Hello, I am new to the forums but I've became very interested in this topic after what was initially an unrelated line of work lead me to this field. Now I'm stuck wondering what should one do if one were to discover the secret to really making cold fusion small and practical. With the current global political climate, it's not hard to imagine that a small super-powerful reactor would quickly be turned into a means of escalating war to all new levels. Conversely though, it would end wars over energy sources and basically stop power-related pollution overnight. How would one release such a technology into the world without brutish fools going nuts with it the way they did when brilliant men like Oppenheimer gifted them with fission power? Leadership is not based on smart, wise, or compassionate; so I wonder what the best approach would be to introduce a revolution in energy production? Do you think it would just further entrench the establishment or would it be a new era of liberty to all of mankind?
When we solve LENR, how do we keep it from being abused?
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Welcome to the asylum! You ask some good questions, a few of which can be answered, though not definitively - there are many unknowns.
It is important to remember that anything can be weaponised. Even a stick or a stone. Modern weaponry is by and large a force multiplier, it represents - when deployed at its maximum capacity to hurt - an unbelievably large stick, the heaviest imaginable stone.
The question of 'how can we introduce a new energy source to the world without causing harm' is one that has been asked over and over through the centuries. Basically there is unlikely to be any kind of benign framework of legislation that successfully promotes beneficial deployment and minimises risk. The market will decide who gains and who loses, as ever.
To turn to your last questions, the world faces much bigger and closer dangers than the deployment of a clean and inexhaustible energy source. For now I will exclude the usual worries about asteroid strikes, nuclear war, and global pandemics. Artificial intelligence presents some real and present dangers - over the next 10-20 years AI is destined tip almost everything we now consider normal up-side down. There is another risk you may not have heard of which is posed by a new kind of electric rocket motor. The EM drive. Lengthy technical discussion of this completely new way of powering spaceships (and even helicopters and passenger planes) would be unduly OT here, but while it is currently too feeble to be dangerous the pace of development suggests that within a generation it would not be beyond the wit of a group of bad actors to develop kinetic energy weapons - silent missiles that could leave the earth and then return at unimaginable velocities to strike a hammer-blow anywhere. The unbelievably large stone I mentioned earlier.
Finally, there are two topics that we moderators decided this forum will never mention except in passing. Politics and climate change/GW. We consider that these topics are outside our brief, so please respect it, there are plenty of other forums where these two topics are both welcome and appropriate.
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The usual way to avoid some technology being abused is to spread it, exploit it as counter weaponry, as shielding, as weak player defense, as deterrence to violence.
the risk of spreading technology to the weaker is that it may allow a nut to defend himself. Consider you are name Donald trump, which nut would you fear to be able to defend itself from you totally justified force : North Korea, Iran, Syria, Russia, China, France, Mexico, ...
technology, when spread, is a truly and awfully liberal tool, allowing group not to follow other's rules. It can help freedom of speech, like cryptography did, it can allow challengers like Amazon to break installed cartel like big mall...
AI can be frightening to marginalize people, or can be considered as a way to help the mentally challenged to extend his brain, like a donkey extend the muscularly challenged to make commerce.
Another way to prevent wars and abuse, is increasing commerce and interdependence. One great example is China vs Taiwan. the two countries are very aggressive, but experts show they cannot make a serious war, as they supply chains are intertwined so that bombing Taiwan or Shanghai would ruin Shanghai and Taiwan immediately.
LENR like diesel engine, can introduce a revolution in international commerce, intertwining more economies, making countries like Iran, EU, US, Mexico, Venezuela, Russia, unable to make wars.
If we have to fight for something in LENR (same for AI) it is
- to spread the knowledge to everybody (publish patents, publish papers)
- to ensure that if the IP is to be paid, there is enough competition between IPs so that everyone who benefit can buy it with his benefits (no need to be free, need to be sharing the value with IP holder). No locking IP.
- to develop technology that match with small player needs, to downscale the technology in term of size, of price. the counter example being the nuclear industry (modular reactors is a good move, insufficient).
- develop applications of LENR that empower weak commerce actors (say the African farmer, the Indonesian manufacturer, the French cooker), and weak countries, zone, industries, weak minorities, so they can face big superpower, cartel, corps, and discriminating majority.
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Every technology is being abused and you have to be prepared for that.
Should we limit social networks because apart from bringing people together they also used for lots of bad things? Cars also kill people. Space ships pollute atmosphere and space. And so on.
