By Thomas Blakeslee
May 3, 2011
I spend much of my time debunking the free
energy fantasies of my less technically competent friends. Wishful thinking
makes many believe that cars can run on water after seeing a brief youtube video. Lately, however, I have been undergoing an
exciting paradigm shift.
Remember the “cold fusion” fiasco of 1989? Well, I have come to realize that it
wasn’t what it seemed at all. Denial, groupthink, dirty tricks and easily
manipulated media combined to create an historical injustice. Two decades have
been wasted virtually ignoring this game-changing discovery. Today’s
environmental disasters, expensive energy and oil wars could possibly have been
avoided. I’ll say more in a moment about what really happened in 1989, but
first, let me tell you what got me started reexamining what I thought I knew
about cold fusion.
You probably think that 4700 watts of clean, radiation-free power from a three
cubic inch reactor sounds like yet another impossible hoax. But this was a
third iteration demo, designed to satisfy skeptics of two previous demonstration at the prestigious
Their written report ended with: “Any
chemical process for producing 25 kWh from any fuel in a 50 cm3 container can
be ruled out. The only alternative explanation is that there is some kind of a
nuclear process that gives rise to the measured energy production.” They also
noted that you would have to burn 3 liters of oil to produce 25 kWh. There has
since been another confirmation.
The inventor, Adrian Rossi, is very accessible on his blog and has said that
more than one hundred of his 4.4 kW reactors are running in four countries. He
plans to ship a larger unit in October that produces one MW of hot water. It
consists of hundreds of the small reactors in series/parallel mounted in one 2
X 3 X 3 meter box. It weighs two tons. The proprietary nanopowdered
nickel fuel will be replenished every six months. Everything has been financed
using Rossi’s own money and the customer will pay only when satisfied.
Rossi is an inventor and businessman who decades ago noticed excess heat
effects while working with a nickel catalyst to synthesize fuel from hydrogen
and carbon monoxide. Using Edison-like experimental techniques, he soon learned
to control the heat production. He even kept his factory heated for two years
with a prototype reactor. More than two thousand prototypes were built and
destroyed in refining the design and learning how to control and scale up the
reaction.
Researching the science literature, Rossi soon found Dr Sergio Focardi of the
The press reaction was muted in
Still, the silence from the
Nickel is plentiful and cheap and so is hydrogen in the tiny
amounts used. Nickel is so plentiful that energy becomes virtually free.
Rossi’s reactor is very simple in principle. Powdered nickel and a catalyst are
simply heated to about six hundred degrees centigrade in a stainless steel
chamber filled with pressurized hydrogen. At a certain point, the gradual
heating starts accelerating due to nuclear reactions in the metal lattice. The
heating resistor is backed off to keep the reaction going at a steady state,
with about 15 times more heat output than input. Much higher ratios are
possible but can be unstable and dangerous. This is why the 1-MW plant will be
built using hundreds of smaller modules.
The reactor is enclosed in a lead shield because some radiation
is, unpredictably, produced during operation. However, the spent fuel is not
radioactive but contains copper that has transmuted from nickel in the nuclear
reaction. The lack of dangerous radiation drives hot fusion experts crazy, but
clearly there are things happening that are not covered by the equations used
in hot fusion. Obviously, quantum mechanics needs to be rethought to include
these reactions.
There are many proposed theories. Biological processes have been found to
produce transmuted isotopes
without radiation. Also, tritium sometimes comes out of volcanic vents
from unknown reactions inside the earth. Clearly, the physicists have more to
explain if they will just open their ears. Here is an equation they should
study carefully:
Groupthink + Denial = Environmental Disaster + Expensive Energy
+ Wars
Groupthink can make us totally irrational. The dot-com bubble
and the housing bubble are examples of renowned experts becoming completely
blind to facts that are now obvious in hindsight. Making a lot of money tends
to blind us poor humans to clear evidence that we are living in a fantasy
world. The consequences can be terrible.
Nuclear physicists in 1989 were riding a bonanza of tens of billions in
government research money for the development of hot fusion reactors. After
several decades of hard work, they were still far from achieving break-even,
where output energy exceeds input energy. Just as the next round of
appropriations was assured, Fleischmann and Pons came along with the
announcement that they had already achieved excess heat output without
government support and on an inexpensive desktop setup.
