Answering “Nine Critical Questions to Ask About Alternative Energy”
Whether you are a scientist or just a regular Jane, how do you evaluate the claims of a new energy technology?
In 2003, Michael C. Ruppert, author of Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil and star of the movie Collapse, posed “Nine Critical Questions to Ask About Alternative Energy“. You can read these queries on his old website From the Wilderness. His new site is Collapsenet.com.
The questions created criteria for evaluating the claims of alternative energies like the renewables: wind, solar, and hydro, as well as ethanol. It was his response to those who advocated replacements for oil and gas which produced flat or negative energy return on energy investment EROEI, like ethanol.
Of concern was M. King Hubbert’s Peak Oil, the condition of reaching maximum production capacity for oil, after which is irreversible decline. The need for solutions to a looming, deep energy deficit had many hoping for an alternative energy solution, but their expectations did not match the realities.
Eight years later, the possibility of a clean energy technology marketed to the world moved closer to physical reality with the recent demonstration in Italy of a cold fusion “steam engine”. Inventor Dr. Andrea Rossi’s ECat boiler produced 12 Kilowatts of power over an hour, using a fuel of hydrogen and nickel.
Low-energy nuclear reactions have been a science for the last 22 years. Now, it seems that a technology is in sight, a technology that promises a nuclear-sized power with no emissions or radio-active waste. How do these claims stand up to Mr. Ruppert’s Nine Questions?
Jed Rothwell of lenr.org has long been involved with low-energy nuclear reactions research, and is the author of Cold Fusion and the Future, a look at the implications of cold fusion technology and the changes and challenges it may bring. We asked Mr. Rothwell to respond.
(Note: Question 9 had multiple parts which we numbered to fifteen questions!)
1. How much energy is returned for the energy invested (EROEI)?
With oil or coal there is significant “energy overhead” meaning it takes energy to extract energy. With oil this is roughly 10% to 20% depending on where the oil is extracted, the type of well, how far the oil is shipped, and what grade of fuel the refinery produces.) Coal is more efficient; the overhead is around 8%. (Pimentel, D. and M. Pimentel, Food, Energy, and Society, Revised Edition. 1996: University Press of Colorado, p. 17.)
The only significant energy overhead with cold fusion is the energy used to extract heavy water from ordinary water. This is 0.05% with today’s heavy water extraction techniques, and it will probably be less in the future, because the techniques should improve. (Rothwell, J, Cold Fusion and the Future, p. 46.)
Total worldwide production of energy will consume roughly 6,000 tons of heavy water per year, which is enough to fill 2.4 Olympic size pools. Some additional heavy water will be needed to cover losses from evaporation, broken cells and so on. (Rothwell, J, Cold Fusion and the Future, p. 34.)
2. Have the claims been verified by an independent third party?
Yes. Roughly 200 major laboratories have verified many aspects of cold fusion, especially excess heat and tritium. A small number of laboratories have confirmed neutrons and helium production. These are much more difficult to measure.
3. Can I see the alternative energy being used?
If you visit the laboratory you can see experiments producing cold fusion. This is what Prof. Robert Duncan did on the “60 Minutes” segment broadcast in 2009. There is only one commercial or practical scaled device. It was demonstrated by Rossi et al. at U. Bologna on January 14, 2011.
Watch CBS 60mins Cold Fusion More than Junk Science
4. Can you trace it back to the original energy source?
The energy comes from nuclear fusion.
5. Does the invention defy the Laws of Thermodynamics?
Nothing defies the laws of thermodynamics. That is impossible. Cold fusion is measured using calorimetry, which is predicated upon the laws of thermodynamics.
6. Does the inventor make extravagant claims?
No. All major claims confirmed by mainstream peer-reviewed journal process. The claims may seem extravagant to people unfamiliar with the scientific literature, but that is a subjective state of mind.
7. Does the inventor claim zero pollution?
Cold fusion produces minute amounts of helium, far smaller than the existing background, and low levels of tritium which is dangerous but can be contained. It produces far less nuclear waste and radioactivity than uranium fission, and roughly 11 million times less radioactivity than plasma fusion.
