22nd Russian Conference on Cold Nuclear Transmutation of Chemical Elements and Ball Lighting
Chairman of the RCCNT&BL-22 Organizing Committee Yury Bazhutov
Vice-Chairmen Vladimir Bychkov, Nikolai Samsonenko
Sept 27-October 4, 2015
Dagomys, Sochi, Krasnodar region, Russia
The anomalous heat effect on D/H loaded Palladium: Exploration at an atomic level, preliminary perturbed angular correlations studies
by Juliana Schell, Vittorio Violante, Graham K. Hubler
and Collaborators: Moustapha Thioye, Jinghao He, João G. M. Correia, Iberê R. S. Junior, Izabela T. Matos, Michel Zoghby
Wednesday, 14 October 2015 from 14:30 to 15:30 (Europe/Zurich)
Geneva, Switzerland
This is a repost of and article originally published on the Falls Church News-Press here.
The Peak Oil Crisis: Cold Fusion Gets a U.S. Patent By Tom Whipple
Sometimes our government moves very slowly. In the case of granting a patent to cold fusion technology, which just might replace fossil fuels, it took 26 years. The odyssey that started with a press conference at the University of Utah back in 1989 and has bumped along below the world’s radar screen ever since, seems to be coming to an end. The cold fusion phenomenon had a brief flurry of notoriety until it was “debunked” by many physicists, a couple of universities, and the U.S. Department of Energy panel. The science fell into disrepute, its discovers were disgraced and went into exile.
Fortunately for mankind, there were a handful of experimenters who were able to reproduce the original experiments which produced anomalous heat, thereby keeping the spark of cold fusion alive, but mostly in obscure laboratories out of the purview of the mainstream press. A decade or so ago some Italian physicists made a major breakthrough which led to devices producing commercial, not just test tube, amounts of heat. This effort culminated in a number of semi-public demonstrations of the technology, which were largely ignored or denounced as conventional wisdom held that “cold fusion” was impossible.
Circa two years ago the Italian cold fusion effort, led by entrepreneur Andrea Rossi, was moved to North Carolina, linked up with a venture capital firm, and well-financed developmental work began on building commercially viable cold fusion reactors. Last February the first prototype, a one-megawatt reactor system producing steam 24 hours a day, was installed for a one-year test in an undisclosed factory somewhere in the US. This device has now been successfully operating for over six months. If all goes well for the remainder of the trial period, a report is scheduled to be issued and heat producing devices will go on sale to the public.
At some point the mainstream media will cotton to the fact that we have been led badly astray as to the viability of this technology and there indeed is an alternative to producing large amounts of energy other than by burning fossil fuels, nuclear fission, hydro, solar and wind. Obviously a technology that can produce large amounts of heat continuously at low cost and without harmful emissions or hazardous waste will catch on quickly. If not in the U.S., then I am sure the Chinese will be happy to help advance the technology.
One of the reasons there has been so much skepticism about cold fusion and Rossi’s reactor in recent years was the secrecy surrounding the inner workings of the device. Much of this secrecy was due to the developer’s inability to obtain a valid international patent on his intellectual property. When the U.S. Department of Energy declared the whole technology a hoax 25 years ago and reaffirmed this decision in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary 10 years later, the U.S. Patent Office adopted the position that it would not patent any device claiming to be based on cold fusion or anything close.
In 2008, Rossi filed for a U.S. patent on his technology, only to have it finally rejected seven years later for lack of sufficient proof that he really had developed a technology that worked. Although Rossi was granted an Italian patent in 2011, nobody thought it offered much protection against copiers of a technology that could easily be worth trillions of dollars should it come to replace fossil fuels someday.
This time around Rossi, and his patent attorneys, took a new approach to gaining the first of what will likely be many patents relating to a technology which could easily turn out to be the most important of the century. Rather than claiming that the device was based on controversial nuclear reactions, the new patent is for a simple “Fluid Heater” that raises the temperature of water by subjecting a mixture of nickel, lithium, and lithium-aluminum-hydride powders to heat. The mixture warms to hundreds of degrees centigrade and begins to produce much more heat energy than is initially applied to the powder by the built-in electric heater. There is a no mention anywhere in the patent of “cold fusion,” nor any kind of nuclear reaction. The patent is silent as to what is causing the excess heat, only saying that it occurs, leaving it to the reader to conclude that so much heat is bring produced that there must be some kind of nuclear reaction taking place – known chemical reactions will not suffice.
The patent breaks new ground in our understanding of how Rossi’s reactor works for in order to obtain his patent protection, he had to reveal the inner workings of the reactor and the composition of the fuel that was inside. The revelation in the patent that there are three separate powders, the proportion of the powders, and that the nickel catalyst must be preheated to drive out any moisture and increase the porosity of the nickel should be of great help to anyone attempting to replicate Rossi’s device. Also revealed in the patent was that each fuel load should be able to run for six months before needing to be replaced. Rossi, however, recently stated that that a single fuel load may run for a year and that the reactor currently being tested can run for long periods of time without the need to turn on the heaters that are run with outside power.
