a re-post of a modified google-translated article by Sergey Tsvetkov published April 8, 2019 at REGNUM https://regnum.ru/news/2606951.html. Any use of materials is allowed only if there is a hyperlink to REGNUM news agency.

The prototype of the Soviet prospective cold fusion reactor on deuterated titanium was created in May 1989 by the head of the institute of the USSR Minsredmash NIKIET N. A. Dollezhal. The collapse of the USSR delayed the revolution in global nuclear energy by almost 30 years.

A report by Sergey Alekseevich Tsvetkov, a member of the Coordination Council of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences on the issue of Cold Transmutation, “My opinion on cold nuclear fusion” at the 30-year-old Cold Synthesis Conference: Results and Prospects held on March 23, 2019 in Moscow.

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Comment REGNUM

Sergey Tsvetkov

Sergey Tsvetkov is a nuclear physicist, a specialist in nuclear reactor physics, the author of a promising project for a cold fusion reactor on deuterated titanium, the development of which began in the Sverdlovsk branch of the Research and Design Institute of Power Engineering (SF NIKIET) of the USSR Ministry of Medium Machine Building.

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“If there was no cold fusion, it should have been invented. ”

My report is devoted to the results that I received in the field of cold fusion in 30 years of work, practically from the very moment when Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced their discovery on March 23, 1989.

Fig. 1. Solemn rally in Zarechny, Sverdlovsk region on the launch at the Beloyarsk NPP them. IV Kurchatov BN-600 fast neutron reactor in April 1980

How it all began. Here, in the city of Zarechny, it all started when the newspaper “Izvestia” on March 25, 1989 published the article “The Discovery of the Century or …” by a famous international journalist, correspondent for the United States and Great Britain, Alexander Shalnev, in which he spoke about a sensational press. conference at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, USA.

Fig. 2. A clipping from the Izvestia newspaper dated March 25, 1989 with Alexander Shalnov’s article “The Discovery of the Century or …”

“THE DISCOVERY OF THE CENTURY OR …”

NEW YORK. (Sob. Correspondent. “News”). ABC began its major news release with a report on a press conference held at the University of Utah. What was announced, and in fact – a sensation. According to Briton Martin Fleischmann and American Stanley Pons, they managed to discover a way to carry out nuclear fusion under the simplest conditions.

If this is so, if further experiments confirm the discovery, then a giant step will be made to the long-standing dream of many scientists – to use fusion as a cheap, reliable and almost safe source of energy. The fusion reaction proceeds with light nuclei, and the fission reaction, which is now used in conventional nuclear reactors, is in heavy nuclei. The advantage of fusion as an energy source is that any water abounds in the deuterium used in this process. Another major advantage – the waste of this process is scanty.

The scientists of the world have long been fighting the problem of fusion. According to the Washington Post newspaper, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent, so that using the most sophisticated and at the same time very cumbersome equipment to create conditions that would resemble those that exist on the Sun in a giant nuclear synthesizer. In the meantime, the result is the following: to carry out such experiments, the energy is spent much more than it is created.

The method of Fleischmann and Pons is extraordinarily simple. This experiment, said the vice-president of the University of Utah, is similar to those conducted by first-year students using two electrodes immersed in a liquid. Scientists themselves say that, according to their forecasts, it will be relatively easy to transform the discovery into a technology that can be used in practical needs – for heat, for example. However, they add, “there is still work to do.”

In American scientific circles, the press conference in Utah did not cause a definite reaction. Attention was drawn to the fact that it was arranged before other scientists were notified of the discovery, and before the discovery report was submitted for publication. It’s unusual.

Secondly, there is a suspicion that the practical benefits of the discovery will be much less than the authors predict. According to Dennis Keef from the University of Berkeley (California), the experiment is worth it to continue on. But, says the scientist, himself a specialist in fusion, it is unrealistic to wait for substantial practical results: after all, the experiments that are conducted still produce a very small amount of heat, which, of course, is not enough to bring boiling water to steam. .

Skepticism, it seems to me, has spread faster than enthusiasm: neither ABC nor other TV companies report on the discovery anymore. Very poorly reacted and print.

A. Shalnev.


Further, a comment was published by Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences Boris Borisovich Kadomtsev, a well-known specialist in plasma physics and controlled thermonuclear fusion.

The correspondent of Izvestia asked academician B. Kadomtsev to comment on this message. He said:

“The message from New York is, of course, sensational. But the scientific information in it is too small for any definite conclusions. In order for the fusion reactions to occur, the nuclei must come to a very close distance. To do this, they must have a greater relative speed. Therefore, a very high technique is required for an intensive reaction. Very weak reactions can occur under less extreme conditions. For example, neutron generators use a metal target saturated with tritium located at room temperature. This beam strikes a beam of accelerated deuterium nuclei, which with low probability can react with tritium nuclei. The information of the correspondent is not enough to make a conclusion about the reliability of the discovery. It is only clear that if the reaction actually proceeds, then it is clearly weak, and such a process can hardly be used to generate energy. ”

This small article was duplicated in the Pravda newspaper, and then, publications appeared in the Literary Gazette and many others. In April 1989, in the 15th issue of the weekly “Echo of the Planet”, a large article ” “Cold Thermonuclear” — the discovery of the century?” was published; showing what results were obtained.

Fig. 3. The article “Cold thermonuclear – discovery of the century” in the weekly “Echo of the Planet”, No. 15, April 1989

On the basis of these newspaper publications, already in early April our group in the SF NIKIET was involved in the verification of the results. But we immediately went on our way.

At the same time, at the end of April, a “refuting” statement of the American Physical Society is published, and in May a number of tendentious newspaper publications appear, stating that Fleischmann and Pons’ data are incorrect, that they cannot measure heat, that, in fact, there is no tritium, etc. As they say, “all dogs were hanged on them”. They tried, of course, all this time to fight back . An attempt was even made to create the Institute of Cold Fusion for which a lot of money was allocated. However, the institute did not last long and was closed at the end of 1990. By 1991, pressure was exerted on the troublemakers so that Martin Fleischmann returned to Britain, and Stanley Pons had to resign from the University of Utah and move to work in France, having emigrated from the United States.

On the history of Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons’ harassment, I wrote an article that was published on December 12, 2017 in IA REGNUM entitled “About the pseudo-scientificness of cold fusion: in defense of Martin Fleischman and Stanley Pons’ electrochemists”, in which, I think, I was able to show that it was not a scientific criticism, but a harassment, the initiators of which didn’t disdain from either outright lies or purposeful falsification of results during the reproduction of the experiment. The April “denials” of the American Physical Society and the Massachusetts University of Technology were published a month after the March 23 press conference, while the reaction from Fleischmann and Pons was launched only on the 72nd day. For some reason, at first, nobody paid attention to this circumstance. “Examinations” were frankly “custom-made”, which later became clear, thanks to the investigation of Eugene Mallove. Even the accusations against Fleischmann and Pons, that they held a conference before they published a scientific article and allegedly deceived their co-author Professor Steven Jones, did not correspond to reality.

The main conclusion of my article is

“Cold nuclear fusion is not pseudoscience. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons made a scientific discovery worthy of the Nobel Prize. ”

So I think today, and so we thought in 1989, we are convinced of the correctness of Fleischmann and Pons in their own experiments.

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On the economics of cold fusion

We now turn to the question: why is it advantageous to engage in cold nuclear fusion for energy?

In preparing the report, I found such a table in the literature.

The way to get energykWh/kgJ/gTimes greater than previous row energy
Burning oil (coal)11.642 kJ/g1
In the fission of uranium-23522.9 x 10^682.4 GJ/g1,974,138
In the fusion of hydrogen nuclei117.5 x 10^6423 GJ/g5
The energy of a substance according to the formula E=mc^229 x 10^9104.4 TJ/g247

Tab. 1. The amount of energy released in a certain amount of a substance with different methods of production.

With the complete burning of oil or coal, 11.6 kWh / kg is obtained. When uranium-235 is divided in atomic reactors by 1 kg, almost 2 million times more energy is released than by burning oil or coal. In the fusion of hydrogen nuclei, the energy is 5 times greater than in the fission of uranium-235.

And if you manage to release the total energy of a substance according to Einstein’s formula E = m · c2, then you can get 247 times more energy per kilogram of substance in relation to the fusion of hydrogen nuclei.

Next, I analyzed the estimate of the energy released during the fusion of hydrogen nuclei, and it turned out that the only thermonuclear reaction involving hydrogen that could give such an amount of energy per gram of substance, refers to a pair of tritium-protium. As a result, helium-4 (4He) and 19.814 MeV of energy are obtained:

3H + 1H = 4He + ϒ + 19.814 MeV

This reaction totals 474.936 GJ/g. And we, like Fleischmann and Pons, from the very beginning considered as a source of energy the fusion of deuterium nuclei (d + d reaction), which occurs inside the crystal lattice of a metal

d + d = 3He (0, 82 MeV) + n (2.45 MeV) + 3.270 MeV (1 channel)

= T (1.01 MeV) + p (3.02 MeV) + 4.033 MeV (Channel 2)

This fusion reaction is possible through two channels. The first channel is the formation of helium-3 (3He) with a neutron (n) with the release of 3.27 MeV of energy, and the second channel with the formation of tritium (T) and a proton (p) with the release of 4.033 MeV of energy.

For this classical nuclear fusion reaction, when the first and second channels are equally probable, the amount of released energy per gram of molecular deuterium is 87.45 GJ/g (G is Giga = 10^9), which is much less than given in Table 1 (423 GJ/g).

In their work, Fleischmann and Pons drew attention to the fact that they have tritium (T) recorded, as compared with neutrons, 11–14 orders of magnitude more than with the classical d + d reaction. If we take into account this increase in tritium yield in their reaction, confirmed later by the work of the Indian nuclear scientists, who had 7–11 orders of magnitude more tritium output than the neutron yield, then the energy per gram of molecular deuterium is 96.57 GJ/g . Thus, with this fusion reaction, one gram of deuterium can become a continuous source of heat with a capacity of 3.062 kW for a whole year. It is wonderful.

When we learned about the press conference of Fleischmann and Pons, we, a group of employees of the Sverdlovsk branch of the Research and Design Institute of Power Engineering (NIKIET branch named after N. A. Dollezhal – the famous NII-8), worked with titanium hydride. At that time, we were making a high-pressure hydrogen complex with hydrogen pressures up to 400 atmospheres. We had titanium hydride on hand, and expensive palladium, as they say, had to be searched for. Therefore, we took titanium and decided to test it in our own way by saturating titanium with deuterium from the gas phase. We ordered deuterium and tried to work with it at high pressures.

Fig. 4. Top view of the Beloyarsk NPP in Zarechny. The orange arrow indicates the complex of buildings of the SF NIKIET, inscription “NNF” marked where the group of Sergei Tsvetkov began work developing the cold nuclear fusion reactor in April 1989.

The question arises: why we immediately chose titanium intuitively, and then continued to work with it, despite the fact that Fleischmann and Pons used palladium, which is saturated with deuterium during the electrolysis process to produce palladium-deuteride. Discussing the question of how to intensify the process, we came to the conclusion that we need to introduce as much hydrogen or deuterium into the metal crystal lattice as possible in order to get recorded results on heat and on products of the proposed nuclear reaction. And here the following table helped us (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5. Table of binary hydrides in the periodic system from the book “Metal hydrides”. M. Atomizdat, 1973, p. 11.

Metal hydrides were very well researched in the 1960s. In 1973, we had a fundamental American monograph on this topic (see Metal hydrides. Edited by V. Muller et al. Translated from English. – M .: Atomizdat, 1973. – 432 p.). In this book there is a special periodic table, which shows which metal hydrides can form and in what quantities they can absorb hydrogen (Fig. 5). It can be seen from this table that titanium, zirconium and niobium form binary hydrides in which there are up to two hydrogen atoms per metal atom, and, say, palladium and nickel hydrides per metal atom can absorb no more than one hydrogen atom. Thus, it became obvious the advantage of working with titanium in comparison with palladium: titanium absorbs twice the amount of hydrogen, and, consequently, the fusion reactions could be expected at least twice as much.

We now consider Table 2, in which nickel, palladium, titanium, zirconium and niobium are compared in density, content in the earth’s crust, heat capacity, thermal conductivity and cost of these metals.

MetalDensity g/cm3How many times heavier is Ti?Content in earth’s crust,% by weight. Heat capacity, J/ kmolHeat conductivity, (300 K) W/(m*K)Cost as of 09/19/17, USD/kgAtomic mass, g/mol
Palladium12.022.650.00000125.871.829191.31106.42
Titanium4.5410.5725.121.91247.88
Nickel8.91.960.007526.190.911.0558.69
Zirconium6.511.430.016525.322.7129.0991.22
Niobium8.571.890.00224.4453.722692.91

Tab. 2. Comparison of Pd, Ti, Ni, Zr and Nb according to several characteristics.

It is obvious that titanium clearly stands out against the background of other metals: it is the lightest of all, in the earth’s crust it is the most, its heat capacity and thermal conductivity are rather small, and its cost is low. It is comparable to the cost of nickel, but in terms of its prevalence in the crust, even no attention should be paid to nickel. Thus, it turned out that titanium can and should be used. These were the reasons we had to do titanium.

Most recently, I found my first job in the USSR to saturate titanium with hydrogen. Employees of the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, Yu. V. Baymakov and O. A. Lebedev, published an article titled “Titanium and Hydrogen” in the collection “Proceedings of the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute” No. 223 for 1963, in which they reported on the thermal effect obtained during the formation of titanium hydride on titanium powder.

Fig. 6. A plot of temperature versus time for heating titanium in hydrogen and a setup diagram for titanium saturation with hydrogen from the article by Yu.V. Baymakov and O. A. Lebedev “Titanium and hydrogen” of 1963.

In the experiment with the formation of hydride, excess heat was recorded in the amount of 16.7 kcal / mol. But the calculated data, which are given in the article:

Fig. 7. Calculation of excess heat generation during the formation of titanium hydride from the article “Titanium and hydrogen” by Yu. V. Baymakov and O. A. Lebedev in 1963

The formation of hydride takes 120 kcal and 103 kcal is spent on the dissociation of hydrogen molecules, that is, the formation of atomic hydrogen. But in the end, all the same, there remains excess heat equal to 14% – this is quite a lot. If we calculate the excess power factor, that is, the ratio of heat expended (120.5 kcal) to excess heat (16.7 kcal), then this will be slightly more than seven. This feature has a titanium, which has been undeservedly ignored in recent studies on cold nuclear fusion.