8. Can I see the blueprints, schematics or a chemical analysis of how it works?
Yes. Thousands of papers about cold fusion have been published, including roughly 1,000 in mainstream peer-reviewed journals.
9. Infrastructure requirements: Does the energy source require a corporation to produce it?
Yes. Cold fusion cells are similar to batteries. They require precision manufacturing and careful handling of some toxic materials. Tritium must be removed during recycling. Mildly radioactive substances when handled correctly are not a hazard. Tritium is used today in some wristwatches and in emergency exit signs in buildings. Radioactive americium is used in smoke detectors.
10. How will it be transported and used?
If cold fusion can be made practical, it will be built into devices. There is no need to transport it. Both cold fusion and plasma fusion produce roughly 1.5 million times more energy per gram of fuel than chemical energy sources, so there is no need to transport fuel. An average automobile will use roughly 1 g of heavy water per year.
11. Will it require new engines, pipelines, and filling stations?
It will require new engines, but no pipelines, filling stations or any other distribution infrastructure.
12. What will these cost?
Cold fusion generators and engines should cost roughly as much as a conventional chemical ones now do. They probably will not require rare or expensive materials, and they should require roughly as much precision and cleanliness as NiCad batteries do. The fuel for cold fusion generators — heavy water or deuterium gas — is virtually free. U.S. per capita annual fuel costs are presently $2,499 according to the Energy Information Administration, U.S. DoE. The deuterium fuel needed to replace this would cost roughly $1.
13. Who will pay for them and with what?
Consumers will pay for them. Since the fuel is virtually free the overall cost of owning these machines will be lower than today’s models.
14. How long will it take to build them?
Once commercial devices become available they will replace most major energy consuming devices such as automobiles, heating and air-conditioning units, and appliances as rapidly as these machines wear out and are replaced. These machines normally last 10 or 20 years. Some heavy equipment such as railroad locomotives and aircraft last longer than 20 years. Large centralized power generators last much longer than 20 years, but these will not be needed with cold fusion.
15. What do you think of these questions in regards to evaluating alternative energy? Are they sufficient?
Some of these questions are not applicable to cold fusion. The questions that should be asked of any scientific claim about energy (or any other subject) are: Has the claim been peer-reviewed and independently replicated? In the case of cold fusion, the answer to both is yes.
12 kW cold fusion reactor demonstrated
Download the report from Prof. Giuseppe Levi, Dr. David Bianchini and Prof. Mauro Villa (Bologna University) about the experiment.
The blow-by-blow by Daniele Passorini.
This past weekend, a cold fusion reactor was demonstrated in Italy by scientists Sergio Focardi and Andrea A. Rossi. In this demonstration, about 18 liters of water went into the device, and turned into steam.
Speak Italian? Watch their video release on their Youtube channel:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-Ru1eAymvE&fs=1&hl=en_US&color1=0x006699&color2=0x54abd6]
Of course creating steam means creating heat to turn a turbine, and that means creating electrical power. The device apparently ran for an hour giving off an estimated 23,000 Kilojoules of thermal energy!
See Jed Rothwell’s report and preliminary analysis on the News page at his LENR News site http://www.lenr-canr.org/News.htm.
This demonstration is still being confirmed, but many respected researchers are lining up in support of the results, in spite of rumors of inventor and engineer Mr. Andrea Rossi’s background.
The demonstration would be a difficult one to fake with members of the University of Bologna physics department measuring power inputs and outputs, and, with one of the scientists measuring the heat generated being the former president of the Italian Chemical Society. See the Advisors for this project here.
Sterling Allan of PESwiki.com has followed this group of scientists and has posted a comprehensive article on his site here that addresses the issues with Mr. Rossi’s past.
This demonstration, when fully confirmed, will be remarkable as the reaction is not from a deuterium and palladium system, but a reaction involving hydrogen and nickel. The theory of this reaction is outlined in this article “Hydrogen/Nickel cold fusion probable mechanism” from the scientists’ group blog.
