James Martinez surprised Cash-Flow listeners on March 1 when he played a pre-taped interview with Dr. Edmund Storms just back from Chennai, India where the ICCF-16 took place. ICCF is a conference where researchers in low-energy nuclear reactions share their most recent results.
Dr. Edmund Storms is a long-time researcher in this field and author of “The Science of Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions“.
Download the .mp3
James taped the interview in conjunction with 137 Films crew filming their documentary on cold fusion. To be released in late summer, it is expected to make the independent film festival rounds.
Here are some excerpts.
James: “What are the new issues that are happening in cold fusion? What happened with that Italian discovery because that’s been written about quite a bit.”
Dr. Storms: “They [Rossi and Focardi] found a way of amplifying the effect to a level that makes it attractive as an industrial source of energy and people in the cold fusion field have been working towards that, but they had not achieved that level of heat production, and so this was both a bit of a surprise and a bit shock, but a bit of a kick to get people moving a little more rapidly now. And it looks like the phenomenon will actually have an application.”
James: “This is a major step then, would you not agree?”
Dr. Storms: “Oh yes, It’s a major step. It doesn’t change the reality, the reality had already been established, but it has moved the debate from the laboratory into an industrial environment, and it’s put the phenomenon on the map now. People, skeptics can no longer ignore what’s going on, it’s such a high level, and apparently quite reproducible, that there’s no doubt that it has the potential to really be a serious competitor for a primary energy.”
James: “So we’ve arrived, so to speak.”
Dr. Storms: “We’ve arrived. It’s interesting we’ve arrived in a different car than we thought we were. Cold fusion started out using deuterium and palladium, and then Rossi found that it worked quite well in nickel and light hydrogen.”
James: Regarding that, since I saw the 60 mins interview, and saw what the Israeli’s did over there in their lab, what did … the Italians do that’s different? Were they financed well? What made them be ahead of everybody else regarding this issue?”
Dr. Storms: “That question is a little difficult to answer. The contrast between the Israelis, Energetics, … they were using – just to give you a little bit of understanding – they were using heavy water, palladium in an electrolytic cell, and applying what they call Superwave that allows the palladium to get to a very high composition. They had worked with the Italians to create palladium that could achieve these high compositions. So they were getting success in a more conventional framework.
Rossi hit upon this somewhat by accident. He was using a nickel catalyst to explore ways of making a fuel by combining hydrogen and carbon monoxide and apparently, observed quite by accident, that his [apparatus] was making extra energy. So then he explored it from that point of view and, apparently, over a year or two, amplified the effect.
He’s exploring the gas loading area of the field. This is also a region, a method used in the heavy water, or the heavy hydrogen, system. But in this case, it was light hydrogen, ordinary hydrogen and nickel and what happens is quite amazing.
You create the right conditions in the nickel, and he has a secret method for doing that, and all you do is add hydrogen to it and it makes huge amounts of energy based upon a nuclear reaction.”
James: “Wow. Alright. I have a number of questions since you said secret. Are they going to be transparent with what they discovered? If I were them, I would tell everybody how they did it, or are they not doing that?”
Dr. Storms: “Well, you really need a patent, you need to protect your intellectual property. You want to be able to gain some economic benefit from the discovery. So far, they have not gotten a patent, and that’s always been difficult in the cold fusion field because the patent examiners simply don’t believe that it’s real.
So, until they get a patent, they’re not revealing how they do it. Now, they’ve been upfront about what they can do and what they promise to do, and so far, they’ve fulfilled these promises. Once they get their patent, then they promise to reveal how they go about doing this.”
James asked Dr. Storms a question from an unnamed listener who apparently knew this interview would be happening. The question?
“Some said this is LENR, not cold fusion. What’s the difference?”
Dr. Storms: “Well there is no difference. It’s purely a matter of semantics. There is a phenomenon, and that phenomenon allows a nuclear reaction to be initiated in a chemical environment, and it’s a very special chemical environment, it’s one that we don’t understand yet, we don’t have total control over it, so that it’s difficult to reproduce, although not impossible, it’s been replicated hundreds of times, so it’s real.
But it’s a process whereby the Coulomb barrier is reduced in magnitude, in a solid, by some kind of … oh what would I call it … chemical mechanism. It’s not chemistry, but it involves atoms and electrons, which of course apply to chemistry.