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It's an interesting philosophical question for sure. Yes, anything can be turned into a weapon, recent technology even more so because it can be spread much quicker and farther. There's no way of knowing if youe discovery will do good or bad but here's my take on it: Yes, everything can be weaponized. Technology isn't good or evil by default, we as humans make it so. And it is our resposibility as scientists to find more good ways to use something than evil ways.
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Nothing can stop technology from being abused, but laws and regulations can limit abuse. See my book, chapters 11 and 19:
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First, LENR can produce muons as one of its energy output formats. Muons have their uses but I can only think of creating defensive weapons from them
See
Next, LENR can produce transmutation of elements. This might be used to produce transuranic elements and/or U235 enrichment to form nuclear weapons. But this is nothing that an uranium mine or a laser cannot do today. Of course the muons can counter this using a defensive anti nuclear shield.
LENR would require that nuclear energy be removed as a power production option because a muon beam could destabilize a nuclear reactor as happened at chernobyl. you might use it to destroy nuclear powered naval vessels of nuclear bombs carried by planes in the air or nuclear tipped missiles coming from space..
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First, LENR can produce muons as one of its energy output formats.
Except that has never been observed. These are special muons, willed into existence by Axil, the way God created the heavens and the earth.
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Except that has never been observed. These are special muons, willed into existence by Axil, the way God created the heavens and the earth.
Holmlid has observed them. Nobody else has looked.
One more thing...
In the SEM micrographs that ME356 has supplied that shows transmutation activity of his fuel. The carbon base that the fuel is placed on shows a lightening in shade. This is do to an increase of the atomic weight of the carbon, The area the carbon that supports the fuel shows this lightening. The cause of this isotopic shift is not yet determined by it could be produced by muon emissions since no neutrons or gamma were detected.
See the SEM micrograph at this post
me356: Photos of AURA control unit
Also see carbon isotope lightening in these other SEMs from me356
me356: Photos of AURA control unit
Jed, can you honestly expect that this level of transmutation can occur without the production of subatomic byproduct emissions.
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This concern is at best, highly premature. Let's worry about preventing a thermonuclear war or a biological agent war started by the likes of North Korea or whatever it will be that replaces Isis. That will be more likely to cause serious trouble way sooner.
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This concern is at best, highly premature. Let's worry about preventing a thermonuclear war or a biological agent war started by the likes of North Korea or whatever it will be that replaces Isis. That will be more likely to cause serious trouble way sooner.
LENR might provide the ability to produce defensive weapons that might neutralize the bombs and missiles of any aggressive country. As a matter of conscience, Ii I were you, I would be concerned that this LENR tech supporting world saving defensive weapons would be suppressed by your incessant negative lobbying.
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It sounds a bit like a fuel cell. Would it have any advantages over that kind of tech? . I ask because I have developed a very robust hydrogen production system, ideal market being fuel cells.
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Great replies. Thank you for your responses. I promise that while I am very political, I will leave this firmly in the real of philosophy. I most certainly have no intention of promoting and political platform unless you consider wanting the best for all of mankind as a partisan view.
As for climate change, I don't think its necessary to bring that into it so no worries there. Pollution is a very real thing though and I think we can agree that LENR technologies offer a path to power production that doesn't introduce any poisons into the environment, regardless of whatever the climate overall is doing.
I truly worry though about the implications of AI as well. Especially if you combine advanced AI with advanced power technologies. Skynet-style drones wandering around with unlimited flight time is certainly not an impossibility. I have an idea for how to make a transistor that outputs more than just 0-1, but what that might lead to certainly worries me as well. I look back in history at naive men like Hiram Maxim, who seemed to believe his machine gun would make war too awful to contemplate, and it makes me cautious with ideas.
I'm not part of academia or the scientific community, so I don't have a good feel for how international collaborations truly work without major political interference(if they even do?). A couple years ago I didn't even have much interest in cold fusion. Then I was trying to come up with a way to simplify redox chemistry to bypass the need for reagents and just by chance happened to come across an idea that lead me to the Fleischmann-Pons experiment. I accomplished my chemistry goal, but I believe I also discovered a way to convert hydrogen into electrical energy(by removing nearly 100% of electrons) without significant heat or any neutron production. Its not exactly a generator or a battery in any traditional sense, but rather something of a hybrid. In fact, I believe the process works best at well below room temperature. More importantly I believe the device can be made quite small(car battery size, perhaps even smaller), and does not require any toxic substances. I've estimated it can be developed for under 2000 dollars, but I simply haven't had the money for the materials yet. Once I have the funds I will get a prototype produced as quickly as I can. It went from being an accidental discovery to a bit of an obsession.LENR can produce excess energy in a variety of differing formats, one of those being electron production from hydrogen. Rossi has found a way to produce excess output energy formatted as light, heat, and some electrons. There have been systems that produce relativistic shock waves involving neutral particles and electrons in useable amounts. The engineering to master how the output energy from LENR is formated has not been defined.
