Nov.29 Lattice Energy Presentation

Quote from Thomas Clarke

Let's see. The energy industry is approximately 5% of the 80 trillion dollar world GDP, that is maybe 5 trillion dollars per year.

LENR, if it exists as a scientific proof of principle, will almost certainly be able to capture most of this. It is so energy and power dense that the fundamental limits to application are nonexistent. That is, let us say, certainly over 1 trillion per year.

Remarkable. How does Mr. Clarke know what the "energy and power" density of "LENR" is? It appears that he is entirely looking at the nickel-hydrogen system, about which we have very little evidence. Rossi et al keep their work secret. Celani is a scientist, but anomalous energy from Celani's experiments has not been confirmed.

Much more is known about the palladium-deuterium system. The ash is known and has been correlated with the anomalous heat, and this has been confirmed by many, with very little contrary evidence. Yet Clarke leaves out something that is necessary for that investment money to flow in: reliability. The FP Heat Effect is famously unreliable. What seems to be the same conditions, sometimes heat, sometimes not. Now, this is reasonably well understood. Back up.

Energy density. A major reason that Pons and Fleischmann claimed nuclear reaction was the energy density, they were producing more energy than they could explain by chemistry, by far, and they were chemists of high competence. Yet they believed that what they had found was a bulk effect. It isn't, and we know from where helium is found. Roughly half of the helium in an FP-type experiment (if we assume the deuterium fusion Q) escapes with the generated gases from electrolysis, or is found in the gas in gas-loaded experiments. Where anodic stripping has been used (two experiments, plus the mysterious Morrey collaboration, long story), no helium remains in the bulk, it appears. Helium would stay in the bulk if generated there.

So, being a surface reaction, the energy density is even higher. However, if the effect cannot be reliably produced, because we still don't understand exactly what is happening and even if we did understand, it might still be very difficult to create the necessary conditions, there is no easy path to commercial application, until reliability reaches some level. It is not there with palladium deuteride, and if Rossi actually has something real with nickel hydride, he may well not have solved the reliability problem, it would explain much about the history of Rossi's claims and announcements.

People who wanted to know hired experts to investigate cold fusion. The experts have concluded it's real. But those who hired them are not throwing large sums of money at CF. Why not? Well, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent without much progress on reliability.

The way forward is obvious: basic research, not aimed at commercial application, but aimed at understanding the effect. I call that Plan B. Plan A is that we sit around and wait for Rossi or someone to release a commercial device. It might happen.

And, then, again, it might not.

Fleischmann thought that to develop LENR would take a Manhattan-scale project. That's not going to happen until basic science questions are answered first, and the funding to do that is far smaller. But has been very difficult to obtain, anyway. That is changing. It will take some years, my sense, for Plan B to generate major fruit. Unless there is that Manhattan-scale project. I'm not seeing that the ground has been prepared for it yet.

Nevertheless, I do estimate the lost opportunity cost for every year that commercial application of cold fusion is delayed at about a trillion dollars, which would then devalue as an estimate of the probability of practical impossibility. From what I know, I'd estimate that at less than fifty percent, because the effect is real, that's solid from preponderance of the evidence, so the issue is application, the reliable creation of what Storms calls Nuclear Active Environment, and the maintenance of it. It might become possible to "print" NAE, this is nanotechnology, but first we have to know what it is! There are probably critical dimensions of what Storms calls nanocracks.

From SPAWAR infrared imaging of an active cathode, and from other evidence, the surface as a whole is also not the active site, small regions light up. So energy density is even higher.

Quote

Currently the amount of money spent on it globally is miserly, maybe $50M per year if you include all the long-running scams research companies like BLP. 0.05% of the potential.

I agree, commercial interest is validation. I'm confidently expecting, on the basis of Gomp's contribution, that we will have real (not one-man-band do PR and hope to get further investment for licenses, vapourware, etc) companies operating within a few months. Or, if the technical difficulties making product are great, but scientific proof of principle is established, I'd expect something akin to the moon race (also technically challenging) where private companies and governments compete to be the first to get this new energy source properly working.