On the basis of the equipment and materials that we prepared for the high-pressure hydrogen complex, in April 1989, the first experimental setup was created to obtain nuclear fusion reactions in deuterated titanium (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8. The first installation of 1989 for the study of cold nuclear fusion in SF NIKIET. On the left – the high-pressure gas part, on the right – an experimental cell with detectors.

Let me remind you that this story takes place at the Sredmash Research Institute (Ministry of Medium Machine-Building of the USSR), at the Sverdlovsk branch of the Research and Design Institute of Power Engineering (SF NIKIET), which is the site of the experimental reactor of the Moscow NIKIET them. N. A. Dollezhal engaged in the creation of nuclear energy facilities and installations for military and civil purposes.

We expected that we could get very high deuterium pressure, for which a special container was prepared at the facility. It was assumed that we can get a hydrogen pressure of 400 atmospheres. We thought that if we do not get a nuclear fusion reaction at low pressures, then we can achieve a positive effect at high pressure. But this was not necessary. In Fig. 9 that the experimental cell is surrounded by various detectors. We had several systems for measuring nuclear radiation: two detectors were used for gamma radiation, there were track neutron detectors (marked in figure 2).

Fig. 9. Layout of the sensors of the neutron and gamma quanta registration system.

It was a thin mica-muskavit with a diameter of several centimeters with thin layers of uranium-235 and neptunium-237 applied to it. The distance at which these track detectors were located was calculated so that the 2.45 MeV neutrons that Fleischmann and Pons registered were slowed down to such energies when interacting with distilled water as a moderator – (8), so that mica Muskavit to leave their tracks of fission fragments of uranium or neptunium by slow neutrons. Gas-discharge helium-3 counters were also used in neutron detectors (7). Moreover, the detectors for gamma radiation and neutrons were duplicated, for example, up to 15 counters were used in the same neutron detector for neutron registration. Therefore, the registration system was very clear and reliable, with high resolution of neutrons and gamma radiation. The synchronous operation of two sensors independent of each other meant that not random artifacts were recorded, but really neutrons and gamma radiation.

In Fig. 10 shows our very first reactor.

Fig. 10. The first reactor for the production of cold fusion reactions on deuterated titanium, designed in the SF NIKIET in 1989.

A sample of cylindrical titanium hydride with a diameter of 9.5 mm (1) and a length of 70 mm was placed in a stainless tube with an internal diameter of 10 mm. Chromel-alumelic (XA) thermocouples in a sealed stainless steel case with a diameter of 1.5 mm (6, 7) were inserted into the tube on both sides. The entire titanium sample outside the tube was surrounded on all sides by a Peltier calorimeter (2), which was made on the basis of chromel-alumelium thermocouples. The calorimeter was calibrated using an independent heat source, for which, instead of a titanium sample, a model was inserted from a nichrome heater to which current was applied, voltage was measured, its power consumption was calculated. We measured the calorimeter’s response to such heating and thus calibrated it by the excess heat at operating temperatures.

In Fig. 11 shows the results of the first studies obtained on the titanium-deuterium system (Ti-D).

Fig. 11. Studies on the titan-deuterium system, May 19–20, 1989.

This happened on May 19–20, 1989. Here it can be seen that, in addition to excess heat, high temperatures (up to 800ºС and above), gamma radiation and neutrons were recorded. And the letters “n” circled on the graph show the moments of synchronous operation of two neutron sensors located opposite each other. Between the sensors was a titanium-deuterium system.

The experimental results obtained in the spring of 1989 unequivocally proved that the cold nuclear fusion phenomenon exists, and not only in the “palladium-deuterium” system, with which Fleischmann and Pons worked. We were busy saturating titanium from the gas phase. Our idea was that all these reactions take place in those metals and alloys that absorb and release deuterium. That is, we made this reactor in order to obtain the following cycle: saturation with deuterium, then degassing of titanium deuteride — pumping, and neutrons and gamma radiation were also recorded during pumping.

In Fig. 12 shows the results that we have obtained.

Fig. 12. Pressure change, titanium sample temperature and heat flux.

This is where the fun begins. If we compare the heat flux from the titanium sample at the saturation of titanium with deuterium and during the degassing of titanium deuteride – pumping, that is, the release of deuterium from titanium, then the ratio of the heat released during saturation to the heat spent during pumping will be about two (1.96). Thus, when deuterium is absorbed, a lot of heat is released, and when it is pumped out, heat is absorbed, but in smaller quantities. This is the first work that showed that when titanium is saturated with deuterium, excess heat is produced, which is released when titanium hydride is formed and the nuclear fusion reaction accompanies it.

The maximum heat release in the first cycle of experiments reached 39.3W. On one gram of titanium, it generates 2.6 W/g. The value is not very high, but it was received, reliably recorded and well calculated.

According to the results of these works, we made two applications for copyright certificates on the method of performing the reaction of low-temperature nuclear fusion, which was carried out by saturation and degassing. We had a hypothesis that at high saturation of titanium with deuterium, phase transitions occur in titanium deuteride, and at phase transitions the structure of the crystal lattice of titanium changes. And we in our first papers tried to check this hypotheses. It turned out that the majority of neutrons and gamma-rays are recorded at the very moment when the titanium-deuterium system passed through the beta/gamma-deuteride phase boundary of titanium. It is on this way of implementing the nuclear fusion reaction using the phase transition from the beta phase to the gamma phase and back we have applied for copyright certificate.

Further, on the basis of this method, the application “Nuclear fusion reactor” was developed. This application has already proposed to place the titanium-deuterium system under the nuclear reactor under the neutron flux in order to intensify the fusion reactions and get more heat. In the list of authors of the essay of the first article prepared for publication, a team was presented that began to deal with it: Bunkov V.V., Bondarenko N. B., Vlasov V. I., Zlokazov S. B., Kadnikov V. P., Maltsev A. G., Nikiforov A. D., Novikov P. I., Safonov V. A., Shentsev V. M., Tsvetkov S. A

Fig. 13. Abstract of the article “Experimental identification of the reaction of low-temperature fusion in the Ti-D system” 1989.

Contrary to the assurances of thermonuclear fusion specialists that the participants in this study were supposed to be overexposed by neutrons, many of these people are still alive and actively working, and only a few of them died in old age, one of whom was the liquidator of the Chernobyl accident.

Then we did the job of determining the initiation of nuclear fusion reactions in titanium deuteride when exposed to laser radiation. For this, the following scheme was developed. A quartz window reactor was made, a sample of titanium deuteride was placed in this reactor. Then air was pumped out of the reactor and a deuterium atmosphere was created with a pressure of 14 atmospheres. Through a quartz window, a pulsed laser affected the end of the sample inside the reactor, with neutrons and gamma radiation being recorded.

In September 1991, the results of this work were published in the journal of the American Nuclear Society Fusion Technology. At that time, the editor of this journal was George Miley, who suggested that we publish an article.

Fig. 14. The cover of the September issue of the journal Fusion Technology and the first page of the article “Laser-induced cold nuclear fusion in Ti-H2-D2-T2 compositions”.

At the end of this article, calculations were made of a gamma-based creation, which we recorded in the experiment, of a gamma laser.

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A little about yourself, friends and colleagues

I am a nuclear physicist. I have a specialization in “Physics of Nuclear Reactors”. I graduated from the Physics and Technology Faculty of the Ural Polytechnic Institute in Sverdlovsk in 1982. I had a diploma on the subject “Study of thermal decomposition of irradiated and non-irradiated polyimides”. I have two specializations: nuclear reactor physics and isotope separation.

I started working in the Sverdlovsk branch of the Research and Design Institute of Power Engineering in Zarechny, Sverdlovsk Region. The first work on cold nuclear fusion was also carried out there. And then life was so ordered that perestroika began, various incomprehensible events began until the end. As a result, I got into the group of Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR Alexei Nikolaevich Baraboshkin at the Institute of High-Temperature Electrochemistry of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Then, in 1993–1995, work began that was funded by the American firm ENECO. To us, they specifically financed the work on the interaction of strontium cerate with deuterium. As a result of this work, we filed an application for the international patent “Methods and devices for producing neutrons from solid-state proton conductors”.

Aleksey Nikolaevich Baraboshkin, together with then-corresponding member Boris Vladimirovich Deryagin, tried to organize and launch the All-Union scientific research program on cold nuclear fusion in 1990-1991. It was developed in sufficient detail. 32 organizations were supposed to participate in it: 12 institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 9 branch institutes of the IEP of the USSR, 8 universities, 5 academicians of the USSR Academy of Sciences and 5 corresponding members of the USSR Academy of Sciences. At that time, they estimated this program at 15 million rubles and plus 3 million foreign currency rubles and planned to carry it out in four years. The draft program is published on the CTIA and CMM website and in the REGNUM news agency. This is about what they managed to do at the Institute of High-Temperature Electrochemistry of the Ural Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

In 1993, Academician A.N. Baraboshkin held a meeting on this program in order to try to conduct it through the Department of Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences. We gave reports there. I then came with the doctor of chemical sciences Kabir Akhmetovich Kaliev, and we tried to make a demonstration of his work on tungsten bronzes at FIAN. Together with academician A.N. Baraboshkin, they then tried this option. They used tungsten-sodium bronze; sodium was removed by electrolysis at high temperature in a vacuum, as a result of which channels were formed. Then deuterium was let in at room temperature. At the same time neutrons and heat increase were recorded. This work they published in Physics Letters A in 1993.

In 1995, Academician A.N. Baraboshkin died, after which our team broke up, and the “fermentation” began.

In 1996, I had a small business trip to the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, where Kabir Kaliev and I repeated his experiments. Using a high-quality neutron sensor, we recorded neutron pulses. They worked out the technology for producing tungsten-sodium bronzes in order to obtain stable results, because in these experiments, instability was first observed, which, as it turned out, was associated with the structure of these bronzes. It was necessary to grow these bronzes very carefully.

After that, I made an attempt to restore and make a new installation with deuterated titanium at the Institute of Industrial Ecology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Yekaterinburg, but it ended in nothing. Then again the Institute of High-Temperature Electrochemistry, UB RAS. There, work was carried out on the electrolysis of molten salts of KCl, LiCl and LiD. They melted at 300ºС, for which an electrode was used, which was lowered into a container with salts. I worked with a titanium electrode and got excess heat. An article was written on this research cycle that was published for a very long time. In the end, it was published in 2005 in the journal “Rasplavy” of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

But then the “struggle for survival” began, where in fact I did not work for a long time, which in 2009 led me to be a junior researcher at the Department of Theoretical Physics and Applied Mathematics at the Ural State Technical University and the Ural Polytechnic Institute in Yekaterinburg.

In 2011, I retired. And then unexpected events began: I was invited to Germany and offered to restore the installation of cold fusion on titanium. I agreed, I came to Nuremberg, and we started working there with private money.

In addition, at this time a number of works was published. Here are the most important from my point of view:

1. Igor L. Beltyukov, Nikolay B. Bondarenko, Arsen A. Janelidze, Mikhail Yu. Gapanov, Konstantin G. Gribanov, Stanislav V. Kondratov, Aleksey G. Maltsev, Peter I. Novikov, Sergey A. Tsvetkov, Vyacheslav I. Zakharov Laser-Induced Cold Nuclear Fusion in Ti-H2-D2-T2 Compositions. // Fusion Technology, 1991, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 234−238.

2. I. L. Beltjukov, N. B. Bondarenko, A. A. Dzhanelidze, M. J. Gapanov, K. G. Gribanov, S. V. Kondratov, A. G. Mal’tsev, P. I. Novikov, S. A. Tsvetkov, V. I. Zaharov. Laser system for Ti-H2-D2-T2 // Physics of metals and metallurgical science, No. 6, 1992, pp. 138−143.

3. K. A. Kaliev, A. N. Baraboshkin, A. L. Samgin, V.S. Andreev, S.A. Tsvetkov. Influence of Electrochemical Treatment on Sodium – Tungstic Bronzes // Abstracts of the International Conference, “Minsk, Belarus, May 25–27 1993, pp. 119−120.

4. S. A. Tsvetkov. Initiation of Cold Energy Fusion // Theses of the international conference, “Possibilities of Ecological Clean Energy Production and Energy Conservation”, Minsk, Belarus, May 25–27, 1993, p. 134.

5. S. A. Tsvetkov, N. B. Bondarenko, I. L. Beltjukov, A. N. Varaksin, A. A. Zivoderov. Calculation of the transitions in the system of Pd-D and cold nuclear fusion // Physics of metals and metallurgical science, Vol. 76, Iss. 4, 1993, pp. 94−97.

6. A.L. Samgin, A.N. Baraboshkin, V.S. Andreev, I.V. Murygin, V.P. Gorelov, S.V. Vakarin, S.A. Tsvetkov, A.L. Shalyapin, A.G. Golikov, L.N. Fomina. Neutron generation in solid protonic conductors with perovskite-type structure // ICCF-4, December 6–9, 1993, Lahaina, Hawaii, Vol. 1, No. 2.7.

7. A. L. Samgin, A. N. Baraboshkin, I. V. Murygin, S. A. Tsvetkov, V. S. Andreev, S. V. Vakarin. ICCF-4, December 6–9, 1993, Lahaina, Hawaii, Vol. 1, No. 4.2.

8. A. L. Samgin, A. N. Baraboshkin, I. V. Murygin, S. A. Tsvetkov, V. S. Andreev, S. V. Vakarin. The Influence of Conducting Solid Electrolytes | Proceedings ICCF-4, December 6-9, 1993, Lahaina, Hawaii, EPRI, Palo Alto, California, Vol. 3; Nuclear Measurements Papers, pp. 5−1 ÷ 5−7.

9. Samgin AL, Finodeyev O., Tsvetkov SA, Andreev VS, Khokhlov VA, Filatov ES, Murygin IV, Gorelov VP, Vakarin SV; 5th International Conference on Cold Fusion, April 9–13, 1995, Monte-Carlo, Monaco, pp. 201-208.

10. S. V. Vakarin, A.L. Samgin, V.S. Andreev, and S.A. Tsvetkov. Influence of sodium chloride tungsten per crystals of the International Conference on Cold Fusion, April 9–13, 1995, Monte-Carlo, Monaco, pp. 227-232.

