When Silence Becomes Betrayal

9 comments

Posted on 19th February 2012 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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Sent to me by long-time reader Peter Hunt.

The Suppression of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions

Our national scientific organizations, from the Department of Energies multiple labs to NASA and the prestigious Naval Research Labs all recognize that a new clean and low cost mechanism for producing energy has come into being. It exists it is replicable and has broad applications. This new evolving science of energy production, which had it’s start with two electro Chemists, Fleischman and Pons back in 1989 holds the potential for near to unlimited clean, inexpensive and thermal power.

The technology, which is as of yet not fully understood, now travels under multiple names of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR), Lattice Assisted Nuclear Reactions (LANR) or the old moniker of “ Cold Fusion”.

For validation and the dimensions of the potential impacts see the official NASA Video:

http://technologygateway.nasa.gov/media/CC/lenr/lenr.html

Or their three sets of Power Point presentations which were released this last Fall under a Freedom of Information request:

 http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/12/04/slides-from-sept-22-nasa-lenr-innovation-forum-workshop/

Add to this the technical validation of Shell Oil and BP ( Amoco) which were conducted in 1995 and buried only to be recently released. Then there is the ten years of Technical Papers by the Office of Naval Research and the peer reviewed Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science which has been around for several years.

This phenomena of LENR holds the answer to climate change problems, in that it produces no greenhouse gases, fossil fuel depletion and escalating costs, with no troublesome by products. It utilizes the reaction of elemental Hydrogen and Nickel rather than the historic use of Deuterium and rare Palladium, which were the initial materials of Fleischmann and Pons. This use of metal hydrides consumed in exceptionally small quantities do not pose raw material problems and the conditions of reaction are mild in terms of temperature and pressure.

In short it is clean, cheap and simple in fabrication so that it could be used at the household level for huge savings in heat and power under what is called dispersed generation. Close to free energy. The step up to electrical production from this near to unlimited heat source is not trivial but well within the spectrum of engineering and time using simple heat engines such as the Sterling cycle. Yes there is a good deal of engineerin g yet to be done to optimize the systems but little excuse for “ denial”.

Yet because of it’s disruptive implications to a high cost and polluting energy based economy our government refuses to acknowledge, discuss and much less support it’s development with public funds. Indeed there is evidence of overt suppression on the part of our government while The Department of Energy and Climate Change of Great Britain acknowledges and is openly examining the potential benefits. Those in the know such as our government officials and privileged private sector members will, however, have the chance to adjust their personal behavior, portfolio’s to profit and protect themselves.

Under multiple names such as “cold fusion”, from the days of Fleischmann and Pons in 1989 to the current moniker of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions ( LENR ) or Lattice Assisted Nuclear Reactions ( LANR ) the phenomenon of utilizing the lattice of metal and Hydrogen as metal hydrides we can produce near to unlimited energy in the form of heat. The cost is low, the conditions mild in terms of temperature and pressure, and the rate of common materials consumption is amazingly low.

Secretary Chu of the Department of Energy is surely on the inside of these developments and has briefed and been briefed on it’s potential – yet he remains publically silent. For a scientist and a public servant this is betrayal. Let the insiders profit first – let the insiders protect their positions before a slow leaking to public knowledge stirs the markets.

Know that China, Japan, Korea , Italy and Greece are moving quickly on this technology and it’s engineering. They will in short soon eat our lunch because of overt neglect. Our reactant behavior will put us at an even further disadvantage in world competition.

Yes. J’accuse our government of betrayal of the public weal.

In a land of lies truth becomes treason. This from our temple of Science.

Peter S. Hunt Feb 16 2012



GAME CHANGER?

30 comments

Posted on 22nd May 2011 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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Very interesting article at the Oil Drum website http://www.theoildrum.com/. If cold fusion could be perfected and rolled out on a large scale, the peak oil dilemma could be significantly alleviated. Science is one of my weakest subject areas. It would be interesting to hear from our engineer/scientist members about the possibility of cold fusion.

The return of cold fusion?

Posted by Ugo Bardi on May 20, 2011 – 10:40am
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: cold fusion, energy catalyser, lenr, low energy nuclear reactions, plasma focus [list all tags]

Back in 1989, during the craze of the “cold fusion” announcement by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, a colleague of mine told me about the theory he had developed. It was based on quantum mechanics, he said, and it would explain everything that had been observed in cold fusion on the basis of an adjustable parameter.

