NASA partners with Global Energy Corporation to develop 10kW Hybrid Reactor Generator

Quote from Shane D.

IH did exactly what I and others wanted them to do, and that was to vet the Ecat. The way they accomplished that was ugly, expensive, and amateurish, but in the end they got it done. Thanks to them we knew for sure the Ecat did not work, and that Rossi was as dishonest as the day is long.

Now NASA is in a similar position to vet the Genie Reactor. They will do a thorough job of it, and in the end we will know if it works.

But at the *beginning* of the IH association, people used the association to give Rossi credibility, just as you did with NASA in the earlier post:

“Now they are working with NASA, and I would think they of all would have a good idea of the integrity of the GEC team they partnered with. … An out and out scammer like Rossi would have been noticed long ago.”

Notice the present tense. Nothing there about “will do a thorough job”. After IH had been with Rossi for 6 months people were saying an out and out scammer would have been noticed long ago. But it took a few more years, at least to convince the likes of you.

So, anyway, we now seem to agree that confidence in GEC should be postponed until evidence is available.

“And yes, I did learn something from Rossi, and no doubt you will keep reminding me of it.”

What are friends for?

@ Louis Reed,

Quote from Louis Reed

I am talking about the first month after the press conference. There were some physicists who were highly skeptical from the start, but they kept their peace initially. The initial reaction in the press and in mainstream science was almost entirely positive.

Yes, exactly, and the interest of mainstream science has gone beyond the first month, as indicated some years later by a protagonist of the first hour of the CF field:

Quote

From: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MelichMEbacktothef.pdf (ICCF4, 1993):

"Starting with the University of Utah press conference on 23 March 1989 through the end of 1989, scientists and their sponsoring governmental and private employers struggled to decide the validity of the claims. By November 1989 the overwhelming official and popular judgement in most of the world was that there was no validity to the FP claims."

This is why the CF initiative has changed its strategy, giving priority to the patent criteria rather than those of science:

Quote

Again from: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MelichMEbacktothef.pdf (ICCF4, 1993):

"There are two sets of criteria that have been in play from the beginning -the scientific criteria and those associated with patents. It was commonly assumed, particularly since the FPE was presented in a public press conference, that the most important criteria were those of science, yet a careful examination of what was made available in 1989 suggests that patent criteria were primary."

The Ecat initiative seems to have been the last, boldest and even most successful (from popularity and financial aspects) implementation of this same strategy.

Quote from Louis Reed

Rossi however serves the useful purpose to show that most of the cold fusion community is not qualified to tell the difference between good evidence and bad evidence.

IMO, most of the CF community is smart enough to know what evidences are required to demonstrate a production of kWs of excess heat from a tabletop device.

Quote

SPAWAR is not a breeding ground for crooks

I am not suggesting that anyone is a crook but notice that SPAWAR shut down Mosier-Boss's project presumably because they did not see sufficient merit in it to continue funding.

Quote

Now they are working with NASA, and I would think they of all would have a good idea of the integrity of the GEC team they partnered with. NASA has it's own scientists researching LENR, and most likely have been communicating with the same group for many years. It is a fairly small community after all, and over the years they have either heard of, worked with, or met each other.

BTW, OMG! WTF?! JWK's web site!!!! Done in 1984 and unchanged since? http://www.jwk.com/ And I could find no mention of LENR or GEC's reactor as I suffered through plowing around in it.

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An out and out scammer like Rossi would have been noticed long ago.

What do you mean? Rossi fleeced IH with comparative ease even though he should have been called out in 2011 or certainly by 2012. Shouldn't that have been widely noticed long ago?

As for GEC. what they promised to Guam makes no sense. Another case of attacking entirely the wrong problem to prove a technology.

Shane D. Know of any JWK/GEC joint papers on low energy nuclear reactions or reactors in general? Are there such papers?

Quote from JedRothwell

"The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors’ rejection of
submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of
impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science."

Just recently I french experimental physicist had to publish a paper that proves (by measuring) that nuclear mass is of electromagnetic nature in an engineering proceeding...

After 90 years of following the wrong path, with only halve of the math being correct and even assuming that the guv metric is correct, mainstream physics just survive in a taliban only mode. The built a kind of Kalifat, that tries to dominate the market place for easy working (CERN, Iter etc...) money.

Nobody of the standard model physicist sect ever could show a correct (= coincident with experiments) formula for the famous Yukawa potential. Reason there is no Yukawa potential. But the religion priest force you to cite this mantra other wise you can't publish.

Why do people (nuclear & particle physicists) that since 100 years never ever found a single formula that can correctly explain= predict something important, believe that they understand what they are doing?