11. V.A. Khokhlov, E.S. Filatov, A.L. Samgin, V.S. Andreev, S.A. Tsvetkov, A.V. Cherepanov, O. Finodeev. Thermal Effects on the Pd-anode at the saturation of the electrolytic or hydrogen in molten salts // Cold nuclear fusion. Materials 2 Russian conferences on cold fusion and transmutations of the nucleus, Sochi, September, 19−23, 1994, Moscow, RFO, 1995, pp. 117–122.

12. Tsvetkov SA, “Cold Nuclear Fusion Initiatives”, Russian Federation Conference on Cold Fusion , 1996, pp. 281−294.

There have been publications on the interaction with laser radiation. There have been attempts to participate in international conferences. I want to draw attention to the fact that in 1995, when I had the opportunity to go to Monte Carlo to the 5th International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF-5), we began a correspondence with Martin Fleischmann. In the letter below, he sends me his regards and informs me that they will take over the financing of my trip to ICCF-5. So we met him in absentia.

Fig. 15. Sergey Tsvetkov’s invitation to ICCF-5 with best wishes from Martin Fleischmann dated February 20, 1995.

I can say that from the very beginning we carried out all control experiments with hydrogen very carefully. In the first paper of 1989, we saturated titanium with hydrogen. Excess heat was obtained, but we did not register any nuclear products — neither neutrons, nor gamma radiation. And so we switched to deuterium. On deuterium, the heat additive compared to hydrogen was very large. If hydrogen is a matter of watts, then deuterium is dozens of watts, and today there is a kilowatt of excess heat on titanium.

Stages of development and organization with which I had to work since 1989:

Year Organization
1989-1993 SFNIKIET
1990−1992 Small enterprise SORUS
1993−1995 IHTEC UD RAS, ENECOUSA
1996 JINR
1997 IPE UrB RAS
1994–2015 RFBR
1997−2017 Rospatent
2000–2001 HCF
2003−2006 IHTEC UrD RAS
2007 RUSNANO, Russian innovations
2007–2009 GFEN, China
2012-2015 AEE AG GmbH, Germany
2012- … Euro patent 2013 European Commission on Energy
2014 NationalInstruments, USA
2014 AREVA, France
2015 AIRBUS Group
2015−2017 UrFU
2017 JSC Russian Railways
2018 ARPA-E, USA
2018 Deneum, Estonia

There are small enterprises and institutes of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and the Russian Academy of Sciences. The RFBR (Russian Foundation for Basic Research) is a separate entity. They said that it was necessary to somehow resolve the issue of financing cold fusion research. I can say that I have a unique “achievement” in relations with the RFBR on this issue. From 1994 to 2015, I submitted 30 applications to the Russian Foundation for Basic Research for grants for research on cold nuclear fusion. The only success was received in 2007 under a Russian-Chinese grant, for which we submitted a joint application with Professor Xing Zhong Li from China. He received a grant, but they did not give me one. Professor Li spent three years on this grant, which was associated with the diffusion of deuterium in palladium.

* * *

Comment REGNUM

It turns out an interesting situation: China, Japan, India, South Korea, Italy, the USA, etc. Cold fusion research is needed for solving strategic civil and military tasks, and therefore they finance these works from their scientific and military state budgets, like when in the USSR, and in post-Soviet Russia, especially after the death of Academician A.N. Baraboshkin, for some reason they became absolutely unnecessary and turned into pseudoscience. What does this mean? The question for over 20 years remains unanswered.

* * *

I have not previously said that we performed the molecular dynamics calculation work on the behavior of deuterium in palladium, which also considered phase transitions between the alpha and beta phases in palladium deuteride. If titanium deuteride has three phases, between which there are two interphase transitions, then palladium has only one phase transition between alpha and beta phases. Therefore, the presence of three phases in titanium deuteride suggests that the process in titanium should go better. So it turned out.

Titanium has shown itself to be much better in energy than palladium: in reactors with deuterated titanium, tens and hundreds of watts of excess heat per gram are produced today, while in installations with palladium, milliwatts are still obtained, as in the days of Fleischmann and Pons.

In 2013, at a meeting of the European Commission on Energy, at which prospects for the industrial introduction of cold nuclear fusion installations were discussed, a report was made on the basis of a report by economists from Gazprombank on the use of palladium reactors:

“There is certainly excess heat when using a technological scheme with palladium, but it is too little to create promising power plants. Give us so much heat to steam the turbine, and then we will give you the money. ”

However, despite this conclusion, as Italian physicist Vittorio Violante from the Italian National Atomic Energy Agency (ENEA) told me later, in the same 2013 he received a € 0.5 million grant from the European Commission for his work with palladium, which he worked from 2013 to 2015.

* * *

Vladimir Tsaryov

I would also like to tell about those people who participated from the very beginning in cold fusion research in the USSR and the Russian Federation and with whom I was personally acquainted. The first of them is the head of the department of the Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. P. N. Lebedeva, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics Vladimir Aleksandrovich Tsarev.

Fig. 16. U-turn of the author’s copy of the article in V. Tsarev, Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk Physics Sciences, “Abnormal nuclear effects in a solid body (” cold fusion “). Questions still remain,” published in 1992, with a photo and autograph of the author.

He started very well, was interested in cold fusion and managed to publish, in my opinion, two or three very large solid reviews on cold fusion, about what directions there are, how they are developing. I advise everyone to get acquainted with these fundamental reviews, which describe in detail how it all began. We met at a meeting of the chemistry department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and he gave me his copyright copy of one of these reviews and wrote:

“Someday we laugh at this ?! Or maybe not!”

Fig. 17. The authors of the first open Soviet study on cold nuclear fusion; Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences B. V. Deryagin and Candidate of Chemical Sciences A. G. Lipson.

I want to pay special attention to the work of the group of Academician Boris Vladimirovich Deryagin. Under his leadership was defended the only candidate dissertation on the study of cold nuclear fusion. Its author, Andrey G. Lipson, is called “Electrophysical Processes on Freshly Produced Surfaces of Solids”, defended in 1986, three years before the press conference of Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons.

Fig. 18. The cover of the author’s abstract of the Ph.D. thesis of A. G. Lipson “Electrophysical processes on a freshly formed surface of solids”, protected under the supervision of Academician B. V. Deryagin in 1986.

fuIn the experiments of Boris Deryagin and Andrei Lipson with the help of a copper hammer, they used to pick up “heavy” (deuterated) ice (D2O) and at the same time get high-energy electrons and neutrons. As far as I know, this is the only dissertation on cold fusion that has been defended in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia. I also tried twice to start writing dissertations on cold fusion in the Russian Academy of Sciences, but both times it ended at the stage of agreeing on the topic and approving it at the scientific council of the institute.

Unfortunately, Andrei Lipson died early. He and I, at the 7th International Conference on Cold Synthesis in Vancouver in 1998, prepared a report on the necessary conditions for the implementation of cold nuclear fusion. It was assumed that in the interaction with deuterium phase transitions should take place in the solid, and the surface of the solid should be very large. An optimal time for the implementation of a phase transition in deuterium-solid body systems is necessary, that is, in addition to saturation, it should go at a certain speed. If the saturation goes too slowly, then we do not register the products of the nuclear fusion reaction and we cannot say that nuclear fusion occurs at all. At a certain rate of saturation, nuclear fusion products are recorded. We noticed this moment in the first experiment – the background of neutrons in a solid is necessary. This idea was practiced by Andrei Lipson, he had many such works. He worked on KD (2) PdO (4) – in such a complex system. And in the end, he received excess neutrons when a small source of neutrons was placed next to this system. He supplied deuterium there, heated the sample, and neutrons of very large values ​​were recorded.

The presence of oxygen in the “deuterium-solid” systems is also necessary. This condition is required. In our first papers, we noticed that if you add some air to deuterium, then the neutron yield increases dramatically 300 times.

In 1997, I patented a method for obtaining a nuclear fusion reaction with the addition of air to deuterium and in 2000 received a Russian patent. Here we are talking about a specific method of obtaining nuclear fusion using titanium.

* * *

Andrea Rossi

Separately, I would like to tell you about the famous Italian Andrea Rossi, whom I managed to meet in 2012 in Zurich. In Fig. 19 Andrea Rossi gives me an autograph on his patent application for cold fusion. We then corresponded with him. He knows and remembers me.

Fig. 19. Andrea Rosii signs on a copy of his patent, presented to Sergey Tsvetkov.

It so happened that the famous Italian nuclear physicist Professor Sergio Focardi separated from another famous Italian physicist, Professor Francesco Piantelli, and began to independently engage in cold fusion research in the mid-1990s, and in the early 2000s Andrea Rossi joined Foccardi, and they made an operating device for obtaining excess heat in the interaction of hydrogen with nickel. It was demonstrated by them at the University of Bologna in Italy in January 2011.

At first they had a small reactor, then they created a megawatt heat generator in which 132 reactors of small reactors were combined. Hydrogen was supplied to nickel, and water was pumped outside, which removed heat and reached the boiling point and even higher – up to 102–103 ° C. This water then gave out 1 MW of thermal energy due to hydrogen-nickel reactions. Rossi then used gaseous hydrogen. His reactor worked at low parameters, that is, the temperature of the powder that was loaded into the reactor reached only 300–400 ° C.

Then the results of Focardi and Rossi were repeated by researchers elsewhere in the world. After a repetition of experiments such as in Switzerland by a group, by Giuseppe Levi, by Alexander Parkhomov in Russia, carefully read the reports and repeated their work. Remarkably, the person did not like most: they ran “over the tops”, concluded that this could not be, because this could never be. No, he understood the details, successfully reproduced the result and now he is constantly improving the operating parameters of his reactor.

* * *

Cold Fusion – Dual Purpose Technology

In 2009, the report of the US Department of Defense Intelligence Agency “Technology Forecast: Increasing and Gaining Acceptance” was presented on the state of technology for obtaining cold nuclear fusion reactions in various countries around the world. This was not a secret report.

Naturally, the question arose of what is true in this report and what is disinformation. In particular, this report contained the following phrase regarding one of my work on the processing of radioactive waste:

“If nuclear particles can be obtained and elements can be converted using them, then low-energy nuclear reactions can be used to reduce the risk of nuclear waste or to neutralize weapons of mass destruction? 48”

Link 48 points to my work: Tsvetkov, S.A. “Waste Products Transmutation for Nuclear Fusion”, 10th International Conference on Cold Fusion, Cambridge, MA, 2003, [.pdf] from LENR-CANR.org website.

This paper was published in 2006 in the proceedings of the 10th International Conference (ICCF-10), which Peter Hagelstein organized at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I had to make several reports there, and it was one of them, which was called “The possibility of using cold fusion for the transmutation of nuclear waste”. It considered the processing of nuclear waste using fast reactors in the cross section for the interaction of neutrons with cesium and strontium. I considered only two of these radioactive isotopes from the entire spectrum of nuclear waste. On the basis of my experimental data on the number of neutrons registered at cold fusion reactors, I calculated the time for “burning out” radioactive waste and compared it with similar parameters that were obtained in fast neutron reactors. It turned out that for the afterburning of nuclear waste, cold fusion neutrons are more profitable and more convenient to use than fast neutron reactors.

In connection with the report of the intelligence agency of the US Department of Defense, I had a question: why do our military show strange indifference to research on cold nuclear fusion? Perhaps one of the reasons for this situation is precisely the fact that cold fusion neutrons can destroy atomic and hydrogen bombs by transmuting the nuclei of fissile material, making atomic bombs and missile warheads inoperable, in fact disarming the strategic forces of the nuclear powers. This feature makes missile defense unnecessary, deprives the military itself of the huge amount of money they now spend on outdated devices that play the role of scenery in the actions of intimidation of humanity and do not bring any tangible benefit, wasting time and energy, to eventually turn into in the sand.

It is quite obvious that on the Titanium-Deuterium system and its ilk, it is easy to make “hand-grenades” to disable bombs and warheads of missiles. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why our military does not really want to develop cold nuclear fusion, which, however, cannot be said about the American military – just look at the latest US government reports on military research and development in the field of cold fusion.

* * *

Vladimir Balakirev

For many years I have been cooperating with Vladimir Fedorovich Balakirev, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Some time after the appearance of the report by the US Defense Secretary, Vladimir Fedorovich received a letter from the Committee on Energy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation, in which he was officially asked to express his opinion on this report, as well as on research on cold fusion in general. The American report stated that there are promising results on cold fusion, everything is fine. And while government funding is not worth it, they say, let the business invest in this area first, and we will see what happens.

Comment REGNUM

Today we know that the situation around cold fusion after the Fleischmann and Pons conference developed from the mid-1990s according to the traditional US scenario: first, risky, high-cost research and breakthrough high-tech developments are implemented with state money, and then a play of their privatization under the guise of living embodiments American dreams such as Bill Gates, Ilon Musk and the like. According to this scheme, military IT-development, pharmaceutical, space, etc. were privatized. Today, the USA does not hide that for the past 25 years the Pentagon, the US Navy, DARPA, the space agency and the largest aviation American corporations have funded work in the field of cold fusion (see for example, a report that is frightening in its frankness (United States Government LENR Energy 2018).

* * *

Vladimir Balakirev wrote a response for the State Duma, in which he argued, and in this I fully support him, that cold nuclear fusion or low-energy nuclear reactions “are fundamental in their essence and are able to lead humanity into a new orbit of existence.”

Fig. 20. Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, State Prize Laureate Vladimir Balakirev.

The letter to the State Duma also listed promising areas for the use of cold fusion, such as:

– obtaining cheap, environmentally friendly thermal and electrical energy;

– single-wire and wireless transmission of electromagnetic energy;

– obtaining all chemical elements and scarce isotopes;

– the use of “strange” radiation;

– obtaining sources of highly targeted x-ray radiation (x-ray lasers).

V.F. Balakirev’s letter to the State Duma on cold fusion is actually only part of a huge correspondence between the Russian government, the Ministry of Defense, the State Duma and the Russian Academy of Sciences with scientists and each other in connection with the publication of the US Department of Defense report on cold fusion. We wrote letters, in response we received answers from the Russian Academy of Sciences, from the Ministry of Defense. The low level of scientific reasoning used by opponents of cold fusion in this correspondence, the obvious commitment of their assessments, combined with the lack of knowledge of the works mentioned in the American report, are worthy of analysis in a separate publication. Their position is unshakable: cold fusion is pseudoscience, the report of the US Defense Department is disinformation, the purpose of which is to direct our weakened intellectual forces along the wrong path.