Rossi has, I suspect, succeeded brilliantly according to his plan. I tentatively assume that he did find a way to generate some heat, he found a protocol that works. He needed to attract sufficient attention to gain funding for development, and possibly believed that making this reliable was just around the corner. That could go on for a long time .... in any case, at the same time he needed to discourage competition, so he has, again and again, made himself look like a con artist, a complete clown. He keeps it all on the edge.

Many people with high knowledge of calorimetry, for example, have offered to assist. He has always rejected this, instead collaborating with the Lugano circus. Looks like he has received the funding he needed. Rossi has generated many red herrings, hints that, if followed, would waste enormous amounts of time. Personally, I don't trust a word that he says about his work. However, I think it unlikely that he's an actual fraud; he can say whatever he likes to the public, people don't understand this. It is not illegal to claim that you have something when you don't, as long as you don't actually defraud someone like an investor. If you tell investors the truth under NDA, you'll be legally covered, and they won't reveal what you disclose unless they feel cheated, in which case they might very well violate an NDA, as happened with Defkalion.

Basing an assessment of LENR on this mess is foolish. I'm privy to the private discussions of LENR scientists, and opinions about Rossi are quite mixed. Nobody really trusts him. Some think he more or less has what he claims, some that he is a complete fraud. Without truly independent confirmation (not the Lugano farce), there is no way to tell.

But we wanna know! And so we get massive public discussion, hanging on every word from Rossi, trying to infer the truth from smoke.

(MFMP is actually working to confirm/disconfirm claims, good for them, and PdD work is difficult and expensive, so it has all been NiH; I am not convinced that we have one truly reliable report of significant heat from NiH. Rossi reports lots of heat, but it's not possible to confirm it.)

Quote

Umm... I wonder why that is not happening. I know, it is is all a MIC conspiracy, made possible by those hidebound scientists who hate doing new science that would benefit the world and give them personally Nobel Prizes!

Nobody gets a Nobel Prize for confirming research that took place twenty years ago. Basic confirmation work is normally done by graduate students, and the first time that a grad student's PhD thesis was rejected because it was about cold fusion, there went that pool of labor. This is all well known, no "conspiracy" needed, just a "cascade," a social science phenomenon.

At times there have been forces operating largely behind t he scenes to suppress cold fusion research. The Washington office of the American Physical Society was involved in this, and some of it came out in legal documents. Why would they do this? There is a very obvious economic incentive, hot fusion research is about a billion dollars per year. That's the salary of a lot of particle physicists, and experts with plasma. The FP Heat Effect, if commercialized, will not use many physicists. It will almost certainly use nanotechnology, chemistry, materials science. So if hot fusion research shuts down, there goes a lot of jobs for physicists. There goes the income of some major research institutions.

Mostly, though, this is sheer inertia. Once the story of "nobody could replicate" was established firmly, such that newspapers repeat it at the beginning of every article, even though it wasn't true by the end of 1989,

When is "replication failure" failure to replicate and when is it disconfirmation? The 1989 DoE review was a setup for failure. What it found, though, was only "evidence is not convincing...." so, governmental review. One might think that it would set up due dilligence. I.e., if evidence is not convincing, how would we know? The DoE spent a lot of money in a rush, but not tallowing time for experiments to mature, read the MckUbre paper on state of t he evidence in the February 25, 2015 issue of Current Science. It is as if it was all or nothing. And it was. The panel was a cold fusion killer, and the evaluation would have been worse if a certain Nobel Prize winner had not threatened to resign.

Sanely, the DoE would have established a desk to monitor developments if the field, and to encourage funding of basic experiments to answer open questions. In fact, both DoE reviews recommended funding, and the second time it was actually unanimous. Such funding never happened through the DoE. Why not?

It appears that the DoE did not follow the recommendations of its own expert panels,. Conspiracy? No, simply ordinary politics.