Using nickel, as well as other less expensive metals and alloys, will bring the cost of cold fusion power devices much lower than if they had to use palladium, a precious metal that is more costly to mine and produce.
Also, using hydrogen, instead of its isotope deuterium, means that the fuel for this type of reaction consists of the most abundant material in the universe, and on planet earth in the form of water!
From Mr. Allan’s article, he quotes an estimated cost for electricity generated from a device using this technology:
“Rossi estimates that the cost of energy made with this system will be below 1 cent/kWh, in case of electric power made by means of a Carnot cycle, and below 1 cent/4,000 M J in case of thermal power production for heating purposes. That is several times cheaper than energy from fossil fuel sources such as coal or natural gas.
According to Rossi, the demonstrated device shown last Friday is their industrial product that is claimed to be reliable and safe. In normal operation it would produce 8 units of output for every unit of input. Higher levels of output are possible, but can be dangerous. They will soon start serial production of their modules. Combining the modules in series and parallel arrays it is possible to reach every limit of power. The modules are designed to be connected in series and parallels.”
As we learn more about new energy technologies, we find that there are many ways to tap the power of the atom, and even the vacuum of space. Imagine a power device that gives a nuclear-sized power and runs on water? Ultra-clean nuclear power will take humanity to a new level of evolution. There is no reason to continue to subsidize oil, gas, and coal when these new technologies are about to blow! It’s time to get educated and get on board.
If you are in the US, call President Obama on the Whitehouse Comment Line 1-202-456-1111. Call your Congressperson.
If you are elsewhere, call your government officials.
Tell them “there is a clean energy solution: fund LENR research now. We want ultra-clean nuclear power from water. It’s been demonstrated many times over. You said that alternative energy was a high priority. Please demonstrate your commitment to new energy technologies by publicly stating your support and putting dollars into researching this science and engineering the technology of the future.”
What makes cold fusion reproducible?
In 1989, Dr. Stanley Pons and Dr. Martin Fleischmann, world-renowned in the field of electro-chemistry, announced their discovery: the creation of an enormous amount of heat, a nuclear-power sized heat, but generated from a small tabletop electrolytic cell using a piece of palladium metal in a glass of heavy water, a type of water made from sea-water.
Their claim was so great that, after describing the apparatus in a news conference on March 23, scientists of all stripes around the world rushed to reproduce the experiment. Unfortunately, they met with few successes.
In the Groks Science Show of May 2009, hosts Charles Lee and Frank Ling interviewed Dr. Michael McKubre, a researcher at SRI International, along with Dr. Irving Dardik of Energetics Technologies, on the then-current status cold fusion science, and Dr. McKubre described how difficult the initial “simple-sounding” experiment was to do, even as an experienced electro-chemist.
In fact, back in 1989, estimates for the initial reproducibility of the Pons/Fleischmann effect ranged between 5-10%. This means that about 90-95% of the scientists who attempted to re-create the Pons/Fleischmann experiment did not succeed. Nothing happened. No heat. No particles. Nothing.
It was this lack of reproducibility that contributed to the now unfounded belief many scientists hold, still to this day, that Drs. Pons and Fleischmann were mistaken in their measurements, and in the worst case, that their results were fraudulent.
But, the few percent who were able to successfully re-create the experiment, and witness the nuclear fusion-sized energy-effect in their little glass beakers, were hooked, for they knew what this discovery meant.
With a virtually limitless fuel of deuterium in the oceans of Earth to power an ultra-clean nuclear-sized energy source, for the entire planet, for tens of millions of years, and created in a small table-top device in your room, this technology would radically change the entire world. Civilization would finally move off of the chemical burning of hydrocarbons for the first time in history and all the associated problems that face our planet because of this oil-fueled civilization can be solved.
And so over the past 22 years, it is these few researchers who have continued to investigate the cold fusion effect, technically named low-energy nuclear reactions. And their ranks have grown, albeit slowly. Worldwide, there are dozens of labs conducting this research and their results, ignored and unpublished by the established scientific societies and agencies in the US, have grown as well.