Before our conference, I met with VF Balakirev. He cannot come from Yekaterinburg, but he said hello to all the participants and signs our welcoming address to colleagues from the USA.

* * *

On the attempt to create a laboratory in the Ural Federal University

Then I started in my alma mater, the Ural Federal University (UFU), organizing seminars on cold fusion. Here is the protocol of one of the seminars at the Department of Technical Physics, in which it is stated that the specialists and the management of the department support this area and talk about the need for public funding.

Fig. 21. Extract from the minutes of the scientific seminar of the Department of Technical Physics from May 25, 2011 on the topic “Single-nuclear nuclear reactions”.

In 2015, the seminars developed into the idea of organizing a laboratory on low-energy nuclear reactions at the Faculty of Physics and Technology of Ural Federal University.

Fig. 22. Title of the presentation of the grant application for the development program of the Ural Federal University.

The head of the laboratory was to be the doctor of physical and mathematical sciences B. V. Shulgin. To organize the laboratory, we applied for projects to receive grants for the development of the university several times. The idea of ​​creating the laboratory was actively supported by the famous theoretical physicist from the Massachusetts University of Technology Peter Hagelstein, who today, March 23, 2019, should open a memorial colloquium for the 30th anniversary of cold fusion in Cambridge in a few hours. Hagelstein gave official consent to become a laboratory supervisor and work in UrFU for at least four months a year.

Then from Yashuhiro Iwamura, a professor at Tohoku University from Japan, who heads the Japanese cold fusion program (NEDO), I also received support for the idea of ​​creating a laboratory in UrFU.

Fig. 23. Famous foreign scientists who supported the idea of ​​creating a cold fusion laboratory in Ural Federal University: left MIT professor Peter Hagelstein and head of the Japanese state program NEDO cold fusion professor at Tohoku University Yashuhiro Iwamura.

European wanderings

In 2012, I managed to get to Nuremberg and organize a laboratory there.

Fig. 25. General view of the laboratory in Nuremberg, Germany, 2012.

I made a new reactor, which used small titanium samples.

Fig. 26. On the left – reactor diagram on the right, in the center – a general view of the reactor, on the right – a working sample.

Collected a new installation. For three years, 62 experiments have been done. The results obtained not only confirmed, but also significantly surpassed the results of previous studies on the titanium – deuterium scheme. An application for registration of a European patent was filed and filed in 2012.

Fig. 27. Application for European patent on the method and device of cold fusion operating on deuterated titanium, from 2012.

It is under review. Twice we were offered to close it and cancel it. But we persist in writing objections. They take time to consider these objections, conduct a new examination and again send us another refusal. But since last year a breakthrough began in the world in issuing various patents on cold fusion, the United States began to officially register patents on cold fusion reactors, I hope that we will “finish off” the European Patent Office and get a patent. Because the Russian patent, which I received in 1997, ended its action in 2017. And the European patent is its continuation.

What results were obtained on this installation? The graph of temperature changes in Fig. 28 shows an abrupt change in the temperature of the sample when the temperature from 590 ° C soars above 1120 ° C when deuterium is injected.

Fig. 28. Temperature change of the sample (6.9 g) with the supply of D2 + 2% air 13.11.2012.

In Fig. 29 shows the change in the pulse counting of the neutron detector. Here you can see the moment of the beginning of the nuclear process and it is clear that at this time the neutron yield is much larger than at the moment of the start of the overlap. The neutron count maximum corresponds to the moment of the second maximum in temperature in Fig. thirty.


Fig. 29. The change in the counting of neutron pulses at the start-up of D2 on sample No. 211.11.2012.

Fig. 30. Sample temperature at titanium deuterium loading 09/14/2015.

I believe that the temperature curve, which is indicated in Fig. 30 in green, is the result of two processes of heat. The first process, shown in blue, is due to the low energy of heat dissipation of the physico-chemical process of formation of titanium deuteride. The formation of titanium deteride gives us Q1 = 84.83 kJ of heat. At the moment of deuterium loading, the second process of releasing additional heat begins, which is Qizb in duration and in magnitude. = 568.25 kJ, and it significantly exceeds the process of hydride formation. It is the second process that is nuclear, that is, its heat is generated due to nuclear processes.

It is possible to determine the amount of deuterium absorbed by changing the pressure of deuterium, which turned out to be equal to 0.4263 g. And for the excess heat of 568 kJ, which is formed as a result of this process, only 5 · 10-6 g of deuterium is needed. This amount of deuterium in relation to the total amount of absorbed deuterium is 1.17 · 10-5 shares. That is, by the amount of released heat there is still a large supply of unused deuterium. This whole process takes only 40–50 minutes. The amount of energy that we spend on absorption in relation to all the heat released is obtained:

(Qizb. + Q1) / Q1 = 7.70

That is, it turns out that only one millionth of the absorbed deuterium is used to obtain the observed excess heat. There is an opportunity to increase this share.

There is one more interesting point to which attention should be paid in these studies. According to calculations, the excess heat that should have been released in these reactions should give the intensity of the neutron source:

Neutron = 3.86 × 10^5 neutron / sec.

But we register:

Ireg = 180 neutron / sec

This is 1869.5 times less than it should be according to calculations. How to explain it?

It is possible that most neutrons are simply absorbed inside the titanium sample, which gives us excess heat. Neutrons remain in the sample and structural materials of the reactor, and only some of them fly out, reach the neutron detector and register with the detector. I have at the moment such a working explanation of all this.

Further in these works secondary signs of cold nuclear fusion were discovered. I have already mentioned that 62 experiments were carried out in Nuremberg. During work we had a break for 4.5 months. At this time, a Geiger counter was left next to the installation, which measured the background inside the room where the installation was located. It turned out that the gamma background around the setup decreased, as can be seen in Fig. 31.

Fig. 31. Change in the pulse count of Gamma Scout from 13.11.2013 to 26.03.2014.

When we made saturation, we managed to increase the gamma background by 6−9%, and here it decreases. And it is clear that it falls off exponentially. And the exhibitor indicates that the process is related to the processes of nuclear decay. There is a scatter of points on the graph, but 6% from the top to the bottom value is nowhere to go – the background has decreased. I calculated the time of effective half-life, and it turned out:

What can disintegrate in the installation? This may be a complex of some elements – this is not one isotope.

Further, when the sample was heated, such an interesting feature was noticed as the change in the power of the external heater.

Fig. 32. Change heater power

The external heater has a certain capacity and heats the sample to 590 ° C. But when deuterium is injected, then a large energy release from the sample begins, and the power of the heater increases. How does it increase? Due to the fact that the temperature of the heater itself and its resistance increase. We used a power source that worked in the mode of maintaining a constant load current, and at the same time the temperature of this heater from an additional heat source increased. Accordingly, the resistance of the heater increases, which leads to a change in the power of the heater, according to my calculations, by 0.64 watts in 43 seconds. This is a fairly sensitive value. Therefore, I had an idea to use this effect to measure the heat from the sample during its saturation with deuterium and degassing. If you calibrate the external heater and install a constant current source, you can measure the amount of heat released from our sample without a Peltier calorimeter or a flow calorimeter.

In the same Nuremberg cycle of experiments, another very interesting mode of continuous release of excess heat was discovered, which I called self-oscillatory. In this mode, the titanium deuteride begins to absorb and release deuterium with a frequency of 0.33 Hz.

In Fig. 33 shows the preparatory steps for starting the system by turning the external heater on and off. The system swayed in this way, before it went into self-oscillatory mode. The sample was completely saturated with deuterium, and then I turned off and turned on the heater. And such a self-oscillating mode can last up to four hours.

Fig. 33. The appearance of the auto-oscillation mode with a frequency of 0.33 Hz on the pressure graph is circled in red.

According to calculations, an excess heat of 360 Watts per 7 g of titanium was obtained. If you count it on a 100-gram sample, you get an excess heat source of about 7 kW. The energy intensity of such a heat source will be 52.2 W / g of titanium, which is higher than the energy release of the WWR-1000 reactor, for which it is 45.5 W / g of uranium. That is, this is a significant heat release that can be converted and used as heat or as electricity.

* * *

In the summer of 2018 in Estonia, I managed to create a new installation (Fig. 34), at which at the maximum an excess heat emission of 500 watts from a titanium sample weighing 35.7 grams was obtained. I started scaling the effect. The result was 12.26 W / g of titanium – this is 4.7 times higher than in the first experiments. It turns out that the amount of heat generated by increasing the mass of the working sample also increases. At this facility, I achieved a process in which there is a constant heat release, while the heat release increases over time. Without adding anything, without touching anything, the system itself enters the self-oscillatory mode when it starts to generate heat.

Fig. 34. Ninth experimental setup cold fusion. Estonia, 2018.

On cold nuclear fusion mechanisms

A few words about the mechanisms of cold nuclear fusion. I found the expression of Albert Einstein, made by him in 1932:

“There is no reason to assume that nuclear energy will ever be obtained. Because for this it is necessary to be able to separate the atoms.”(highlighted by me – S.T.)

Actually, a system of solids (in our case, titanium) and deuterium allows us to separate hydrogen molecules into atoms. This separation mechanism works on the surface, more precisely, the surface works here. The process of titanium saturation with deuterium is carried out in such a way that at first deuterium is adsorbed on the surface, is divided into individual atoms, and individual atoms can penetrate into the titanium lattice. The size of the crystal lattice of titanium is such that the deuterium molecule cannot pass inside. Only if we divide it into individual atoms, then the deuterium in the atomic state quietly passes inside the lattice.

Based on my long research experience, it is possible to formulate the main components of the cold nuclear fusion realization mechanism in titanium:

1. The separation of hydrogen molecules into atoms.

2. Transformation of the energy of individual atoms using heavier atoms.

3. Maxwell distribution of atoms by energy.

4. The effect of the collider.

5. Van der Waals forces.

6. Tunneling.

7. Primary products of high energy cold nuclear fusion.

8. Siverts law.

Explanations for item 7. The first products that are obtained as a result of the d + d reaction, tritium, proton, helium-3 and neutron, have very large energies, MeV! Large energies give a very large cross section for the reaction of the interaction of reaction products with each other. I believe that the resulting neutrons, helium-3, tritium and protons interact with each other with the development of the same tritium and helium-4. A cascade of nuclear reactions is launched, which leads to the production of tritium in much larger quantities than neutrons are obtained, and this is what we register. That is, neutrons, in addition to the energy return to the titanium lattice, are also involved in the formation of tritium. At the same time, helium-3 still adds protons to these reactions; therefore, such an imbalance of the amount of products in these nuclear reactions is observed. As a result of a cascade of nuclear fusion reactions, helium-4 is formed. Thus, helium-4 is not the primary product of the d + d reaction, but secondary, which is created as a result of the implementation of a cascade of nuclear reactions of high-energy products of the initial d + d reactions. That is my understanding of the process today.

* * *

Prospects for cold fusion

It is impossible to tell in detail about all aspects and directions of development that arise in the process of studying this amazing phenomenon of cold nuclear fusion. You can only identify the main directions, each of which requires a serious and lengthy discussion. At the moment I would highlight the following areas:

1. Getting heat and electricity.

2. Processing of nuclear waste from nuclear power plants and other industries.

3. Synthesis of tritium is much cheaper in cost than currently available in nuclear reactors.

4. Synthesis of precious metals and rare isotopes.

5. Getting oxygen from carbon dioxide.

6. Creating a gamma laser.

7. Space, aviation, auto and railway engines using technology.

No one wants to waste time today on understanding the mechanisms of cold fusion, although logic suggests that there was first a fusion of the elements, and now we use them using fission reactions or simply burning fossil fuels. Humanity is vital to the transition to nature-like, cyclical technologies that will meet the needs of people without disturbing the natural balance and gyres. The key technology in this transition today is the cold fusion technology of cold transmutation of nuclei. The transition to new nuclear technologies allows solving simultaneously the main energy, resource and environmental global problems.

Cold nuclear fusion is the gift of the Creator. Sin is not to take advantage of this. We must learn to use it.

By Sergey Tsvetkov

This is a re-post of a google-translated article by Sergey Tsvetkov published April 8, 2019 at REGNUM https://regnum.ru/news/2606951.html. Any use of materials is allowed only if there is a hyperlink to REGNUM news agency.

Today is F-Day!

On May 8, 1989, the Electrochemical Society held their spring meeting in Los Angeles amid the frenzied controversy of the cold fusion announcement, and declared it F-Day!

This was on the heels of the 1989 American Physical Society meeting that began May 1 in Baltimore, where disgruntled physicists who failed to replicate the findings gathered together to congratulate each other for saving science from amateurs. After all, they knew nuclear theory, and chemists did not. Some of the biggest insults hurled by the mainstream physicists came from scientists with the MIT Plasma Fusion Laboratory and Caltech.

Electrochemist Nathan Lewis was from Caltech and claimed to have seen no effect. As it turned out, his experiment was woefully marred. [See Examples of Isoperibolic Calorimetry in the Cold Fusion Controversy by Melvin H. Miles J. Condensed Matter Nucl. Sci. 13 (2014) 392–400] Still, Dr. Lewis showed solidarity with physicists by claiming “that their device “violates the first law of thermodynamics,” that is, the conservation of energy or, as is often said, “the universe offers no free lunch”.

That’s how Eugene Mallove tells it in his Pulitzer Prize-nominated book Fire from Ice Searching for the Truth Behind the Cold Fusion Furor.

I’ve seen Youtube video of him frothing at the mouth while angrily asserting that Drs. Fleischmann and Pons had not “stirred their cells” properly.

Physicist Steve Koonin, a colleague of Nathan Lewis’s at Caltech, as well as future BP Oil exec and Department of Energy Secretary, said, “If fusion were taking place, we would see radiation in one form or another, and you would simply not be able to hide that radiation.”

Of course, this is what makes cold fusion/LENR so attractive. Not only do we get fusion-sized energy from tiny table-top cells that use a fuel of water, the heat energy is derived from a new type of reaction that generates no deadly radiation, as well as no CO2! Oh, Steve.

Eugene Mallove writes in his book Fire From Ice:

“…that Dr. Koonin also told New York Times reporter Malcolm Browne at the time of the meeting, “It’s all very well to theorize about how cold fusion in a palladium cathode might take place … one could also theorize about how pigs would behave if they had wings. But pigs don’t have wings.”