Denial was immediate. MIT and Caltech, who had been leaders in hot fusion work,
immediately went to work “trying” to replicate the experiment. In just five
weeks Caltech announced negative results. At a May 1st
1989 APS meeting in Baltimore, two thousand physicists gave a standing ovation
to the Caltech team’s presentation. A lynch mob mentality, combined with
denial, turned the exciting discovery of cold fusion into an enemy.
MIT helped set the tone by arranging a front page story in the
Boston Herald on the day of the meeting with the headline, “MIT bombshell knocks fusion “breakthrough” cold.”
The story was an interview with leaders of the MIT fusion lab that accused
Fleischmann and Pons of fraud. The charge was later denied but tapes of the actual interview
confirm what was said.
MIT further disgraced itself by altering data in its failure to
replicate study. This was discovered two years later by MIT employee Eugene Mallove, who found copies of the July 10 and July 13 drafts
of the paper. The July 10th version had a graph that clearly showed excess
heat. In the July 13 version the graph was redrawn to show no excess heat. The
atmosphere at MIT, as shown by a “Wake for Cold Fusion” party (before the data
was analyzed) and t-shirts and mugs offered by the plasma fusion lab, was
hardly impartial.
To this day, denial reigns among most of the guilty parties of this travesty.
The Department of Energy, Nature magazine, Scientific American, the American
Physical Society, the U.S. Patent Office and many of the world’s top physicists
still cling irrationally to the belief that cold fusion is junk science. Of
course, this is how denial works: We protect our belief system by quietly
stepping around the “elephant under the rug.” As long as a majority of our
group backs us up, our view of reality remains grossly distorted to preserve
the group-think consensus. Global warming deniers do this every day.
The Fleischmann-Pons announcement should have been the start of a new era of
cheap, clean energy that would have saved us from the financial and
environmental disasters and wars caused by fossil fuel energy. Instead, denial
and dirty tricks caused us to waste 23 years and tens of billions of dollars on
failed nuclear projects as though nothing had happened. The Presidents 2012
budget includes $2.5 billion for such
projects. The first DEMO hot fusion plant is currently scheduled for 2033.
A surprising natural process was discovered in 1989 that can provide us with
clean, essentially free energy. It clearly conflicts with the current consensus
understanding of quantum mechanics that works nicely for hot fusion reactions.
It seems reasonable to try to improve the theory to accommodate this new
reality, but denial has instead tricked many good scientists to try to “shoot
the messenger.”
The time has come to admit the mistake and get busy trying to
improve our understanding so that we can perfect this amazing new technology.
We have spent $20 billion and 55 years trying to reach break-even with hot
fusion. Time to give cold fusion a chance.
There have been many painful scientific battles in the past over paradigm
changes, but truth has a way of prevailing eventually. Cold fusion work has
continued under the radar using the more accurate term “Low Energy Nuclear
Reactions” (LENR.) Shunned by the establishment, supporters of LENR have
created their own journals and meetings. Much progress has been made.
The reasons for the initial difficulty in replication of excess
heat have been identified and the amount of excess heat has increased. By 1995
there were 21 published replications
showing excess heat of up to 205 watts. Strangely, the press lost interest
after the initial media circus. The media’s face-saving denial has left most
people with the impression that cold fusion is still dead. In 2009, 60 Minutes broke the
silence and did an excellent update. But the rest of the media simply ignored
it and focused instead on less risky reports on newsworthy items like rising
gasoline prices.
Annual conferences have continued. A weeklong working demo of LENR was included at
the tenth ICCF conference, which was held in 2003 at MIT. The power output was
2.3 times the power in. The most recent meeting was held in
By using nickel and ordinary hydrogen, several researchers have
significantly increased energy output and
reduced costs. In 1992, Thermacore,
a
Now that Rossi and Focardi have shown
what can be done, expect to see a flurry of new announcements. New technologies
tend to take forever to totally debug, so it won’t be surprising if the October
delivery is delayed. There are several other companies such as Lattice Energy LLC, Blacklight Power, Brillouin
Energy, and Energetics,
who have announced product plans to the press and then gone silent.
Silence is not necessarily a bad sign, as the Bloom Box
demonstrated. My bet is that we will have some amazing surprises within a year
that will be a wake-up call, just as
Some excellent videos to watch: 60 Minutes, one
hour movie.