But here at the end of 2010, cold fusion still has no theory to describe or predict the many effects. So what do scientists know? Here’s a few notions that are experimentally verified:
1. There is excess heat generated above and beyond a mere chemical reaction and on the order of a nuclear fusion reaction.
2. Particles such as Helium-3, helium-4 and tritium, which are normally associated with hot fusion, are detected, though in significantly smaller quantities.
3. The transmutation of elements is found to occur on the surface of the metal in what is called the nuclear active environment.
4. It is a many-bodied physics, not the one-to-one interaction that models hot fusion.
But perhaps the most exciting development in cold fusion research is that, at least for SRI and Energetics, the reproducibility rate has climbed to 73%! Meaning, when they set up the cells, and attempt to induce the cold fusion effect, they can make it happen 73% of the time.
So what’s happened? The last two decades of research point to two fundamental criteria.
First, for the reaction to occur, hydrogen isotopes (deuterium) must be loaded into the metal to at least 90%. This means, for instance, the palladium metal must be super-stuffed with deuterium atoms in an almost one-to-one ratio with the palladium atoms, causing the isotopes to crowd up tight together.
Secondly, these isotopes must then be induced to “move”. Dr. Irving Dardik’s Superwave stimulation, a fractal-type, nested wave, pattern-oscillation of electrical current, drives the deuterium atoms to move in particular patterns and this has been key to improving their reproducibility rate. “Directed in the proper pattern as input energy”, Superwaves act on the deuterium in a cohesive way.
Also, it must be acknowledged that the improved quality of the metal since 1989, needed to withstand the loading of deuterium and the flux of Superwaves, has been crucial to successfully implementing the experiment. The small piece of metal in which the reaction takes place must be designed and manufactured on the nanoscale and as nanotechnology continues to develop, materials science has been able to mange ever greater control over the design of metals.
Early experiments using any old chunky palladium could not be successful. Only the few random pieces of metal that happened to have a few spots with the proper conditions of a nuclear active environment were successful in re-creating the effect.
In that same interview conducted in 2009, Dr. Dardik boldly estimates that a reproducibility rate of 100% could be achieved within one year, although he admitted that a two to -three year time frame was more likely.
A year later, Energetics Technologies had moved into a new lab in the University of Missouri Business Incubator Park, and we look forward to their announcements.
Currently, researchers are operating under the hypotheses that loading a metal with deuterium and producing flux to move the atoms at high-rates will achieve a 100% success rate of reproducibility, and when that happens, a new technology will be ready to massage the planet, and humanity will be given a second chance at survival.
The stakes are so high.
In the words of Dr. Michael McKubre,
“I can’t think of anything more important for me to work on. If you have any talent, any ability, any ideas in this particular research area then I think you have a moral obligation to do it.“
“On the Relation of Hydrogen to Palladium”
Thomas Graham describes some of his first results investigating the properties of hydrogen-infused palladium in a paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 1869.
The link below opens the Proceedings book scanned to a .pdf by Google books in a new tab.
What’s really cool is the guy was a numismatist as well as a researching chemist – and Master of the Mint!
Enough revisions to go around…
A recent article Mercury serves up a nuclear surprise by Eugenie Samuel Reich and published by Nature, describes how the “discovery of a new type of fission turns a tenet of nuclear theory on its head.”
From the article:
Nuclear theorist Witold Nazarewicz of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville says that the study demonstrates the extent to which, more than 70 years after the discovery of nuclear fission, we are still learning about the process. “This is very important information for any model of the nucleus,” he says.
Nazarewicz says that although engineers’ practical knowledge of fission has progressed far enough for us to build nuclear bombs and reactors, “I don’t think we have a firm understanding of fission rooted in the interactions of the proton and neutron building blocks.”
At least there’s one thing nuclear scientists can agree on! Cold fusion scientists know a little something about revisions of the nuclear model.
When it comes to cold fusion, claims that “they are measuring the input power wrong” are just not going to cut it anymore.
A new model of nuclear particle interactions is required to encompass both hot fusion and low-energy nuclear reactions, and will be based on the many-bodied physics that takes place on the nanoscale dimension.
Perhaps now there might be some sympathy in the nuclear fission community?