Nathan Lewis (L), Steve Koonin (Middle), and Charles Barnes (R) of Caltech. Usurping the scientific process, and believing a 100-year-old theory over the experimental facts, these three men helped to close down research on what could have been clean fusion energy technology. Photo: Interview with Charles Barnes Caltech Oral Histories

Dr. Steve Koonin further disgraced himself for all historical time by saying “My conclusion is that the experiments are just wrong and that we are suffering from the incompetence and delusion of Doctors Pons and Fleischmann.”

While the Baltimore meeting allowed physicists to vent their failures with misery as company, the lowest point for the American Physical Society was reached when Dr. Steve Jones from Brigham-Young University led a panel at a news conference. Steve Jones, of course, the very reason why the March 23, 1989 news conference was held in the first place.

It was after five years of research that Drs. Fleischmann and Pons decided to get funding for their experiments. The US Department of Energy gave their proposal to Dr. Steve Jones for review. Dr. Jones had been previously working on a different kind of muon-catalyzed fusion, but had given it up for lack of results. (He claimed to get neutrons, though no one has ever reproduced his results.)

When Jones saw what the pair from University of Utah were up to, he was excited enough to jump back in, and he contacted Drs. Fleischmann and Pons – not a normal procedure in the application process – to invite them down for a visit to see his neutron detector. In the end of February 1989, while they visited, Steve Jones told Drs. Fleischmann and Pons that he would be announcing his own form of “cold fusion” in May, but, if they wanted to publish papers at the same time, he would be willing to do that.

Huh? Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons wanted nothing more than to get their funding and keep working, but upon arriving back at the University of Utah, administrators and lawyers were fearful of losing the “first place” of announcing this new kind of energy-producing experiment. The two electrochemists were prodded into making the news conference announcement anyway, beating Jones’ own announcement.

At the Baltimore meeting of physicists, Dr. Jones, perhaps still sore from being one-upped on his one-up, made poor scientific judgement by polling with a show of hands in order to determine whether cold fusion was dead, as documented by Steven Krivit on his website.

Eugene Mallove wrote in Fire From Ice:

Finally, “science by press conference” occurred again, degenerating even further into “science by poll.” At a news conference on the second day of the Baltimore cold fusion fest, Steve Jones asked for an impromptu “straw poll.” He asked nine of the session’s leading speakers whether they were at least 95 percent confident that the University of Utah claim to have generated heat by fusion could be ruled out. Eight answered “yes” and one, Rafelski, Jones’s colleague, wisely withheld judgment. Rafelski commented, “This should not be taken as the matter is settled.” However, Yale physicist Moshe Gai said of his group’s work, “Our results exclude without any doubt the Pons and Fleischmann results.” The panel voted more favorably on whether the claim that neutrons were being seen in a number of cold fusion experiments could be ruled out—three of nine kept an open mind.”

May 2, 1989 Physicist Steve Jones takes a vote on whether or cold fusion is “dead”. Photo: New Energy Times if you can’t tell.

To have the top physicists in the country ridiculing the scientific process with such ugly outrage showed weak stature in scientific thinking, but these physicists were successful in having the tide turn against Drs. Fleischmann and Pons’ work. Their excess heat effects were now completely suspect.

Thus, when the May 8 meeting of the Electrochemical Society began, electrochemist Dr. Nathan Lewis of Caltech was confident in his superior knowledge. Nevertheless, there were 1600 attendees who were less assured.

From Fire and Ice, we get a list of positive results being reported from very competent and open-minded scientists. Eugene Mallove writes:

Everyone was awaiting May 8, when at the special cold fusion session of the Electrochemical Society spring meeting in Los Angeles, Fleischmann and Pons were supposed to present a “thorough, clean analysis” of the thermal aspects of their experiment. Pons told Jacobsen- Wells of the Deseret News, “We are going to supply all the information that we can. People evidently are misunderstanding a lot about calorimetry. A lot of people are making calorimetric measurements with instruments that may not be suitable for these experiments.”

The meeting began with controversy over the relative absence of critical scientists; had it been arranged to be a celebration of only positive results? Lewis of Caltech was present at least as a token skeptic. As he had done in Baltimore, he proclaimed his numerous permutations and combinations of materials and conditions, all of which had failed to show excess power or nuclear products. “I’d be happy to say this is fusion as soon as somebody shows that it is,” a self-assured Lewis told the 1,600 assembled. Fleischmann and Pons were having no trouble. Now they were claiming to get bursts of heat lasting a few days up to 50 times the power input to their cell—the claim was even more extreme than before! Was this a tip-off that they were really onto something, or that they had completely gone off the deep end? To rebut Lewis, they showed a brief film clip of a bubbling cell in which they had injected red dye. Within 20 seconds the dye had spread uniformly through the cell, intuitively giving the lie to Lewis’s accusation about improper stirring.

Concerning their neutron results, Fleischmann and Pons backed off a bit, acknowledging reluctantly that their measurements were deficient and were the “least satisfactory” part of their research. They said that they would rerun their experiment with a new detector. More disturbing was their withholding of the long-awaited and promised 4He measurements. There was an emerging feeling (not necessarily a correct one) that if there were no copious neutrons, there had to be helium-4 to make the claim for a nuclear process. The Fleischmann-Pons rods were being analyzed for helium by Johnson-Matthey Corporation, the 170-year-old British precious metals supplier, under an agreement of exclusivity with the company. This was the presumed reason for the turning down of many other offers to do the rod “autopsy.” Fleischmann had admitted at the meeting that if no helium were to turn up, “it would eliminate a very strong part of our understanding of the experiment.”

Bockris from Texas A&M, Huggins from Stanford, and Uziel Landau from Case Western all backed up the Utah duo with positive heat measurements. At a press conference Huggins said, “… It’s fair to say that something very unusual and large is happening. There is conclusive evidence there is a lot of heat generated here—much larger than the proposed chemical reactions that people suggest might be happening.” A thinly veiled criticism of physicists by a Society official, Dr. Bruce Deal, drew applause: “Unlike other societies, we do not attempt to solve complex technical problems by a show of hands.” But not every electrochemist left the meeting convinced. The experiments were subtle, apparently difficult to reproduce consistently, and of course totally unexplained. Steve Jones again reiterated his faith in his neutrons and disbelief on the question of heat—at least in cold fusion cells. Cold fusion might still be partly responsible, he thought, for the hellish conditions inside the planet.

Soon cold fusion would face increasingly acid opposition. Martin Deutsch, professor of physics emeritus at MIT had told Science News, “In one word, it’s garbage.” (Science News, Vol. 135, May 6, 1989.) Some media had essentially written it off. Scientists who had genuinely tried to make cold fusion happen, but who for reasons still not clear could not coax their cells into working, would be joining the ranks of the opposition. They were frustrated and mad. They had wasted precious research time chasing rainbows. Enough was enough! Time to move on.

But those who believed in the tantalizing results of some experiments would not be stilled. Others who were bold enough to theorize about fantastic mechanisms to explain cold fusion did not give up either. They persevered, egged on by the serious critics.

If people were having trouble finding neutrons, perhaps the mysterious “cold fusion” was a kind of nuclear reaction that was largely neutronless—as the MIT analysis seemed to suggest. As skeptic Petrasso himself would say in January 1990 at a lecture at the PFC, “We may turn out to be the big allies of Fleischmann and Pons if they can now prove that they have fusion, because what we’ve demonstrated now is that they basically didn’t have any neutrons at all coming from their heat-producing cell….So now they can claim that they are having neutronless heat generation.” If this turns out to be true, a mind-boggling technological revolution may be in store for us.

The cover of Time magazine on May 8, 1989. Fusion or Illusion? Two obscure chemists stir up a fascinating controversy in the lab, but new tests challenge their hopes of creating limitless energy By Michael D. Lemonick.

So it was that cold fusion became the “pariah science” despite so many positive results, and the Electrochemical Society proclaimed May 8 to be F-day. While I imagine that means Fusion Day, one could fill in F-day with other words, for though the ugly attitudes have stopped spraying spittle as they emote, the lasting effects of these lost years have yet to be measured.

What would have been different if these physicists had only kept to their scientific oath, to follow a method “consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.

Lucky for us, Caltech, MIT, the Department of Energy, the USPTO – it’s a long list – were not able to stop the research. Today, we are nearing commercially-available technology using condensed matter nuclear science, the field which Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons discovered. It’s 30-years late, but after rolling that long, we can expect an avalanche of announcements that will flip the narrative of failure that mainstream physicists have perpetrated. The failure is their own.

These men who de-railed our future should apologize to Dr. Martin Fleischmann (posthumously) and Dr. Stanley Pons (still underground), and us. The best way would be to urge their colleagues at the current Department of Energy to recognize CMNS science and start funding science research so we can get a technology fast. Or, we can just let them fade away, on the wrong side of history forever.

Get Eugene Mallove’s Fire From Ice from the New Energy Foundation online store here!

The 22 International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science on September 8-13, 2019. Registration now open!

Drs. Fleischmann and Pons at the Capitol

Thirty years ago on April 26, 1989, Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons were in the midst of a barrage of inquiries about their discovery. Visitors to their basement lab on the UU campus were treated to a tour, and came away satisfied. Others elsewhere were setting up cells, and failing to reproduce the excess heat effect the pair had claimed was nuclear in origin.

Excitement and confusion carried the news to the U.S Congress where a hearing would be held. A group representing the University of Utah, including Drs. Fleischmann and Pons, the University President Dr. Chase Peterson, and the Vice-President for Research Dr. James J. Brophy would update the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, and ask for research funding to explore this new effect.

This was documented in the Pulitzer-prize nominated book Fire From Ice Searching for the Truth Behind the Cold Fusion Furor by Eugene F. Mallove which chronicles the early days of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science.

Buy right! Get a copy of Fire from Ice from Eugene Mallove’s Infinite Energy Foundation.

Mallove writes on page 87:

At 9:45 A.A., Room 2318 in the Rayburn House Office Building was packed. Chairman Roe in his prefacing remarks held up the promise of a golden age: ” Today, we may be poised on the threshold of a new era. It is possible that we may be witnessing the cold fusion revolution, so to speak. If so, Man will be unshackled from his dependence on finite energy resources.” The ranking Republican member of the Committee Robert Walker of Pennsylvania, sang the tune of small science, which Pons and Fleischmann had come to personify: “If this discover is fully proven, it will show once again the importance of supporting a vigorous small science enterprise in this period of large engineering and science projects… If the initial results are verified, it is essential that we do everything we can do to develop the promise of cold fusion.” He chilled the hot fusion scientist who were present: “I was pleased that the committee’s Energy Research and Development Subcommittee accepted my amendment during its April 6 markup authorizing that $5 million be redirected from the Magnetic Fusion Program in to the basic Energy Science activity, specifically for room temperature fusion.” He said he would move in the direction of upping that to $25 million. These high states were really making the hot fusion people sweat, but despite their skepticism, they could not be absolutely sure that old fusion was a mistake or an artifact – a misinterpretation of something much more prosaic.

Dr. Stanley Pons (L) and Dr. Martin Fleischmann (R) testifying before the House Space, Science, and Technology Committee April 26, 1989.

Congressman Owens introduced Fleischmann and Pons with soaring words: “The event, the possible achievement of solid state fusion, or the so-called cold fusion, is nothing less than a miracle with all the elements of a miracle – surprise, exaltation, disbelief, and skepticism.” Pons led the cold fusion charge and recounted the tale of their amazing discovery. He had brought a mock-up of their experiment to show the congressmen and held forth with technical slides to buttress his case, explaining the science and technology of the special electrochemistry in some detail. He explained the “competition” of two paths for the deuterium – either release as D2 gas bubbles at the palladium rod surface or deep penetration into the palladium. Pons drew a mental picture to prompt association with hot fusion, “… we end up having a low-temperature plasma inside the metal instead of atoms or molecules of deuterium” Palladium can dissolve within its structure a staggering amount of deuterium (or hydrogen) without forming gas bubbles within the lattice. With the palladium lattice, nature supposedly performs a wonder that our most sophisticated technology is incapable of doing otherwise. Pons said, “If you were to try to obtain that same voltage by the compression the hydrogen gas to get that same chemical potential of 0.8 Volts you would have to exert a hydrostatic pressure of a billion, billion, billion atmospheres…” Pons estimated the effective confinement time for the deuterium atoms to be 600 years! Ergo, he and Fleischmann had tamed fusion.

Mallove continued describing Stanley Pons’ experimental conclusions:

….The bottom line: “… the excess heat liberated is of such a magnitude that it cannot be explained by any chemical reaction.” But even more wondrous: “The heat generation continues indefinitely until the cell is turned off….” This time he fully owned up to the mystery of cold fusion: The amount of energy coming out was about a billion times more than could be explained with conventional d-d fusion giving those same measured levels of neutrons and tritium. “So apparently there is another nuclear reaction or another branch of the deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction that heretofore has not been considered, and it is that that we propose is, indeed, the mechanism of the excess heat generation.”

Responding to question about others who reported that they could not reproduce the effect, Eugene Mallove recounts Dr. Fleischmann’s response.

To questions about reproducibility, Fleischmann claimed that many people were setting up cells with dimensions and parameters that—not surprising to him—did not yield excess heat. Just to be sure no one could question their veracity, Pons announced that researchers from Los Alamos would soon be coming to the University of Utah to measure a working cell and would take it back with them for testing (after it was charged up with deuterium). He also said that other groups in the past week had come to the university and had been satisfied with what they saw.

They were supremely confident of their results. Pons told the committee: “For five and a half years I think we were our most severe critics, and we are still as sure as sure can be. We produce our data and we believe what we are seeing.” Fleischmann was only a shade more circumspect: “I do not know how to interpret our results in any other way than that we have observed a fusion phenomenon. So I’m still totally convinced about our work. But naturally, we shall have to look at everybody else’s work as well, including all unsuccessful experiments, and only time will show whether we are correct or not.” Fleischmann based this claim, he said, on adding up the total energy coming out of a typical cell over a period of 100 hours or more. The bottom line: The excess energy per cubic centimeter of material in the palladium electrode (5 megajoules per cubic centimeter; alternatively, 1.4 kilowatt-hours per cc) was over a 100 times “any conceivable chemical reaction in the system.” Fleischmann did not doubt that if the experiment were run 10 times longer, the total excess would be 1,000 times higher than a chemical process.”