And so, what do you call it? Well it was called cold fusion by Steve Jones, and that stuck. And then later people said, you know, that’s not very accurate because you get transmutations, and it may not be fusion directly, so let’s make it describe a bigger area, so we’ll call it low-energy nuclear reactions [LENR]. I like the chemically-assisted nuclear reactions [CANR] description myself, but nevertheless, it’s all the same thing. It’s hard to believe that nature has only one technique for doing something so extraordinary.”
James: “As far as patents go for this subject matter, are you briefed on that all the time, are other scientists made aware of what’s happening with that, or do you hear about it later?”
Dr. Storms: “Well it generally percolates into the cold fusion chat rooms fairly quickly. There was a patent that was made known by Windom-Larson most recently, but that was granted, oh I guess it was actually filed back in 2005.
Very few are granted, and most of the ones that have been granted, I might add, are absolutely useless as patents because not only don’t they describe very well what is going on, but in the absence of any understanding, their descriptions are not implementable, you cannot take the patent and then do what the patent claims, which is what a patent absolutely requires. It has to describe how a person that skilled in the arts can go about replicating what the claims may be.
None of the patents do that, so technically, their not valid, and that ‘s a big problem, until somebody makes something that works, and then describes how they made it work and that’s where Rossi comes in, because he in fact does have something that works and once he shows how it works, he will have a valid patent.”
James then asked Dr. Storms what type of press did the Italians get on their demonstration.
Dr. Storms: “The Swedish newspapers, the Italian newspapers, the Greek newspapers, they showed an interest. The American newspapers showed none at all. It’s been on a number of blogs and talked about in a number of chat rooms, but no, it hasn’t reached a level of any serious importance to the American press.”
James: “Why do you think that is now?”
Dr. Storms: “Mainly because, it is institutionally the belief that cold fusion is not real, or if it is real, it’s so trivial, it’d make no difference to anybody. That’s institutional. It’s the myth that’s in, we’ll call it, the intellectual structure of the United States, and a number of other countries.
There a few countries where that’s not true, and Italy is one of them. The government there believes that it’s real, and they’re doing everything they can to develop it. The government in China believes it’s real an they’re doing everything they can to develop it.”
James: “So what is the problem? Regardless whether it was an American issue or an Italian issue, that should be all over the press here, and it’s not. It absolutely amazes me that this needs to be happening right now, what I’m doing. The press should’ve had this totally covered.
Well, what’s next for you? Are you going to be following what the Italians are doing, are you going to go to Italy and be working on it, and try to do what they’ve done and replicate it where you are?”
Dr. Storms: “Well, first of all, I haven’t been invited. Rossi is determining who’s going to watch this – he’s promised a demonstration in Florida that’s coming up in October. And there will be some people from the US government there watching, and hopefully they will be convinced that it’s real and that will change the attitudes.”
James: “So they still – after this entire time – can’t wrap their head around it!”
Dr. Storms: This obviously is not a rational world, and we, on many levels, do not have a rational government. It is very simple once you realize that this irrationality is present.
Yes, people are trying to replicate what he did. But in the absence of this secret addition, it’s all guesswork [refering to the secret ingredient Rossi is using as a catalyst]. And that’s been pretty much true of all the work in the field. We do not have a good theory, we don’t have a path to follow, and so people do a lot of random searches, and when somebody – I’ll use the analogy prospecting for gold – when somebody finds a nugget, everybody runs to the spot where that guy found the nugget and everybody starts to dig there. Maybe some other nuggets will be found, maybe not.
That’s what has made it easy for the skeptics to blow it off, and it’s made it easy for the government to pretend that it doesn’t exist.”
James then asked why was the upcoming demo is being done in Florida.
Dr. Storms: That’s where the factory is that Rossi owns. Rossi has business interests in the United States, he has a number of companies. He has a company in Florida and that’s where the cells are being manufactured.
James: “So they’ve [Rossi and co.] already started the process then?”
Dr. Storms: “Oh, yeah. The [recent demonstration] in Bologna was a single cell unit and it put out 10Kilowatts and it’s put out even more energy in other circumstances. He’s going to build a hundred cell unit in Florida, he claims, to try to run a Megawatt. That’s pretty difficult to ignore.”
James: “What do you think they’re going to be able to do of a practical use? What are they going to use it for initially?”
Dr. Storms: “Well, they’re planning to use this as a source of energy in a factory in Greece, and they’re making arrangements in Greece for this to be incorporated into an industrial application, an industrial factory.