In the past year, numerous replicators have attempted to produce excess heat from devices similar to Rossi’s. One the of these replicators, Alexander Parkhomov at the University of Moscow, has been successful in at least a dozen tests. Other replicators have been able to produce excess heat, but were unable to control their reactors which quickly melted down due to the massive amount of heat being generated. With this new information from the patent, we should soon be seeing many successful replications and put to rest assertions that the technology is a fraud.
For those of us who have been following this technology for over a quarter of a century, the granting of a U.S. patent marks a major milestone in the history of science for it offers the opportunity to get mankind beyond the age of carbon and nuclear fission fuels and all that they have wrought – rogue petro state governments, pollution, global warming, and dangerous radioactive wastes. For now, the major question is whether this or similar technologies can come into widespread use fast enough to slow and then halt the many adverse societal, economic and climatological trends with which we are currently beset.
This is a repost of The Peak Oil Crisis: Cold Fusion Gets a U.S. Patent By Tom Whipple originally published on the Falls Church News-Press here.
In mid-April the 19th International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF-19) took place in Padua, Italy and was attended by some 470 scientists, cold fusion bloggers, entrepreneurs, and the merely interested. The first of these conferences was held back in 1990 in the wake of the University of Utah announcement that two of its chemists had discovered a new way to release energy from the atom. The 1990 conference, however, was resoundingly ridiculed by the American Physical Association and was said to be nothing but a gathering for crackpots, pseudo-scientists, and fraudsters. However, over the decades, the conferees continued to gather in cities around the world, with some 100-300 usually in attendance. Many of those who came to the conferences were scientists who had been able to reproduce the “anomalous heat” that the University of Utah researchers had observed prior to their announcement in 1989. Most of the presentations were way down in the scientific weeds and were comprehensible only to those with considerable knowledge of particle physics, so the conferences drew little attention.
In the last couple of years, however, the tide has turned. Although Cold Fusion is still anathema to many in the U.S. and more importantly to the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists in several countries around the world are starting to see that the technology works, that it could be at least a partial solution to many of mankind’s problems, and are starting to talk about developments in the field to their local press. Most, however, continue to be unaware of recent progress in developing this new source of energy or are too wedded to their prejudices to even consider new evidence.
This year the most important development in cold fusion, unless overtaken by a competitive technology, is the acceptance test of the Rossi/Industrial heat, 1 megawatt, cold fusion reactor, which currently is underway at customer factory in the US. The engineer and entrepreneur, Andrea Rossi, who developed the first working commercial application of a cold fusion reactor, did not attend the ICCF-19 conference. However, his CEO Tom Darden of North Carolina based Cherokee Investment Partners and its subsidiary that is developing the cold fusion reactors, Industrial Heat, attended for the first time.
While many were hoping that Darden would give a progress report on Industrial Heat’s acceptance test of its first fusion reactor, they were disappointed. Darden talked only in generalities as to how he became involved with cold fusion, his dedication to the technology as a way of solving the carbon emissions problem, and his interest in financing similar projects. Two or three journalists who attended the conference however, reported being told by a “credible” source, possibly Darden, that the 400-day, 24/7, acceptance test of the one megawatt reactor is going well after several months. Rossi, who is spending full time monitoring the acceptance test, has been saying lately that the reactor has been running in the “self-sustained” mode a good piece of the time which means that it does not require any outside energy to stimulate the heat-producing reaction.
As has been the case for 25 years, mainstream media coverage of the conference was scarce to non-existent. In addition to his formal address to the conference, Darden who seems to be one of the more knowledgeable people around concerning what it going on in the field, gave a lengthy interview to a blogger. In the interview, Darden revealed that he was funding other cold fusion projects, but did not give any details.
During the interview Darden said primarily that he wants to use this technology to stop global warming and not just to make money from a new source of energy; that he invested millions of his own money in Rossi’s technology only after many tests and careful due diligence; and that he is convinced that Rossi’s or a similar technology will have major impact on the world. He notes that a cheap source of clean energy, which is exactly what cold fusion promises to be, is what mankind needs at this juncture.
Another star of the conference this year was the Russian physicist Parkhomov, who successfully reproduced Rossi’s cold fusion reaction earlier this year and has been sharing the details of his experiments with interested parties all over the world. This has made him a folk hero among those who are hard at work attempting to create still more replications of the reaction.
As could be expected many of the presentations were highly technical, and ranged from new ways of making the cold fusion reaction more reliable to aeronautical applications and even mutating radioactive waste into harmless substances. The Russians, with their ongoing Chernobyl problem, are particularly interest in this aspect of the science.
This conference was notable for it may be the last one to be ignored by the mainstream media. Should the Rossi/Industrial Heat year-long trial of a working commercial reactor be successfully completed by the time the next conference comes around, public and government perception of cold fusion could well have changed markedly. A working commercial scale reactor, which is open for public inspection, will be very difficult for skeptics to deny or ignore.
Next year’s conference will be held in Japan with a subsidiary conference in China. India was also a bidder for the honor. After 25 years, cold fusion looks like it is on a roll.
“There were many high points,” said Michael McKubre, who spoke at the conference on Cold Fusion for CMNS Present and Projected Future Status.