The path that your discovery might be taking could go through the creation of muons that decay into electrons. Invest in a cloud chamber to see what particles are produced by your device. If the hydrogen is disappearing, that means that the protons are being converted to other subatomic particles namely mesons. Mesons will eventually decay into electrons. If the hydrogen does not disappear, then your reaction is probably chemical.
me356 said that he has seen a large amount of hydrogen disappear from his reactor a matter of seconds.
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It sounds a bit like a fuel cell. Would it have any advantages over that kind of tech? . I ask because I have developed a very robust hydrogen production system, ideal market being fuel cells.
You may already have done so but you will want to talk to Toyota. They are starting to push hard to sell the fuel-cell powered Mirai (US name anyway) and possibly a fuel cell powered bus.
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It sounds a bit like a fuel cell. Would it have any advantages over that kind of tech? . I ask because I have developed a very robust hydrogen production system, ideal market being fuel cells.
The main advantage is that it takes just hydrogen and converts it to H+ and as the reaction builds it eventually produces helium. Once the helium is produced you have He++. Hypothetically it could then be tuned a bit differently and turn helium into lithium, and that in turn to beryllium, and so forth. It would require electrons be reintroduced each stage though and that is basically where the potential comes from. There's probably a point where the leakage current becomes so extreme that there's no way to keep the electrons separated and the entire thing would have a meltdown. I lack the formal education necessary to calculate all that. Like I said, I stumbled into this discovery purely by accident while pursuing another line of thinking. -
LENR can produce excess energy in a variety of differing formats, one of those being electron production from hydrogen. Rossi has found a way to produce excess output energy formatted as light, heat, and some electrons. There have been systems that produce relativistic shock waves involving neutral particles and electrons in useable amounts. The engineering to master how the output energy from LENR is formated has not been defined.
The path that your discovery might be taking could go through the creation of muons that decay into electrons. Invest in a cloud chamber to see what particles are produced by your device. If the hydrogen is disappearing, that means that the protons are being converted to other subatomic particles namely mesons. Mesons will eventually decay into electrons. If the hydrogen does not disappear, then your reaction is probably chemical.
me356 said that he has seen a large amount of hydrogen disappear from his reactor a matter of seconds.
I've checked out Rossi's work. Its certainly interesting conceptually, but I'm not sure why he'd turn down a million dollars to demonstrate it working. Maybe I am missing something? It certainly glows.
Nothing disappears. I just take the electrons and protons and send them to separate places and make it very hard for them to rejoin each other. -
The Safire project has produced helium from hydrogen using just a negative electrode and the walls of a cylinder providing a positive electrode with a DC current passing between the two electrodes. . Because of its simplicity, this reaction is different than any other one that I know about. It is so uncomplicated and uses just EMF to produce transmutation. The plasmatron produced overunity current flow in the same way. Your reaction seems to be very simple and uncomplicated and uses an ionizing method to remove electrons from the hydrogen.
Over the past 100 years there have been many people who have come upon a strange reaction much as you have and have failed to bring their tech to prominence. In order to raise your profile, contact MFMP for a third party test so that they can popularize it in order for you to get more backing and technical expertise.
What is the format of the overunity energy that you generate: heat, light, electrical current, something else? It sounds like the energy output is heat since you speak about meltdown.
Information on safire:
information on the plasmatron:
Surprising Energy From gases after an electrical discharge....1946
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I am certain that fusion of protium cannot happen on earth. Your reaction might be the same one that occurs in the sun's corona where huge magnetic fields generate heat up to millions of degrees C. This reaction is why the 11 year solar cycle causes the sun's energy output to vary based on that cycle.
As I have stated above, heat is not produced in many types of reactions, but transmutation always occurs. Magnetic field lines cause protons and neutrons to become unstable and a quark soup results. This process can be thought of as quark fusion. It is my bet that you are producing helium 3 just like Safire is doing.