It has to be done in industry at this level because we don’t know if it’s safe, we don’t know it’s characteristics, we just don’t know enough about it to put it into individual homes. This is what he says, and it’s quite rational. It has to be explored, its characteristics have to be understood in an industrial environment, so they’re going to do that in Greece.
Of course, he’s taking orders, and I’m sure there’ll be people from all over the world, where regulations are not so quite severe, and minds are more open than they are here, and they’ll buy units, and put them in their factories, and suddenly the cost of energy to those companies will go down significantly, and all of a sudden people will panic, and then there’ll be a stampede to buy these things.”
James: “The irony of the timing of all this now, seeing what’s going on in the Middle East right now, everything’s going up at the gas tank, people looking at other energy things, do you find this unusual, the timing of this? This could have happened five years ago, and right now, with the complete and total collapse of many economies around the world, suddenly these guys in Italy come up with something. Did that surprise you?”
Dr. Storms: “Well, life always surprises me. It always has these synergistic relationships happening all the time. No, it didn’t surprise me. It’s quite, what would I call it, simple justice. The system absolutely needs this, and suddenly it’s available. I guess it took both happening at the same time to change minds.
You have to be desperate enough to want to believe that this is real, and then you have to have a device that puts so much energy out that you cannot ignore it, and you marry those two things together, and the skeptics are just blown away.”
James: “If this is going to happen in Florida, obviously the press is going to catch wind of it, and if it is a private meeting for this demonstration, are you .. thinking that now all the big money people behind the scenes are going to get in on this deal and close it off, and compartmentalize it, and not give it to the public?”
Dr. Storms: “I don’t think that’s possible.”
James: “… because I don’t think you should have been cut out of it. I mean, you’re one of the guys that stood tall before anybody!”
Dr. Storms: “Well I appreciate that, but I’m not being cut out of it, and in fact, I don’t feel that I’ve been cut out of it.
I’m funded. We’re working to try to understand the mechanism and so we’re hoping to have a seat at the table when the final decisions are made. But Rossi is clearly in charge of his own discovery, and I wouldn’t find that unusual.”
James: “OK, well, listen, I’m glad that you’re back, I’m glad that you’ve told us this, I’m glad that we’ve covered it here. I want to thank you very much Dr. Storms for always being there for for me and helping me out, and making this a public issue, so thank you very much, much appreciated. We’ll be talking to you very soon. You may be surprised – we may hit Florida anyway!”
Dr. Storms: “Well James, I appreciate your efforts too, it’s efforts like yours that make it possible for people to find out what’s going on.”
For the FULL audio interview, go to the Cold Fusion Now Ca$h Flow page to download the March 1 Edmund Storms interview.
Related Links
Why is cold fusion rejected? by Dr. Edmund Storms July 1, 2010
Q&A with Dr. Edmund Storms by Ruby Carat June 27, 2010
So where do I place my order for the 1MW device..? Forget ‘off the grid’: BE your own grid!!
Spot on GROK! The future of all utility companies should be similar to the internet! We can all produce, we just need the network! Sign me up for a 1MW too!
IMO as the mater of R&D we should do homopolar approach as it involves magnetic and electric fields concentrically connected explaining it with Lorentz force law what again IMO is the natural “cosmic” principle of energy flow trough time to space and it is in direct connection with standing em waves and phase conjugation and four wave mixing.
Cheers
All this seeming confusion suggests the feasibility of cold fusion.
Despite the fact that the transition from doubt to accepting the validity of Rossi’s invention requires time, the challenges of economic crisis and increased energy prices depict an awkwardly appropriate timing for the world to look through a different prism; one that allows mankind to consider energy without worrying about its cost.
Why not entertain the consideration? Why not look into the future and expect a positive turn for mankind? We should have the maturity and psychological strength to unleash favorable expectations and look forward to a new energy era without worrying about negative possibilities; let them co-exist. There is no need to obliterate the spreader of good news without proof.
Western societies’ crisis has brought many face-to-face with a post capitalist conundrum linked to energy challenges and national uprisings. Societies will no longer be the same – so why not allow for virtually free energy to come into the scenario?
You say Greece is the source, so be it. After all, the origins of freedom of thought, the structure of our democratic processes all had to begin from somewhere. Although I dont see much activity in Greece itself, it is the day after that will be of interest. We will be looking at a completely new geopolitical and geostrategic political map, where considerations, alliances, VIP tit-for-tats, and so much more will have to undergo a face-lift.
