Alongside the ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference hosted by Tesla Tech, this year’s Natural Philosophy Alliance (NPA) Conference will have a variety of speakers on the philosophy of science as it broadens the boundaries of conventional thinking when they meet July 25-28 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S. The scheduled list of speakers is here.
The 2012 John Chappell Memorial Paper is “What Is Cold Fusion and Why Should You Care?” to be presented Friday, July 27 by NPA-member Dr. Edmund Storms, a veteran cold fusion researcher based in Santa Fe, New Mexico who recently released the paper with co-author Brian Scanlan. [source] A text is posted on the NPA website here.
Storms has recently presented a new idea naming the nuclear active environment (NAE) as a crack or fissure between atoms near the surface of the metallic lattice hosting the cold fusion reaction, also called low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR). The idea is described in the paper “Explaining LENR“, soon-to-be published in the forthcoming Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science Vol. 9. The unassuming title belies a heap of paradigm-changing notions as Storms narrows the possibilities for modeling the cold fusion reaction by using experimental results to exclude contemporary theories that do not uphold the twenty-three years of empirical data. [.pdf]
Formulated after a complete survey of the field, his recipe for the NAE derives from the commonalities of all observable data from over two decades of experiments. Unusual topologies are a feature of each cell design that successfully measured excess heat or nuclear products.
Storms' NAE supposes the regular atomic array of a metallic matrix is cracked and filled with hydrogen and electrons in this artist rendition.Storms believes it is these cracks, as well as the tiny spaces between thin-films, nano-particles, and co-deposition tendrils, where hydrogen nuclei and electrons can become trapped. When applied power in the form of heat, an electromagnetic field, or laser light, reaches just-the-right vibrational frequency for the stacked column of material, resonance, a characteristic of sympathetic vibration, instigates a “nuclear mechanism”, and the heat-generating reaction ensues.
In naming the NAE, Storms does not hypothesize on the nature of the nuclear mechanism, only that resonance turns it on. His goal is to give a recipe to start the reaction on-demand, so experiments and commercial products can be designed optimally, as opposed to the hit-or-miss successes so far.
When a definitive how-to for creating the cold fusion reaction is eventually published, the world will have the opportunity for a new age of green energy technology utilizing optimally designed generators that unlock the clean and safe power inherent in the fusion of hydrogen from water, causing a transformation of human culture far greater than even the digital revolution.
Artist's rendition of a crack stacked with hydrogen and electrons.
Peter Gluck, a long-time researcher in the field, asked Storms to respond to questions about his new idea and Cold Fusion Now posted their exchange here.
Currently, Storms is testing the recipe for creating the NAE at Kiva Labs in Santa Fe, with encouraging results. He will continue to test the hypothesis throughout the year, seeing if he can generate the effect on-demand, the determining factor in whether the idea has merit or not.
Cold Fusion Now’s Ruby Carat will attend the NPA conference to video Storms’ presentation and interview him afterwards about his research.
The NPA conference will be held at the Marriott Pyramid North in Albuquerque, NM alongside the ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference hosted by TeslaTech. More information about this particular event can be found at their site here.
What is Cold Fusion and Why Should You Care? by Edmund Storms and Brian Scanlan [.pdf] An earlier version of the paper was published by Cold Fusion Now in March here.
Explaining LENR by Edmund Storms soon-to-be published by Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science Vol. 9 2012 pre-print [.pdf]
Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear SciencePublications
Explaining LENR: Answering Peter Gluck posted by Ruby Carat June 11, 2012
2012 ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference sponsored by TeslaTech Home
There is much speculation on the nature of the cold fusion reaction.
What starts a nuclear reaction when hydrogen meets a tiny piece of metal?
Low-energy nuclear reactions LENRs do not occur often in Nature. We generally do not see spontaneous heat energy erupt before our eyes in ordinary material. It is a rare phenomenon and historically difficult to reproduce in the lab.