Also testifying in support of the claims was Dr. Robert Huggins, a Professor in the Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Mallove writes that at the hearing, Dr. Huggins claimed 14% excess heat with a deuterium cell, while a light-hydrogen cell used as a control produces zero excess heat.

He put the magic conclusion directly up front, “The results that we
have obtained lend credence to the Fleischmann and Pons contention that a significant amount of thermal energy is evolved when deuterium is inserted into palladium, and that this phenomenon is quite different from the behavior of the otherwise analogous hydrogen-palladium system.” Not being experienced in nuclear measurements, however, he had no neutron or other radiation data to give further support to this remarkable result.


Huggins’ group was claiming about 14 percent excess heat in one of the experiments. The excess power generated in the deuterium-containing cell increased continuously, while the power curve of the light water cell remained essentially flat. Huggins concluded that there must be “an appreciable internal heat generation effect in the case of the deuterium-palladium system, regardless of the presence of any chemical or thermal effects in both systems.” The group had observed the phenomenon, he said, in more than one sample, on several occasions, and with different types of calorimeters. Moreover, Huggins asserted, “The magnitudes of the observed effects are comparable to those reported earlier by Fleischmann and Pons and lend strong support to the validity of their results.” Huggins told the panel that the now very puzzling reproducibility problem in his view had to do with the preparation of electrode materials, a theme he would consistently echo in weeks to come. He cautiously avoided a firm conclusion that the phenomenon was a nuclear effect, though he did cite the Walling-Simons theory (the helium-4 production branch of d-d fusion) as a possible explanation.

George H. Miley

Another supporter came in the form of hot fusion scientist and editor of the journal Fusion Technology, Dr. George H. Miley, whose written statement to the Committee included, “I am personally convinced that solid-state catalyzed cold fusion occurs and this is an unexpected

and very important new regime of physics.” In fact, Professor Miley was a “proponent of fusion in any form”

Mallove writes in Fire from Ice:

Miley’s overall message advocated diversity in fusion research—the antithesis of the present direction of the financially strapped hot fusion program. “It’s very important to the research activities of this nation that we have seed money to allow smaller groups to do the exploratory research,” he said. “I’m a lifelong proponent of fusion. It has so many possibilities, that one of the difficulties of the moment is there is no roo for funding for innovative research. Something has to be done.” He was absolutely right.

Of course detractors were at the hearing as well. Dr. Ronald Ballinger, Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology “blasted Drs. Fleischmann and Pons’ “communication”.

Eugene Mallove tells the story of how Dr. Ballinger told the Committee

…that the round-the-clock MIT experimenters had so far been unable to verify any cold fusion claims. “To my knowledge,” he said, “with the possible exception of the people at Stanford [University], and the results from Europe and the USSR, of which I have no personal knowledge, we have not had a single confirmation, scientific confirmation of the reported neutron emissions from the experiment, nor the excess heat. I want to be careful when I say scientifically verified.” He maintained that the MIT radiation detection measurements were at least 10 times more sensitive than the University of Utah measurements yet had found no neutrons. He also claimed that MIT’s calorimetry was also “probably about ten times more sensitive.”* Blasting Fleischmann and Pons’s style of scientific communication, he said, “… the scientific community has been left to attempt to reproduce and verify a major scientific breakthrough while getting its experimental details from The Wall Street Journal and other news publications.” He urged the committee to support verification experiments but not to commit major funds before that process had worked its way through.

As it turned out, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s attempts to reproduce the effect were woefully inadequate.

The MIT Plasma Fusion Center held a Wake for Cold Fusion before their experiments were even finished. Shockingly, they also edited their data, moving temperature readings downward to eliminate any possible signature of excess heat.

The report on the MIT physicists’ malfeasance was documented in MIT and Cold Fusion: A Special Report and prompted Dr. Eugene Malloves resignation from the MIT Science News Office.

A later analysis of both MIT and Caltech’s epic fails was performed by Drs. Melvin Miles and Peter Hagelstein who determined that in both cases, crippling designs and/or procedure damned their results. For details read New analysis of MIT Calorimetric Errors [[.pdf]

See also How Nature refused to re-examine the 1989 CalTech experiment by Jed Rothwell.




Cold fusion research thriving at 30-years young

A report on the 2019 LANR/CF Colloquium at MIT

30-years after Drs. Martin Fleischmann and B. Stanley Pons declared the existence of an unknown type of nuclear reaction occuring between electrolyzed palladium and heavy water, research into understanding the Anomalous Heat Effect has grown into the discipline of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science with experimental results beyond what anyone could have imagined.

Drs. Pons and Fleischmann with cold fusion energy cells in 1989. (Courtesy University of Utah Archives.)

Difficulty in reproducing the experiment caused the topic to be banned from federal funding opportunities and peer-reviewed science journals for the duration of their existence, nevertheless CMNS scientists have documented effects such as fusion-sized excess heat from tiny table-top cells generating no deadly radiation. They have achieved the alchemist’s dream of nuclear transmutation of elements, even finding biological systems that transmute elements. Experiments based on the work of Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons have generated coherent photons, maser-like emissions, and a host of other nuclear phenomenon occurring in solid materials at relatively low-temperatures.

Now, the field that offers so much towards solving humanity’s energy and material woes is starting to get the attention it deserves, and resources are turning towards solving the biggest scientific question of our time and using that knowledge to create a new energy technology that will transform the world.


Read Celebrating 30 Years of Cold Fusion Science: The 2019 CF/LANR Colloquium at MIT [.pdf] by Christy L. Frazier Infinite Energy #145 May/June2019


Robust support and resources boost range of results

The US Department of Energy DoE and the US Patent and Trademark Office USTPO initiated decades of drought for basic CMNS research with a no tolerance policy for anything “cold fusion”, and up until recently, neither agency officially accepted the reality of this reaction. But the USPTO is accepting and approving more small, innovative nuclear reactor designs within the designation called Low temperature nuclear fusion reactors, e.g. alleged cold fusion reactors than ever, despite still battling specific cases.

In the Glossary of Terms, cold fusion is defined by the USPTO as “Nuclear (fusion) reactions taking place at ordinary temperatures”. David French wrote on this designation in 2012, but a new analysis of applications of this type shows shows the number of approvals in this category rising.

This was reported on by former-USPTO Examiner Richard Chan at the 2019 LANR/CF Colloquium at MIT, a two-day meeting held on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over the 30th anniversary of the news briefing by Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons on their discovery.

The event was organized and co-sponsored by Dr. Mitchell Swartz and Gayle Verner of JET Energy, and Dr. Peter Hagelstein of the Research Laboratory for Electronics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Participants were treated to a program that included top CMNS experimentalists and theorists from around the world.

International scientists and longtime original researchers presented a tour-de-force of frontier work in condensed matter nuclear science. Some results had been presented at the 21st International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science ICCF-21 last June, but at the 2019 Colloquium, new developments in theory were heard, and experimental work was more tightly summarized with new positive data from the last year added.

Gayle Verner and Mitchell Swartz of JET Energy and co-organizers of the 2019 LANR/CF Colloquium at MIT. Photo from Celebrating 30 Years of Cold Fusion Science: The 2019 CF/LANR Colloquium at MIT by Christy Frazier Infinite Energy #145.

Colloquium Co-host Dr. Mitchell Swartz began the event with Why CF/LANR is Important and then gave several talks throughout the two-days focused on the engineering aspects of the NANOR, a tiny, reliable, low-wattage unit that is being designed and tested for its commercial potential.

There were short, quick presentations where lessons learned were inventoried at various stages of development.

Two States Characterize and Control Active CF/LANR Systems, D-Line Emission from Active CF/LANR Preloaded NANOR-type Components, Importance of D Flux (Q1D to Motors) and Preloaded NANOR-type components (from teaching components to masers). [See also ICCF-21 video Aqueous and Nanostructured CF/LANR Systems Each Have Two Electrically Driven Modes and ICCF-21 video Personal Experiences During Many Years of LENR Experiments]


Watch Dr. Mitchell Swartz Aqueous and Nanostructured CF/LANR Systems Each Have Two Electrically Driven Modes


Co-host Dr. Peter Hagelstein commemorated the 30-year anniversary by sharing an overview of the problems the announcement cold fusion posed to conventional science with the lecture Physics Issues, Key Experiments and Mechanism, describing some of the key experiments that inform today’s theoretical thinking.


Watch Dr. Peter Hagelstein Physics Issues, Key Experiments and Mechanism


He also talked about PdD and PdH Phase Diagrams. [See also ICCF-21 video Statistical Mechanics Models for the PdHx and PdDx Phase Diagram with both O-site and T-site Occupation]

There was excitement over recent modeling breakthroughs in the excitation transfer ideas, outlined in his lecture Phonon-nuclear coupling, excitation transfer, and applications which have conformed with experimental evidence and

offer a path to modeling the unique release of energy from this newly-discovered nuclear reaction. [See also ICCF-21 video Phonon-Mediated Excitation Transfer Involving Nuclear Excitation]


Watch interview with Dr. Peter Hagelstein at the 2019 LANR/CF Colloquium at MIT


Florian Metzler, who’s working with Dr. Peter Hagelstein at MIT, presented Update on MIT phonon-nuclear coupling experiments describing the process that will confirm the claims. [See also ICCF-21 video Observation of Non-Exponential Decay of X-ray and γ lines from Co-57 on Steel Plates]

But while CMNS experimentalists and theorists were reporting on the state of the field, their very success is riding a wave of attention and funds flowing into research. Concurrent with the increased number of a patent filings in the Low Temperature Nuclear Fusion category, private capital is moving to do what federal funds wouldn’t, securing sections of basic scientific research that are incrementally advancing towards usable technologies in the near- and long-term.

At least four active investors were at the Colloquium getting updates on their projects. Michael Halem of LENRInvest, Dewey Weaver representing Industrial Heat, Hideki Yoshino of Clean Planet, Inc. and Carl Page of Anthropocene Institute all attended the full two-days of lectures by scientists who are looking to engage in more collaborative work.

Dr. Robert Duncan, Professor of Physics at Texas Tech, where a heat-helium correlation, among other experiments, had been announced in 2014 was also in attendance, though there was still no outcomes published from that project.


Watch interview with Dr. Robert Duncan at the 2019 LANR/CF Colloquium at MIT


Industrial Heat continues diverse support in experiments and theory

Industrial Heat has been funding several LENR research projects for about seven years. A group photo with some of the scientists IH works with was taken at ICCF-21 and published in the 2019 LENRIA Calendar.

The Industrial Heat Group at ICCF-21 from the 2019 LENRIA Calendar. Photo courtesy A.J.Frankson.

The mix of basic research and commercial aspirations shows the variety of work they fund. Dennis Cravens, Dennis Letts, Tom Claytor, and George Miley (who weren’t at the Colloquium at MIT) are primarily experimentalists who presented new, hotter results at ICCF21 [video]. Student researchers working in the lab with Professor George Miley at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are supported, too.

Clean Planet, Inc starts new round of collaborations

At the Colloquium, Dr. Yasuhiro Iwamura presented Recent Advances in Heat Generation Experiments using Nano-sized Metal Composite and Hydrogen Gas with newer, positive excess heat data from the repeatable and replicated experiments with the twin Metal Hydrogen Energy reactors. [See also ICCF-21 video Anomalous Heat Effects Induced by Metal Nanocomposites and Hydrogen Gas]

Day 2 of the LANR/CF Colloquium at MIT showing (foreground) David J. Nagel, (bottom counter-clockwise) Anthony Zuppero, Yasuhiro Iwamura, (upper left) Hideki Yoshino, and Dimiter Alexandrov. Photo: Mitchell Swartz JET Energy

Famous for his nuclear transmutation research, which he still continues in partnership with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Dr. Iwamura is lending his engineering expertise to the design of excess heat generators in the Condensed Matter Nuclear Reaction Division of the Electron Photon Research Center at Tohoku University.

Watch interview with Yasuhiro Iwarmura at the 2019 LANR/CF Colloquium at MIT

Establishing that CMNS division at Tohoku was due in part to the work of Clean Planet, Inc. and Dr. Iwamura was accompanied to the Colloquium at MIT by Hideki Yoshino, the CEO of Clean Planet. Over the last several years, Clean Planet has put together the largest collaborative LENR project on the globe, involving several university and industry labs in Japan who partnered together for a series of successful replications over a two-year program, showing what can happen when multiple laboratories work together.


Read more about the work of Tadahiko Mizuno, Akito Takahashi, Yasuhiro Iwamura and Hideo Kozima.


Now with new funding, they are beginning another set of coordinated excess heat and nuclear transmutation experiments, and it appears that Anthropocene Institute will be assisting them.

Clean Planet, Inc and friends relaxing at ICCF21. Photo from the 2019 LENRIA Calendar.

“Dr. Iwamura has a terrific approach, and I’m looking forward to working with them – and anybody else who is making good progress”, says Carl Page, President of the Anthropocene Institute.

Anthropocene Institute co-sponsored the 2019 Colloquium at MIT and President Carl Page gave a talk Athropocene Institute, Clean Energy and Cold Fusion [.pdf] about his perspective and plan for nothing less than an overhaul of the global energy landscape.


Watch Carl Page Clean Energy and Cold Fusion


Anthropocene Institute sees new nuclear as solution to climate change

“Anthropocene Institute exists to try to accelerate the adoption of clean energy technology of any sort that can get us well ahead of climate change so we can fix climate energy for sure, with enough energy for a safety margin,” he says, “in case something unexpected happens.”

President Carl Page made clear the priorities of the Institute, which echoed many of the researchers at the Colloquium: to provide clean, dense energy that addresses climate change and initiates an economic renaissance to lift global populations out of poverty, all by deploying new small nuclear technology, as soon as possible. While he includes designs such as molten salt reactors, according to Page, LENR is the “best and most desirable solution”.

“I’m a climate hawk,” he said in his presentation. “I’m one of those people that believes that IPCC is a conspiracy of scientists lying to us about climate change – but they’re understating the problem. We actually have to get completely off of fossil fuels in 10-12 years if we can, and that means that we have to deploy atomic energy way faster than most people believe is feasible.”

“One of the problems I look at for my schedule is ocean acidification. People worry about temperature increase, and it’s complicated. It takes a big computer to tell you how climate changes.”

“A one line equation tells you when ocean water changes to sparkly water, and it turns out the ocean plankton doesn’t like sparkly water at all.”