Alas, in the real universe parameters cannot be adjusted at will as in the memory of a computer. Cold fusion proved elusive; I myself spent some months at that time with a home-made contraption that should have produced it; looking for the helium atoms that should have been created. I found none and I was not the only one who was disappointed. At that time, practically everyone who had a physics or chemistry lab available tried. But nobody could reproduce the claims about fusion taking place in an electrochemical cell, not even the authors of the claims themselves. So, the idea of cold fusion died out rapidly; surviving mostly in the dreams of crackpots and conspiracy theorists. A few serious scientists kept working on it; there were more claims scattered over the years and a whole new term “LENR” (low energy nuclear reactions) was coined to describe the field. However, after more than 20 years it seems clear that it is not possible to obtain useful energy by cramming deuterium atoms into palladium, as Fleischmann and Pons had tried to do.

So, it would seem that cold fusion as a way of producing energy is something made of the same stuff dreams are made of. That was my conclusion after having worked on it and the reason of my initial reaction of total disbelief when I first heard of the claims of having attained just that dream by two Italian researchers, Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi. Yet, in physics there are no absolutes: everything known can be disproved and, in the end, it is the experimental reality that counts. So, I noted that Rossi and Focardi, unlike Pons and Fleischmann, seem to be able to reproduce their result according to several reports that appear reliable. Then, a friend and colleague of mine went to visit Focardi. My friend is not an easily duped person and he went there ready to debunk the hoax. He came back rather perplexed, saying something like, “well, there may be something in this story.”

So, what is happening? Have we really made a giant step forward in our quest for a clean and abundant form of energy? Nuclear fusion, after all, is a common physical reality – it can be made to occur in the laboratory in a variety of ways and not just with the giant machine of the “ITER” project which attempts to reproduce the reaction that takes place in the sun. Another kind of fusion is well known and almost commercial: it is the version where a nucleus of boron and one of hydrogen react to form three helium nuclei in a high energy plasma. This system goes under the name of “plasma focus” fusion. It could be used to generate soft x-rays, or neutrons when deuterium is used in the place of hydrogen. But can it be used to generate energy? Some people claim that it can; but surely it has to be difficult because the technology was invented in the 1960s and so far no energy producing prototype seems to be around.

Still, the “plasma focus” technology may be the prototype of a different class of fusion machines which don’t try to fuse hydrogen isotopes together. They, rather, try to fuse protons (hydrogen nuclei) with heavier nuclei. Boron is the choice in plasma focus, but there are other possibilities. What Rossi and Focardi have claimed is that they have been able to fuse a proton with a nickel nucleus. It is a reaction that could, indeed, produce large amounts of energy. The problem with this idea is that there is a tremendous electrostatic barrier that prevents the positively charged proton from entering the positively charged nickel (or other) nucleus. Overcoming these electrostatic barriers in a practical device, usually, requires the use of high energy plasmas which need much more energy to be created and sustained than it can be obtained from fusion. Yet, if it were possible to reduce this potential using some kind of “nuclear catalyst,” then one could tap fusion as an energy source. It can be done and it has been done using exotic particles known as “muons,” which act as catalysts, indeed. It is an extremely complicated process which takes a lot of energy to create and maintain. Yet, at least it shows that “nuclear catalysis” is possible.

This is what Rossi and Focardi have claimed to have been able to do with their device that they called “Energy Catalyser”. They don’t claim to be using muons but, somehow, they claim to have been able to activate and maintain the nuclear reaction of hydrogen with nickel by providing much less energy than the reaction then generates. They claim that the EROEI of the device could be around 30 or even larger once the thermal energy generated by the reaction is converted into electrical energy.

So, have we found the magic trick to get abundant and clean energy? Could people go back to speak of electric power “too cheap to meter” as in the heyday of nuclear energy? Perhaps, but it is too early to tell. There are several details that just don’t click together in Rossi and Focardi’s claims (see, e.g., the article by Kjell Aleklett cited below). If we have to reconcile the energy catalyser concept with what we know of nuclear physics, we have to think of some truly exotic phenomenon that takes place in the reaction chamber. In physics, the experiment reigns, but the possibility of the experimental error is always present. That’s why no claim can be considered as validated until the relative experiment is independently reproduced. That will take some time, you can’t do physics in a hurry, but in the end we will know.

Some references on the “Energy Catalyser”

Kjell Aleklett’s article. http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/rossi-energy-catalyst-a-big-hoa…

Wikipedia has a good page on the story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer

More info

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-italian-scientists-cold-fusion-video…

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Andrea_A._Rossi_Cold_Fusion_Gener…

http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article3111124.ece

http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/

http://www.express.gr/news/business/434458oz_20110316434458.php3