This is what has led Edmund Storms, a twenty-three year veteran of cold fusion research and formerly of Los Alamos National Laboratory, to speculate that the reaction cannot occur in ordinary material, but requires some special environment that operates independently of the larger metallic structure. He calls this special environment the Nuclear Active Environment NAE.
According to Storms, the NAE must be present for the energy-producing reaction to occur. His fullest survey of the field yet was summarized in the recently updated A Student’s Guide to Cold Fusion May 2012. [visit] In it, Storms has pushed the idea of the NAE further by proposing a model.
To reproduce the excess heat effect between hydrogen and various metals maximally and efficiently, the recipe on how to perform the steps must be clearly stated. What elements must we put together to initiate the power-producing reaction on demand?
This recipe exists experimentally for a few lucky leaders in the race to commercialize a technology. Labs like Blacklight Power, Brillouin Energy, JET Energy, LENUCO, Leonardo Corporation and Praxen-Defkalion Green Technologies all have recipes to initiate LENR with a particular key element which also happens to be a trade secret. Ironically, each of these successful laboratory breakthroughs uses a different theoretical model as a guide.
If there is no one definitive theory that tells us how to make cold fusion work for all the varied forms of energy cells and transmutation generators that have been discovered, why not go back to basics and look at the source of all that’s known about these systems, the experimental data?
And that’s exactly what Edmund Storms did, deciding that “Identification of the NAE can start by finding a single condition that is present during all successful LENR studies.”
So what environmental factor appears in all successful experiments?
All successful experiments have some kind of rough, broken topology in common. Cracks, crevices, or microscopic mountains of material built-up on a surface that create tiny canyons at their feet are all present in some form or another.
Cracks can form through repeated stress. Most metals used in cold fusion show cracks, if not until after repeated loading and de-loading of hydrogen. Thus, Storms’ idea of the NAE is absence of material, like a crack.
The material deposited on the surface electrodes from the original style palladium-deuterium Pd-D electrolytic systems came from contaminants both in the Pyrex container and the heavy water salt solution. The stacking of contaminant particles makes ‘hollows’ where hydrogen (deuterium) could be become trapped.
Slide from Navy SPAWAR Twenty Year History of LENR Research Using Pd-D Co-deposition showing bumpy surface where hydrogen can hang.Co-deposition techniques, whereby palladium and deuterium are purposefully deposited on a planar substrate have measured many transmutation elements. Upon examination, they are found to have many crooks and crannies, tiny caverns where hydrogen could have been trapped.
Thin-film electrodes have measured transmutation effects between the interfaces of the different layers, places that may enjoy a thin space for hydrogen to collect.
Nano-particle powders may be generating just the right-sized spaces between the tiny spheres to create the NAE.
Slide from Navy SPAWAR Twenty Years of LENR Research Using Pd-D Co-deposition showing mottled surface of electrodes.Storms visualizes the cracks as, perhaps, long thin spaces where hydrogen can stack up on one another with an electron shielding the positive-charges of the proton nuclei. [see top]
With the electron screening the positive-charge, the protons can migrate closer than they normally would. Of this arrangement, Storms says “This is obviously not a conventional relationship.”
Given the NAE of a crack, Storms is proposing a three-step framework to describe the reaction.
Storms 3-Step Model
1. The nuclear active environment NAE is formed.
2. The NAE is populated with hydrogen and electrons.
3. Resonance initiates the nuclear mechanisms that cause fusion.
Through some endothermic process, meaning it requires energy to perform, the NAE of a crack or space is created first. Then, hydrogen is introduced to the space, perhaps through pressure. After the hydrogen is introduced to the NAE and it’s all stacked up, an energy is applied.
Irving Dardik's Superwave pulse activates Energetics Technologies generator.The energy may be introduced as a Brillouin Q-wave or an Energetics Superwave, or perhaps, as a Letts laser-light. Simply heating the cell can add enough energy too.
Whatever the source, the added energy makes the hydrogen dance back and forth in step with the frequency of the applied pulse.