“The schedule we have to worry about is somewhere between 2035 and 2050, the plankton will change its way of life.

“It may not decide to kill us – but it could; it might make hydrogen sulfide instead of oxygen. That would be bad if you’re a warm-blooded creature.”

“It probably won’t, but nobody knows. The plankton gets to decide and it hasn’t made up its mind yet. I vote for not giving the plankton the option to choose our fate.”

Rate of decarbonization isn’t fast enough

“We are in a race. Every nation has to decarbonize – I say in twelve years. Some nations already have; I don’t have Sweden on this, but it would probably be at top of the chart. “

“We are all in a race towards zero percent carbon.”

“The only one to use technology to get there is France, because they’re 80% nuclear and 20% hydro. And then you have Germany, which is completely going backwards: they’ve invested a whole lot in wind and solar – you can see that tiny little corner. (These are years going by to the right in each bar). And here’s Japan, which was pretty good, about middle of the pack, and then they got to be as bad as Australia because of Fukushima.”

Sources of generated electricity 1985-2015, portions of Nuclear (red), Wind (orange), Solar (blue) and Hydro (green) Years going by to the right in each rectangle. Only nuclear provides the carbon-free energy density to match replacement of fossil fuels.

“We have spent enough money in California and Germany to completely zero out carbon from our sectors, so we can do it, we just didn’t choose the right technologies.”

“We can’t let this kind of thing slide anymore. That’s why we’re relying on LENR and other forms of innovation in energy.”

That passion is driving Anthropocene to support multiple LENR-based projects, and seek collaborations in both basic research and technology development. Brillouin Energy Corporation was the first lab to get his attention, and with Anthropocene support, Brillouin has achieved multiple benchmarks of success, continually upping their prototype heat generator Hot Tube power output and efficiency.

But Carl Page wasn’t always so optimistic.

“I was very resistant to even looking at LENR because I was pretty sure that physicists knew it was impossible. But I had to look back through the contexts and figure out why people were saying that. I had to figure out who was acting like a scientist, and who was acting like an ideologue, or defending academic turf and funding.”

“I was introduced to Robert Godes and I didn’t even talk to him for a year until I studied the back story, and until I figured out that there was room in physics for this to exist, I refused to talk to him!”

“But I’m obviously pretty convinced now.”

Robert Godes is the President and Chief Technical Officer of Brillouin Energy, as well as the inventor of the Hot Tube, a LENR heat generator.

“It became clear to me that it was possible; that there was a hole big enough in physics to accommodate this observation. And it was also apparent to me that we had passed over most of the relevant important technologies.”

LENR is the #1 choice of all other innovative nuclear technologies

Dr. Francis Tanzella, now retired from SRI International and consulting privately with Energy Research Center reported on the Hot Tube last June, announcing 5 Watts excess thermal power with a 1-2 COP. It was not a commercially-viable output, but controllable, and on-demand, something unique in the LENR research community. [See ICCF-21 video Nanosecond Pulse Stimulation in the Ni-H2 System]

By December, the Hot Tube had realized an increase to 50 Watts excess thermal power with a 2+ COP.

At the Colloquium on March 23 of this year, Dr. Tanzella reported in Update from Brillouin Energy [.pdf] another hike in Hot Tube thermal excess power to 80 Watts.


Watch an interview with Francis Tanzellz at the 2019 LANR/CF Colloquium at MIT


Carl Page said, “Robert Godes has a different perspective in that, he’s not trying to get a science win like I kind of would do, but he’s trying to build a practical reactor that doesn’t have material degradation. He’s trying to make sure he can carry the heat away really well, and that there’s no electro-migration of materials in the catalyst, so he’s using an AC impulse function instead of a DC one, to make sure the electro-migration gets healed.”

Slide from Dr. Francis Tanzella presentation at 2019 LANR/CF Colloquium at MIT showing features of the Brillouin Energy Hydrogen Hot Tube reactor core.

“He doesn’t want to make any reactions that are sustained by adding temperature, because if the reaction is creating heat, it’s obviously hard to control, expecting heat to control it. So the electrical stimulation function is the option here.”

“He’s got a computer model of the reactor that predicts within 0.1% what the temperature is supposed to be at any given time. So in the old days, they would have to set up the reactor and wait for it to stabilize, and then use the calculator to figure out how much power they were getting. Now, they just have a readout that says how much power they are getting at all times. They can play with the input parameters and the readout is compared with the model and anything unexpected that happens shows up immediately. ”

“That’s a tool available for others to use, too. It’s called System ID or System Identification. And basically you don’t have to tell the computer what you think is going on in the reactor. You let it learn, and then, see if the model predicts that. And then if a thermometer starts to break, you know it right away. It’s a really great system.”

To avert the worst of climate disaster and re-kindle a new economic paradigm, Carl Page sees LENR as superior to all other innovative nuclear technologies, “because that’s the cleanest I’ve ever seen”. Plan B is the small type nuclear reactors like those that use hot molten salt.

All carbon-free options are being pursued

TerraPower is a company developing next-generation nuclear power systems like the Molten Salt Reactor within its own lab, as well as assisting other labs, and was founded by the very resourceful Bill Gates, who resides as Chairman of the Board. [visit] Searching the number of patent apps in the G21B3/00 designation and showing 1,380 results reflects these numerous technologies that have been developing outside the orbit of CMNS science, and the consequence of such able and venturesome support.

While Anthropocene Institute favors LENR technologies, all the alternatives to decarbonize are being explored. President Carl Page outlines the back-up plan. “Now if the LENR community fails, there’s still a good option, the Fission Molten Salt Reactor fueled by Uranium or Thorium. This is the thing that President JFK was trying to build, and that 73% of the American people would support if anybody were building them, as polling data shows.”

In an MSR, uranium or thorium is dissolved in a hot salt liquid. Heat is captured while it fissions within the mix. This type of technology would allow the clean-up of existing stockpiles of uranium nuclear waste to be processed as fuel for an MSR.

This is good news to environmentalists, because Molten Salt Reactors are nothing like the pressurized water, conventional nuclear power plants of yesteryear.

“The fission industry with the light-water reactor is pretty much dead – except in South Korea and China – because it’s hard to make an unsafe system safe, by adding parts and complexity,” reports Carl Page.

“If somebody pokes a hole in a Molten Salt Reactor, the fuel might spill out on the ground, but it sits there – there’s no fallout cloud, there’s no steam explosion, there’s no hydrogen-zirconium disassociation problem. There’s no blowing the roof off with hydrogen, so it’s quite safe.”

Estimate of the improvement factor of MSRs over a pressurized reactor. From Carl Page presentation 2019 LANR/CF Colloquium at MIT
Estimate of the improvement factor of MSRs over a pressurized reactor. From Carl Page presentation 2019 LANR/CF Colloquium at MIT

“The MSR  can be deployed really fast because it doesn’t require heavy construction – there are no pressurized reactor vessels. You can build many of them per month in a modern shipyard quite easily.  China is getting started on MSRs for water-saving power plants, and for warships.”

“That will happen if LENR doesn’t.”

Carl Page says that “A sub-goal I like to focus on is 1 cent clean energy. Because right now, coal might be 5 cents, and wind is 3.5 cents in new purchases, solar is about 3.7 cents in desert purchases, so if we were trying to sell you a light-water nuclear reactor and they say 10 cents a kilowatt hour, they’re not going to get anywhere, right?”

“If we’re envisioning LENR solutions and anything else, we have to aim at the price that renewables will get to. Even though nuclear energy has advantages that renewables don’t, selling it is still hard against the market.”

The people are ready for change, but are physicists?

“It’s important to be reminded why there are so many people opposed to nuclear power, and I admit as a college activist I was opposed to nuclear anything, but that was because I was really scared about the arms race. Today’s situations are really different, and we need to get over it.”

Sunday at the 2019 LANR/CF Colloquium at MIT Photo Mitchell Swartz, JET Energy

A survey done by the Anthropocene Institute shows that most Americans in the U.S. would welcome a new type of nuclear technology.

“It turns out that Americans are afraid of fallout clouds and meltdowns, but they’re not actually afraid of the word nuclear“, reports Page. “The reasons that people who don’t like nuclear don’t like it are varied, but LENR is a winner in all these.”

“Most Americans are looking for good innovation. In fact, if you promise the kind of nuclear that JFK was trying to build before Nixon shut it down – the molten salt reactor – 73% of Americans say they would love that. The word didn’t turn them off.”

“We need to have a lot more people speaking out correctly on what energy systems are safest, as well as cheapest. We shouldn’t be relying on climatologists to tell us what energy technologies are safest, but we’re not out there tootin’ our own horn, so we have to get a lot better at that.”

“MIT has been talking a lot about innovative nuclear. They haven’t gotten as innovative as LENR yet, as this reports, and this is a concern, but this is quite a good report”, he says referring to The Future of Nuclear Energy in A Carbon Constrained World issued late 2018. [visit]

“The fact that classical mechanics with a few corrections from quantum mechanics explains everything that plasma physicists understand and it predicts experiments to nine decimal places, it’s an amazing accomplishment. But it doesn’t work in solid materials at all.”

“Physicists are right to object that if LENR was real, you’d see it in nature. And when you’re looking through astronomy, it’s sometimes hard to see a LENR signature.”

Showing a diagram of the interior of the Earth, he asked the audience of CMNS scientists, “Why is the solid part hotter than the liquid part? It’s not fission, and it’s not fusion. Do you guys know any reactions that might look better in a solid than in a liquid? Because the physicists don’t.”

Then he cited data recently observed in Japan that shows “there are neutrinos coming from the direction from the core of the Earth that shouldn’t be coming from the core of the Earth, because the core of the Earth would shield it. In fact, physicists say they have changed the standard model of physics to explain this crazy observation!”

“However, suppose there was a reaction that makes neutrinos located at the core of the Earth. Then we don’t have to change the standard model of physics. So I’m guessing that we’ll be able to see a lot of new stuff in nature once when we really get our heads around when the LENR reaction happens. ”

There happened to be another meeting of physicists at the same time as the LANR/CF Colloquium, and physicist John Wallace, co-author of Yes Virginia, Quantum Mechanics Can Be Understood: How Nature Treats Information [visit] who spoke at the Colloquium on Baryon  Charge Density [.pdf], was hopping back and forth between the two meetings. He indicated there “was some curiosity there” at the physics meeting, and that several physicists stopped by the Colloquium, too, though there was no word on their thoughts about the talks.

Carl Page likes to remind people that “with LENR, we’re in a place where experimentalists are in the drivers seat, and physicists are really uncomfortable with that. But that’s how we got through thermodynamics: scientists didn’t tell the steam engineers anything useful, rather, thermodynamics was curve-fitting into what the engineers had already figured out.”

Technology and applications that can’t wait are developing together

Larry Forsley gave a wide-ranging talk titled A Reliable Protocol for Inducing Nuclear Reactions in Condensed Matter which included an update on his work with the fusion-fission hybrid reactor being developed in partnership with NASA for space power, the benefit being that the most dangerous and expensive material is replaced with a clean LENR cell. Slides from the presentation show the reactor core features and comparisons.

USPatent 8,419,919 was issued in 2013 for the System and Method for Generating Particles detailing the original design for the GeNiE.

Larry Forsley says that, “This hybrid technology embraces the NASA Kilopower and previous Prometheus nuclear reactor programs but requires neither low nor high enriched uranium (LEU or HEU) fissile material. Previous NASA power conversion, shielding and heat dissipation research and development is applicable to this new reactor core.” [See also ICCF-21 video Hybrid Fusion-Fission Reactor Using Pd/D Co-Deposition and ICCF-21 video Space Application of a Hybrid Fusion-Fission Reactor]

Another project he announced was a A STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) Trackers Kit initiative intended to help train students to use the technique of co-deposition. The project is being developed with Dr. Pamela Mosier-Boss and assistance from Anthropocene Institute.


Watch interview with Dr. Larry Forsley at the 2019 LANR/CF Colloquium at MIT


Student participation to rise with new STEM Trackers Co-deposition Kit

From taking sound and video from an active cathode that allowed them to hear and see the “mini-explosions” of power, to generating neutrons detected with CR-39, Dr. Stanislaw Szpak and Dr. Pamela Mosier-Boss, who initiated and developed the co-deposition method, derived two decades of successful research at the Navy SPAWAR electrochemistry lab from the approach . There is “independent reproducibility and replication across multiple laboratories in five countries”, according to Forsley.

“Consequently, we’re developing an undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) enrichment program using the Pd/D co-deposition protocol in conjunction with Point Loma Nazarene University (PLNU) in San Diego, CA. A student presented some of their data in a poster session at the march meeting of the American Physical Society,” said Larry Forsley.

The STEM Trackers Kit originated with undergraduate chemical engineering seniors at University of California, San Diego over a three-year period. Students successfully used the protocol to produce energetic particles as detected by CR-39. The paper Energetic Particle Emission in Pd-D Co-deposition An Undergraduate Research Project to Replicate a New Scientific Phenomenon [.pdf available] reports on that project.

Sadly, there are few women involved in this science. In fact, there may have been only two women officially registered for the event. Gayle Verner of JET Energy, Inc co-organized the event was there of course, and one other woman registered. Initiatives to engage students is an important task for CMNS scientists, not only to educate more young people about this exciting science, but girls, too.

Lectures on Experiments and Theory

There were two lectures on Helium production in Pd-D systems.

Dr. Dimiter Alexandrov presented Cold Fusion Synthesis of Helium Isotopes in Interaction of Deuterium and of Hydrogen Nuclei with Metals [.pdf]. In the course of his materials research, he had been performing experiments using palladium and deuterium, and discovered – by accident – that helium was being produced! Since then, he’s been studying the parameters of the repeatable experiment. At the Colloquium he also described the methods used to determine it was helium production, including mass spectroscopy. [See also ICCF-21 video Nuclear Fusion in Solids–Experiments and Theory]

Dr. Melvin Miles was scheduled to talk on Production of Helium in Cold Fusion Experiments [.pdf] At the last minute, Dr. Miles was unable to attend, so I was recruited to give his talk. It was about a simple equation he developed to compute the theoretical amount of helium that should be generated in Pd-D systems, given the excess power generated in Watts and the current in Amps. This equation assumes all the excess power is derived from the helium generation, neglecting other reactions that may be taking place. With that input, you can compute the amount of Helium-4 generated in parts per billion.