Steve Katinsky, one of the leaders in the formation of the new LENR Industry Association said, “I would describe an undercurrent of anticipation.”
“Though this is only my third ICCF conference, something intangible was different in Padua,” Katinsky said. “While it is hard to know for sure, perhaps it is the precursor to a tipping point, and a subsequent acceleration of resources and activities in the field.”
Michael McKubre wrote a history of the ICCF conferences for the event, now archived on ICCF19 website. “I wrote the conference histories in groups of three for practical reasons, but these blocks do cycle progressively in tone. ICCF19 was the start of a new cycle and definitely felt that way.”
“I keep fairly abreast of technical progress, so for me the positive results of all conferences, except the first few, have mostly been the aspects of interpersonal bonding and team building. For this conference, with many newcomers, a major benefit was the possibility to get to know members of the next generation,” he said.
Technical talks paired with policy-making
David J. Nagel speaking at the 2014 CF/LANR Colloquium“Scientists are generally interested in the practical aspects of LENR, and entrepreneurs want to understand the science,” said David Nagel, formerly of the Naval Research Lab and currently a professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. who spoke on High Power Density Events in Lattice-Enabled LENR Experiments and Generators.
He found the talks on “materials from Coolescence, SKINR and ENEA to be very good. Much progress has been made on understanding experimental procedures to achieve high loading of deuterons into Pd,” he said.
Katinsky agreed, “The talks and posters overall were very good.”
“Mitchell Swartz’s work that Peter Hagelstein presented in Padua always captures my imagination. David Kidwell in his Q&A talked about having too much He4, and I would like to hear more about that, and I was intrigued by Mark Davidson’s presentation.”
Dr. Mitchell Swartz, JET Energy and Steve Katinsky, LENRIA at ICCF-18 Banquet 2013“For me, in addition to a great range of scientific reports, were the talks of Tom Darden and Mike McKubre.”
Katinsky said, “There was both formal presentations and posters, and informal conversations and socializing; that together made for a very rewarding conference experience.”
LENR Industry Association is forming
Conversations with Steve Katinsky about the new LENR Industrial Association (LENRIA) were both very productive and pleasant,” Nagel said. “We get a lot done when we can talk.”
Katinsky added, “We had many requests for slides and information on membership, for when it opens. While commercial activity is nascent, this is the right time to get started.”
Asked how they will move forward from here, Katinsky replied, “We are close to having our initial web site up, where people and companies can register to be notified when membership opens. Also, many of the materials we have developed in support of forming the association shall be available there. Next, our efforts shall turn to seeking contributions to help with costs, and to developing our membership and some initial services.”
“Our formation of LENRIA might be somewhat early,” said Nagel, “but that, if so, is wrong in the right direction.”
Biggest crowd yet
A relatively large number of people attended, although the final count is now available yet.
Nagel said, “I also had a good conversation with Lowell Wood, an old friend from Livermore, who has followed this field for many years.”
Dr. Vittorio Violante and Dr. Michael McKubre both presented at European Parliament ITRE meeting.Lowell Wood attended ENEA Labs with Bill Gates and entourage when they were educated on the latest science by Vittorio Violante.
Katinsky liked “having the opportunity to get to know better the journalist Mats Lewan, Mike Nelson from NASA, Robert Godes of Brillouin Energy Corporation, David Kidwell of NRL and Mel Miles.
“The Great Hall was exquisite and the Orchestral start was sublime,” said McKubre.
However, the large room lacked intimacy.
“There was large attendance in an even larger hall that diminished speaker – audience connection. Overall there was a conspicuous absence of in-depth discussion and the configuration and acoustics were not particular;y conducive.”
“A lot of original attendees were prevented from attending by age or worse, and a lot of new faces were present. Obviously the presence of many new faces is only good but it meant that many old questions needed to be asked and answered again.”
Open Power collaborated with MFMP in Parkhomov Padua
One group had wanted to present their work to the community, but were not able to be scheduled in the program.
Luciano Saporito of the Open Power Association said, “We are ready to talk about our work everywhere we will have invitation: but our patent speaks for itself…”
“We are engaged in experiments,” said Ugo Abundo, a lead researcher at Open Power.
“In perfect style of Open collaboration, we contributed along with MFMP during a Parkomov replication at Padua during the Conference.”
“As Bob Greenyer said: ‘We would very much like to work together with you again. I was VERY impressed with the willingness to help in Italy in general.'”
What’s next?
The results of the conference remain to be seen, but participants are going home with a big to-do list.
“From here it is a short step to victory,” says McKubre. “Resources are entering the field. If we can find some commonality of action to ensure that the sum is greater than the parts then we will all win. I am highly encouraged.”
“One of the highlights of ICCF19 definitely was ICCF20. With the next continental rotation returning to Asia (and Oceania) it was surprising and unprecedented that four countries were seriously interested in hosting the next conference: China, Japan, India, Russia.”
“The IAC was faced with the happy need to make the diplomatic decision to hold the primary conference at Tohoku University in Sendai, on the East Coast of Japan, with a satellite meeting follow on meeting at Xiamen University on the East Coast of China.”
Workshop at Airbus