When the energy applied is at the resonant frequency of the hydrogen/NAE combination, then the nuclear mechanism initiates. The resonant frequency is determined by the size, shape and mass of the H-stack. But like Ella Fitzgerald singing just the right note to make the glass shatter, the resonant frequency applied to the crack and its contents will increase the response exponentially.
But what is the nuclear mechanism that ensues? Storms leaves the nature of that open at this time, though he considers the idea of some special type of matter forming, like a Bose-Einstein Condensate BEC, a Lochon, hydrinos, or Rydberg matter.
Whatever mechanism occurs in the third step to set-off the mass-to-energy conversion, he believes it is initiated by resonance. Further, as the resonance process turns mass into energy following Einstein’s E=MC2 equivalence, the energy dissipates not explosively, but by a emitting series of photons, light-energy, that over a period of time, both disperse in the atomic lattice and are focused and emitted along the axis of the crack.
Hydrogen has one positively-charged proton at the center. Deuterium has an extra neutron, tritium has two extra neutrons at the center. All have a negatively-charged electron orbiting the nucleus to make an atom.The energies of the photons will depend on the type of fusion reaction, which is itself dependent upon the ratio of hydrogen H and deuterium D in the NAE.
The electron which shielded the positive-charge of the protons in the stack performs double-duty as it is sucked into the fusion process, and occasionally, emitted back out as a Beta decay during the process in which tritium is formed.
Hydrogen, deuterium or tritium present at the ends of the stack would be available to interact with other elements, producing the observed transmutations.
JET Energy diagram of palladium atomic matrix when filled with hydrogen. The palladium atoms are bonded together through their outer electrons in what's called a lattice.In this model, energy can accumulate in the NAE through resonance without affecting the atomic bonds of the crystal lattice. It allows the nuclear mechanism to operate in an environment independently of the larger metallic matrix. There is no violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics.
Storms’ model gives testable claims along with a proposal on how to create the NAE and he’ll be working with colleagues in the coming months to test this hypothesis. Only experimental confirmation of a model will determine its usefulness in engineering energy-producing cells.
If Edmund Storms is right, and creating cold fusion is a matter of resonance, then the possibility exists that the transition metals need not be the only host to the reaction; any material could create cold fusion. All we need do is create the little space, add hydrogen, and apply the proper frequency, and there is clean, dense, portable, and next-generation energy technology that leaps above the hard-won trial-and-error achievements thus far, and the energy revolution we seek will be delivered.
A Student’s Guide to Cold Fusion
by Edmund Storms April 2012download .pdf
Abstract “Evidence supporting cold fusion (LENR) is summarized and requirements an explanation must take into account are justified. A plausible nuclear-active-environment is identified by ruling out various possibilities and by identifying an environment that is common to all methods used to produce LENR. When this environment is combined with a plausible mechanism, many testable predictions result. These insights and proposals are offered to help clarify understanding of LENR and to suggest future studies.“
Dr. Edmund Storms is a former Los Alamos National Lab researcher who began his career in cold fusion just after the announcement by Drs. Fleischmann and Pons in 1989. While investigating the claims with team members, including Dr. Carol Talcott, he measured the production of tritium, a form of hydrogen, from active cells thereby confirming that nuclear reactions were taking place in the small table-top device. The investigation of this phenomenon has occupied Dr. Storms’ attention ever since. He is the author of The Science of Low-Energy Nuclear Reaction, a 2007 summary of the field sufficiently detailed for use as a textbook. [visit]
Dr. Storms recently conducted a full survey of the field assimilating the progress made by researchers around the world since the last edition of the Guide. These advances have been added to the new edition, along with fresh insight and analysis.
His recent review of research has also provided him with a hypothesis for the form of the Nuclear Active Environment NAE, those special conditions within a cold fusion cell that allows a reaction to take place. The proposed NAE is outlined at the end of the Guide.
If the hypothesis proves correct, this will hasten development of cell design by providing details of the environment that the cold fusion reaction needs to initiate. Experiments are now being planned at Storms’ Kiva Labs to determine if the proposal is correct.