Dr. Miles then re-analyzed his early heat-helium data and compared the theoretical amount to the actual amount of helium measured. Not surprisingly, the computed values followed the measured values. [See also ICCF-21 video Excess Power Measurements for Palladium-Boron Cathodes]

Steve Katinsky and David J. Nagel presented Status of LENRIA Experiment and Analysis Program (LEAP). The Industrial Association for LENR [visit] organized and sponsored the 21st International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science ICCF-21

in Colorado, US last summer, and, they publish the LENRIA Calendar. The growth of LENRIA’s participation in the CMNS community from advocacy into scientific research continues with LEAP, a testing project using the Naval Research Laboratory’s palladium-boron cathodes, which Dr. Melvin Miles had used previously with success.

Working together on a theoretical model, Thomas Dolan presented Heavy electron catalysis model [.pdf] right before his colleague Anthony Zuppero presented Applications of the model to experimental data. [See also ICCF-21 video Electron Quasiparticle Catalysis of Nuclear Reactions]

Konrad Czerski talked about Crystal Lattice Defects and Threshold Resonance of D-D Reactions at Room Temperature. [See also ICCF-21 videoInfluence of Crystal Lattice Defects and the Threshold Resonance on the Deuteron-Deuteron]

I missed the talks by Vladimir Plekhanov with Experimental study of the strong nuclear interaction via re-normalization, Jozsef Garai on a Physical Model for Lattice Assisted Nuclear Reaction, and Jeff Dricscoll, who talked about Mills’ Theories, though I was able to get a one-on-one with Jeff Driscoll for the documentary.

Interesting new science was presented by Keith Fredericks in his lecture Elliptical tracks: Possible Evidence for superliminal electrons [.pdf] which looked at strange tracks detected on photographic emulsions. [See JCMNS 15 Possibility of Tachyon Monopoles Detected in Photographic Emulsions]

Brian Ahern talked about Anharmonic Motion and Magnetism in LANR, which contained a section about his analysis of an unusually powered car. [See .pdf Energy Localization The key to Understanding Energy in Nanotechnology & Nature]

Dr. Hysen Blloshmi spoke epically on the History of one Significant Invention [.pdf] which included details on his cold fusion generator which he reports was able to power the desalination of seawater for 400 days. Thomas Ciarlariello spoke on Muon Catalyzed fusion from Prior Art to Future Space Planes and had this hand-out [.pdf].

Robert Smith, Jr. talked about the Impacts on the Rate of Knowledge in LANR.

On a related topic, Dr. Thomas Grimshaw gave an overview of the LENR Research Documentation Initiative [20Mb .pdf] which is currently servicing and/or finished a total of 11 different projects.

Imagine 30-years of data on varied file formats, including 5″ floppies and software from 1990, and you can understand the importance of capturing the early record of research in this field, especially as original scientists get older.

Cold Fusion Now! was on the scene to get video interviews for a documentary movie to begin production in 2020. I was able to talk one-on-one with scientists such as Sveinn Ólafsson who spoke on Experimental techniques for studying Rydberg matter of Hydrogen. [.pdf][See also ICCF-21 video What is Rydberg Matter and Ultra-Dense Hydrogen?]

I taped video statements from longtime researchers Francis Tanzella, Francesco Celani, Larry Forsley, and Brian Ahern. Also, Yasuhiro Iwamura, Robert Duncan, Dimiter Alexandrov, Mathieu Valat, and Thomas Grimshaw spoke with me about their thoughts on this thirty-years of research.

Lectures were captured by videographers Richard Chan and Frank Ling, who also recorded some interviews. Videos of the presentations are expected to be available at http://www.lanr2019.com/.

Turning agony to ecstasy accompanied by cocktails

Saturday night was a party at Legal Seafood in Cambridge, a block from the MIT campus, to celebrate the decades of historic revolutionary science performed by a community of outcasts turned heroes. Delicious appetizers, drinks and dinner were served, and it was good to know it was Legal.

Former-USPTO Examiner Richard Chan, who gave a patent update at the Colloquium – and performs more functions than a Cray – was ready with equipment to DJ that night! Would the set of music put together for the party be realized? Alas, the room was not appropriate for that.

It turned out that there was so much to talk about, the conversations reached high decibel levels, so nobody missed the music. It was probably good that there was no dance floor. What might occur when nuclear scientists electrolyze Chardonnay with the Ohio Players?

It wasn’t just Cambridge that partied. Festivity migrated around the world that night. Electrochemist and veteran LENR researcher Dr. Michael McKubre shared a photo of he and Dr. Huw Price celebrating a toast in New Zealand. [See H. Price Icebergs in the Room Cold Fusion at 30]

Cheers! Michael McKubre and Huw Price celebrate three decades of breakthrough science at the March 23 Global Party. Courtesy Michael McKubre.

Cold Fusion Now! had special I’m Hot! t-shirts made for the occasion, and gave the Colloquium organizers a prize for their hard work. Then, a lucky player volunteered for our game: Name Three Effects of the Cold Fusion Phenomenon and Win a Shirt! I am not actually sure who it was that played, but he was a real sport and lots of fun, and readily met the challenge, as

determined by the scientists in the room, who judged the answers with three boisterous Yeas and zero Nays.

Happening at the same time around the world, CMNS colleagues at the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences were celebrating “Cold fusion – 30 years: results and prospects” in Moscow. A report was first published in Regnum, but here’s a google-translate of the article to read.

From left to right: A.S. Sverchkov, L.V. Ivanitskaya, A.V. Nikolaev, A.A. Kornilov, A.I. Klimov, I.B. Savvatimova, A.G. Parkhomov, A.A. Prosvirnov, V.I. Grachev, S.N. Gaydamak, S.A. Flowers

The program reviewed the 30-years of Russian Cold Nuclear Transmutation research, referring to what we call LENR, and contained a wish for continued success to their friends around the world. We wish for the same, and CMNS scientists look forward to meeting together at the 22nd Interntational Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science ICCF-22 happening Sept. 8-13, 2019 in Assisi, Italy. [visit]

Of course the goup was missing patent lawyer David French, who freely served the community for the last decade and passed away this year. His unique skills, and amenable disposition made him a valuable asset to the field where scientists are brilliant in chemistry and physics, but not so informed on business and law. THANK YOU David.

Over 100 people registered for the Colloquium, and there were more than a few walk-ins throughout the two days. The lecture room in the Strata Building was filled on Day 1, with almost all the seats taken. There was less attendance on Day 2, as many had to leave early to return home for Monday morning.

By 5:30PM Sunday, the Colloquium was officially over, and participants were still hopped up – and numb – from the 48-hour science storm.

Light On the LANR/CF Colloquium at MIT Photo: Mitchell Swartz, JET Energy

Walking around the campus for a last look in the early evening, I came upon Dr. Francesco Celani waiting for his ride. He spoke at the Colloquium on the Advanced version of the “Capuchin knot” geometry [.pdf] and the bump in power he got by putting knots in the straight wire. He was planning to stay another day and roam the MIT campus and bookstores. [See also ICCF-21 video Steps to Identification of Main Parameters for AHE Generation in Sub-Microscopic Materials]

Francesco Celani in Cambridge after the 2019 LANR/CF Colloquium at MIT. Photo: Ruby Carat

Green LENR future to benefit oceans, wildlife, and global populations

After thirty years, the CMNS field is now receiving essential attention and support for basic scientific research as well as engineering prototypes from several investor groups. The Anthropocene Institute, the newest to bring help and supplies, has come full-circle in their search for carbon-free, energy-dense, ultra-clean power.

“If you don’t envision where you want to go, you’ll never get anywhere. This is what I envision we should have,” says Carl Page.

“We should have great transportation, we should have great food, a lot of it grown indoors because its way cheaper and a higher quality. We should be able to make a lot more wildlands than we have today, because we don’t need all that farmland, especially those growing bio-fuels. We don’t need palm oil for European Diesel, we don’t need corn ethanol.”

“We’ll need to provide carbon-neutral fuels for vehicles we don’t get rid of. We should have room for 12 billion affluent city dwellers, and, we’ll need to provide industrial heat for our industrial way of life. We’ll need to desalinate large-scale; and this is all quite doable. We should fully recycle everything we use, and we should guarantee success for fifty years.”

“In the 80s, people were taught that if too many people were wealthy, the planet would be overpopulated. It turns out that when people get to be middle class, the population explosion disappears. Population explosions happen because of subsistence farmers needing child labor. The moment child labor is not in the money, people stop overpopulating.”

“So we’ve got to get to work on it.”

Teamwork and communication essential to success

The conversion of Carl Page is complete, and it’s unlikely he’ll be backing down from putting LENR front and center in his nuclear energy mix. In fact, he’s advocating a kind of truce, even collaboration, between the differing nuclear approaches. CMNS success will be reached by broadening participation into a wider, mainstream association. The resources that Anthropocene brings to do that are unmatched to anything this field has seen, and Carl Page has a plan to do it.

“The fact that LENR physics is not well-explained – I consider that a software problem, which is the best kind of problem to have. Because once you figure out your software problem, manufacturing is free. So we only have to figure out the physics once, and then, it’s free.”

“That’s not true of hot fusion, because there we have engineering problems. The physics is well-understood, but the engineering is not. Enginnering problems mean costly changes.”

“The hot fusion and the cold fusion people are sometimes a bit competitive”, he says. “But these innovative nuclear groups are start-ups, and most of them are clever, smart, interested people, and they have a business problem to solve. When they get new physics from people who understand condensed matter, it really helps them. Some, like AGNI are actually half-way between cold fusion and hot fusion, where they have a solid target fusion system.”

Slide from Carl Page’s presentation shows innovative nuclear fusion start-ups.

“…and the thing is, the government is providing hardly any money into any kind of innovative growth in technology. So if we can stop shooting arrows at each others back, and start trying to get the government to be less disruptive towards research in the relevant technologies, it will help us all. Because if they start funding innovative nuclear, and it includes even a shred for LENR, LENR will take the lead, because we just don’t need as much money. They’ll think they’re hurting us by not giving us enough money, but actually, we’ll get ahead.”

“There are other people in Las Vegas that put the penny in the million dollar slot machine that almost never rings, and there are investors similarly willing to take long odds bets, if it’s more than fair.”


Watch video interviews and selected lectures from the 2019 LANR/CF Colloquium at MIT on Youtube.


The 22nd International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science ICCF22 Early Bird Registration is now open! Go to the International Society of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science website at http://iscmns.org/


President Bush “briefed” on cold fusion

In 1989, Dr. Glenn Seaborg was asked to brief President George H. W. Bush on the “cold fusion” phenomenon. On April 14 of that year he did so.

April 14, 1989 Nobel Laureate Glenn Seaborg talks to President Bush about cold fusion. Photo from Reflections on the Legacy of a Legend Glenn T. Seaborg 1912–1999 by David L. Clark and David E. Hobart

Eugene F. Mallove wrote in Intimations of Disaster: Glenn Seaborg, the Scientific Process, and the Origin of the “Cold Fusion War” [.pdf]:

Even though the jury was certainly still out on the evidence for
or against “cold fusion,” Seaborg, through some as-yet-to-be-revealed process (though he certainly had conducted no experiments), had determined that cold fusion was not what it was claimed to be. On April 14, 1989 Seaborg told President Bush that “it is not due to nuclear fusion.”

We discovered this extremely revealing account of Glenn Seaborg’s actions in the spring of 1989, which appeared in an issue of Skeptical Inquirer, November/December 1997, as part of “The Elemental Man: An Interview with Glenn T. Seaborg”.

SI: During the early stages of the cold fusion furor, President Bush asked you to come to the White House and give him your views on the matter. What happened? What did you tell him?

Seaborg: In April 1989, I was called back to Washington to brief George Bush on “cold fusion,” the totally unexpected phenomenon that University of Utah scientists announced they had discovered by the simple process of electrolysis of heavy water. A couple of days earlier, the purported co-discoverer of “cold fusion,” University of Utah electrochemist Stanley Pons, spoke to an enthusiastic standingroom-only audience of chemists at the semi-annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in Dallas. His talk had attracted so much attention that, apparently, the news had reached the White House. After briefing White House Chief of Staff John Sununu, I went into the Oval Office to brief President Bush on April 14, 1989. I told him about my role in the discovery of the radioactive iodine that had been used a couple of days earlier to treat his wife, Barbara, and said that a similar treatment with radioactive iodine had effected a miraculous cure for my mother, who was suffering from the same condition as Barbara. The president facetiously said that Barbara is now radioactive and she is not allowed to kiss their dog as long as this condition prevails, but he implied that it didn’t seem that this prohibition included himself—the president. I then went on and described briefly the situation with respect to cold fusion. I indicated that this is not a valid observation—that is, that it is not due to nuclear fusion—but, on the other hand, it must be investigated. The president seemed very interested and convinced by my assessment, and encouraged us very much to go ahead with an investigation. [Infinite Energy’s emphasis]

I might add that the panel I recommended to study the purported “cold fusion” process was created and about six months later came out with a report disputing the validity of the observation, pretty much in line with the view I adopted in my briefing of the president. Also it is interesting to note that President Bush himself, two years later, in May 1991, benefitted from treatment with the same radioactive iodine (iodine-131).
—(End of the Skeptical Inquirer interview section)—

–From Eugene Mallove’s Intimations of Disaster: Glenn Seaborg, the Scientific Process, and the Origin of the “Cold Fusion War” [.pdf]:

Dr. Seaborg received the Presidential National Medal of Science from President Bush in 1991.

Stanley Pons speaks at the ACS in 1989

On April 12, 1989, American Chemical Society (ACS) President Clayton Callis hosted a special Presidents Event “Nuclear Fusion in a Test Tube” at the 197th Annual Meeting of the ACS in Dallas, Texas. Valerie Kuck of AT&T Bell Laboratories organized the Symposium and introduced the speakers.

Special guest Dr. Stanley Pons spoke on the then recently announced discovery of the Fleischmann-Pons Anomalous Heat Effect. Watch the entire set of talks courtesy of the New Energy Foundation.

The initial panel included Harold Furth, Director of Princeton University’s Plasma Physics Lab, Allen Bard from University of Texas, Ernest Yeager of Case Western Reserve University, Stanley Pons from University of Utah, and K. Birgitta Whaley of University of California – Berkley.

Here is the introduction to the meeting:

Dr. Stanley Pons presented, and here’s his talk.

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