We live in exciting times to say the least!
I was following the palladium/deuterium effect in the literature. With caution like everybody else. What put me over the edge in terms of credibility that it was nuclear was the CR-39 triple tracks. I also noted the reproducibility of the Arata gas loading excess heat effect. Although the radiation effects were convincing, the energy production was always still academicaly small. I knew about the nickel/hydrogen possibility but thought it was a longer shot. The Rossi reactor clearly indicates that this is the real deal. The abundance of fuel (nickel and hydrogen) indicates that once the patent is granted and details revealed all further research should take that direction. This is a world changing event.
The issue of patent concerns me – but will probably make the business people happy. Once the patent is issued, we will all know. So I guess that is why Rossi is so secretive. He wants to make money. Dont we all! Should I start trading Nickel? What will happen to the price of oil?
I want to understand why investor relations at Chevron, GE, Siemens, Honda, LG, etc. or policy analysts at the French nuclear centres in Grenoble, the European Atomic Energy Agency, and similar entities in UK, Germany etc – to say the least of DOE Dr Chu – and so many other to-be-affected – why they have nothing to say about it?
Is silence by these people an issue of buying time – a lack of awareness of what is going on – or, simple stupidity [sic]?
Ok, someone has to do some more research on how well prepared the opposition reaaly is.
We hear so much about these sorts of things yet nothing comes from it. The Howard Johnson motor for instance.
He had to show the patent office a working version before being grated a patent It reputedlt had an output power of around 300 watts. This would obviously be a commercially viable product. Where is it?
How-ever I am convinced Cold Fusion or LENR, CANR is the way of the future & wont cost the billions that has been spent on ” HOT FUSION”.
Cheers & keep up the good work u guys out there.
John McManus
Of course one would hope that this works. 6 months wait is really nothing. I would not sell your Exxon shares just yet!
As a PhD physicist, it is obvious that there exist forces such as the Casimir effect, and others that _could_ drive LENR. Some of the papers and experimental results look real, I just have not made up my mind yet. A proof based on 1MW would of course be a clincher, but just a few extra watts in an experiment repeated at Oxford, Berkeley and MIT would also convince me.
The way the LENR people tell it, the original Cold Fusion experiment works, but only occasionally, and no one can figure out why. So when big, busy labs try to replicate, they fail. That is the story, believe it or don’t.
Yes, and the most famous of them all – MIT – tried it an lied about the results. Interesting!
I cannot remember the exact moment I became converted from being a tired cynic, to being a frothy bubble of excited enthusiasm.
I think it must have happened in my sleep. Deep and mysterious things happen in your sleep. Otherwise why would evolution allow such an extremely dangerous loss of consciousness?
We can expect others to experience the same conversion.
Give them time.
Anyway I have been a thorn in the Australian Broadcasting Networks side over the issue. They will rue the day when their eyes rolled back in their heads at yet another perpetual motion machine nutter.
Would it be undignified to mock mercilessly?
How about a small titter?
A meaning eye roll?
Yes. That would be fitting. I have seen plenty and should get it right.
I have just learned about Placeholders in science.
They have a long and successful history.
Did Darwin know about the double helix? No. But he published his theory regardless. He used a placeholder.
Do we understand the nature of dark energy? No. But again we use a placeholder and publish the fact that the universe is expanding.
Do we understand the cause of mass? Does this prevent us from developing cars? No. We use a placeholder.
Ditto gravity. How absurd it would be not to develop airplanes because we do not understand how gravity works. We use a placeholder and move on.
How about magnetism? We describe its behavior but not its fundamental cause.
Heck, all of science’s foundations rest on Placeholders.
I am fond of saying that my god is not the god of the gaps. My God is the God of the vast echoing, yawning chasms.
Am I the only one troubled by the fact that Rossi has not submitted the E-Cat device to independent verification? He could do that as a black box under an NDA and a university or government test lab could do the tests. Why is he waiting until October to do that when he says he has dozens (in one article hundreds) of devices already built and tested?
In my opinion, the problem with E Cat is similar to the palladium experiments in that a wave of high pressure hydrogen is initially produced on the internal surfaces of the metal, followed by its realease with failure of the lattice structure (variation of voltage), and the termination of nuclear reactions. They seem to hesitate in producing long term experiments.