A Student’s Guide to Cold Fusion is a good introduction to the field of condensed matter nuclear science as it relates to low-energy, or lattice-assisted nuclear reactions. The first part of the Guide is accessible to the non-scientific reader, while the subsequent parts go into more detail, challenging the minds of even professional scientists.
A paper that seeks to give the interested reader some background on what cold fusion is and how one might put recent developments into context has been released by Edmund Storms and Brian Scanlan, both of Kiva Labs, an independent energy research company with labs in New Mexico and Connecticut.
Dr. Storms has been researching cold fusion, also known as LENRlow-energy nuclear reactions, LANRlattice-assisted nuclear reactions, and CANRchemically-assisted nuclear reactions, since the initial announcement by Drs. Fleischmann and Pons in 1989. Formerly of Los Alamos National Labs, he is the author of The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, a comprehensive survey of the field published in 2007 by World Scientific.
In one part, the paper takes special note of the difference between hot and cold fusion. Hot fusion produces dangerous radiation products, has cost tens of billions of dollars, and has not produced any viable energy technology over six decades of research.
“The circumstances of cold fusion are not the circumstances of hot fusion”, said Nobel prize-winner Julian Schwinger, before resigning from the American Physical Society due to their complete rejection of cold fusion research. Cold fusion does not produce radiation the way hot fusion does, nor does it use any radioactive or toxic materials.
Table 1 from What Is Cold Fusion and Why Should You Care?
[latexpage]In 1989, Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced results of their largely self-financed research into palladium-deuterium electrolytic systems. In one of the early patent applications, they included a graph documenting the surprising increase in temperature of a cell over time.
As a scientist involved in this research since that very day back in 1989, Dr. McKubre described some of the main features of this graph.
“This result, by itself, with no more explanation really, is sufficient – if you believe Martin Fleischmann – to convince you that there is a real thermal heat effect in a deuterium-palladium system.” -Michael McKubre
Acknowledged as one of the greatest electro-chemists that ever lived, there was good reason to accept Dr. Fleischmann’s, and his partner Stanley Pons’, data.
In the graph, the temperature begins in the upper-50s$^{circ}$ C, and then begins to increase at a steady pace, represented by the slowly climbing line in the graph, as their electro-chemical cell is held at constant power.
“You see the little downward spikes in the rising areas”, said Dr. McKubre, “Fleischmann and Pons ran their electro-chemical cells open, that is, the products of electrolysis, in this case deuterium D2 gas and oxygen O2 gas, leave the cell, so they have to refill the cell every so often with the amount of heavy water that’s left. So these downward spikes are the times once each day when heavy water was added to the cell to make up for lost electrolytes.”
In their paper that circulated after the 1989 announcement, some of the early Fleischmann-Pons experiments that created excess heat were described.
… standard additions of 1 ml of the electrolyte were made following sampling. Losses of D2O due to electrolysis in these and all the other experiments recorded here were made up by using D2O alone. A record of the volume of D2O additions was made for all the experiments.
—Electrochemically induced nuclear fusion of deuterium, J. Electroanal. Chem., 1989
The steady increase in temperature, punctuated by small, temporary drops, continues for days. Dr. McKubre relayed what happened next,
“All of a sudden, one day it goes down alot, and then it kicks up to a new level – it kicks up in temperature by 10 degrees or more. So all by itself, at constant input power, steady operating systems, the cell suddenly started to produce 15 degrees more temperature. There’s clear evidence of excess heat and it builds.
It builds up asymptoting at 100-degrees Centigrade, so it comes up very close to the boiling point, and then all by itself – and this all-by-itself is why its taken us twenty-two years to understand this thing – the cell switched off and went back to its initial trajectory.” -Michael McKubre
When the temperature “kicked-up”, the rate of change increased to about 6.4$^{circ}$ C higher each day, and rose parabolically as it got closer to boiling. After the big drop, the rate of temperature increase returned to about 2.2$^{circ}$ C each day.
What caused these sudden temperature increases, and temperature drops, has occupied scientists for the past 23 years.
“This is an electrode being electrolyzed in a heavy-water electrolyte”, said McKunbre, “a palladium cathode, the negative electrode. The line is rising, the temperature is going up in the cell at constant power. Now, electro-chemical cells will generally rise in voltage, so that’s not necessarily surprising or interesting.”
Continuing,
“All you need to do is wrap a calorimeter around that and measure the amount of heat to determine whether this is possible by any chemical scheme or not. And the answer is it’s absolutely not possible by any chemical scheme. This amount of heat is 100 or 1000 times more than you could get from the sum of all possible chemical reactions in that particular experiment.” -Michael McKubre
In his 2007 summary of cold fusion research The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, Dr. Edmund Storms described one early FP experiment using a 1-cm cube of palladium which “melted through the beaker and bench after an explosion stopped the current.” [p 128] In their initial paper, the Fleischmann-Pons team wrote “WARNING! IGNITION?” for that particular run. Had they experienced “heat after death”, a phenomenon whereby the cell keeps on generating heat energy even after it’s been unplugged, and the current to drive electrolysis is no longer applied?
The control of this particular reaction leads directly to “self-sustain mode” in the newer nickel-hydrogen gas-loading steam generators, leading to huge thermal energy returns that are safe and clean.
“This [early data] was available for discussion and interrogation”, said Dr. McKubre. “Thoughtful people looked at it and said, ‘My god, how can that possibly happen?'”
Unfortunately, for various reasons, some of which Dr. McKubre discusses in the lecture, many bright scientists did not reproduce the results. Dr. Edmund Storms related the irrationality of the broader scientific community in accepting their negative conclusions over the positive results.
“Accepting these negative studies as evidence against anomalous power being real would be like having many groups each collect random rocks from a beach, have the sample carefully tested for diamonds, and then when only a few diamonds are found, conclude that diamonds do not exist anywhere in nature because the observations could not be reproduced when other random rocks were examined. Such an approach would be considered absurd in any other field of study, yet it was applied to claims of Fleischmann and Pons.” Edmund Storms The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction [p 52]
This early data “was preliminary, as Fleischmann and Pons readily acknowledged”, and they had not at the time intended to make it public. Yet, it was this early data and graph that “triggered” all the work in the newly created field of condensed matter nuclear science since.
Dr. Storms wrote,
“Nevertheless, the excessive response encouraged intense studies in many laboratories and a willingness of a few scientists to acknowledge anomalous results. Without this over-reaction, such unexpected behavior would have been completely ignored as error. Instead, people were encouraged to report behavior thought to be impossible-behavior that now has been witnessed hundreds of times in dozens of laboratories.” Edmund Storms The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction [p 62]
This Early Data graph was dismissed by the mainstream science minds of the day. The small group of researchers around the world who continued to investigate the anomalous heat generated by these simple electrolytic chemical cells have done so despite isolation and derision from their less-than-curious peers. Now, major advances in this field are leading to commercial products which hold the promise of changing all planetary systems, social, economic, and ecological.
As this field develops from an obscure science to a worldwide technology, this graph represents a turning point, when humanity was given a second chance for a peaceful future, with clean, abundant energy for all, even if nobody knows it yet.
Dr. Edmund Storms, cold fusion energy scientist and author of The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, spoke to Cold Fusion Now last summer.
This segment has Dr. Storms discussing the idea of the Nuclear Active Environment, an idea that consolidates elements of the cold fusion/LENR/LANR/CANR reaction, through both geometry and processes, in an attempt to describe the reaction theoretically.
Alongside the ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference hosted by Tesla Tech, this year’s Natural Philosophy Alliance (NPA) Conference will have a variety of speakers on the philosophy of science as it broadens the boundaries of conventional thinking when they meet July 25-28 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S. The scheduled list of speakers is here. 
The 2012 John Chappell Memorial Paper is “What Is Cold Fusion and Why Should You Care?” to be presented Friday, July 27 by NPA-member Dr. Edmund Storms, a veteran cold fusion researcher based in Santa Fe, New Mexico who recently released the paper with co-author Brian Scanlan. [source] A text is posted on the NPA website here.