Louis,

“If fission is to be exothermic, then there has to be an excess of neutrons (not counting alpha decay as fission). The increase in binding energy per nucleon resulting from fission is because of the long-range repulsive Coulomb force is compensated by additional neutrons as the size increases beyond mid-size.”

Starting from naturally occurring isotopes, fission is (hypothetically) exothermic in elements as light as strontium:

84Sr → 30Si + 54Cr + 717 keV (both daughters naturally occurring)

84Sr → 34S + 50Ti + 713 keV (both daughters naturally occuring)

Here’s zirconium, two places down the chart:

96Zr → 48Ca + 48Ca + 3005 keV (both daughters naturally occurring)

94Zr → 46Ca + 48Ca + 92 keV (both daughters naturally occurring)

These are the only exothermic (2-daughter) branches starting from naturally occurring parents; notice the pattern of stable daughters. The challenge here, of course, is that the lighter the parent, the more infinitesimally small the spontaneous fission cross section.

“Again, fission of a medium mass would not be exothermic (not considering alpha decay as fission). And the unstable products are not necessarily short-lived. Ni-64 to two Si-28 (half-life 153 years).”

Your 64Ni fission is not a good example, because the hypothetical transition would be endothermic by 33 MeV.

A better way to model this problem is to use the Gamow calculation to calculate the fission cross sections under various amounts of electron screening, to use heavier parent nuclides, and to allow alpha decay as a decay channel. I propose that platinum (present as the anode in nearly every electrochemical experiment), lead and mercury are better candidates. With the cross sections calculated, it’s possible to find the probability of the different possible daughters. My recollection (it's been a while) is that when you run the numbers using various amounts of electron screening, the fission daughters are either stable or have very short half-lives to stable nuclides.

It is important to include alpha decay in such calculations, both because it is a very similar process to spontaneous fission, and because it can potentially make sense of the heat-helium correlation.

“In any case, radiation associated with such unstable nuclides (even short-lived) would be highly specific identifying the nuclide unambiguously. I have not seen such claims.”

Another claim of speeding up fission (thorium-232) can be found here:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/0906.4268.pdf

In this case they used lasers to (allegedly) speed up the natural activity and measured it using gamma spectrometry.

"This choice of an example kind [Barker's patent] of makes the point. It’s not LENR. There are no nuclear reactions claimed."

I may have missed the gist of your point, but I think we make too many assumptions by concluding that Barker's (claimed) speeding up of spontaneous fission is not LENR.

"As for the patent, well sometimes patents are granted for claims that have not been realized, and considering that this idea has not been widely implemented and has not resulted in fame and glory for the inventor, it’s a safe bet this is one of those patents."

I will allow that. But the patent still provides the basis for an interesting set of experiments to attempt to replicate what he's describing; if he's still around, he might be able to help out.

"I don’t know if one should take seriously an inventor who thinks 2 of the 3 most important isotopes in nuclear waste are U-238 and U-235. U-238 is not particularly radioactive ... it says something about the inventor’s competence in the field, in addition to the point made by HGB."

If Barker implied in his patent that the remediation of uranium isotopes is important in the fission industry, I think the matter of his knowledge of the economics of the industry (or his too quickly writing a patent) gives only indirect information about whether he found something interesting. Scientists who require solid evidence of competence obviously may be scared away. But there are also good scientists who have more of an appetite for adventure. The important question, of course, is whether there is any substance to Barker's claims.

"Ah yes, nature contrives to make any unambiguous indication of LENR inconsistent with whatever mechanism might be at play."

That wasn't quite my point; I'm optimistic that if LENR exists, it can be nailed down in more than one way. The thing I wonder about is whether you're going to get novel nuclides along the lines you suggested and to which suggestion I responded.

H-G,

"This is stupid. Things cannot be subjected to an electric potential, only to electric fields. There is no electric field inside the terminal. It forms a Faraday's cage."

"William Barker's insights into electrostatics has not improved since his previous patent on the subject. The same goes for the patent engineer."

Ok. But is what Barker was claiming in the patent about the change in activity of uranium isotopes true, and can it be scientifically verified?

Quote from Eric Walker

Starting from naturally occurring isotopes, fission is (hypothetically) exothermic in elements as light as strontium:

OK. Yes, there are some exceptions. By virtue of the zigs and zags of the binding energy per nucleon curve, some lower mass nuclides can have greater stability with the same relative neutron excess, as in your examples.

But I think your idea that exclusively stable products make sense if the reactions are all fission is not consistent with the claims of more than 60 transmutation products in Parkhomov’s report from last year. I doubt you could explain more than a few (if any) of those claimed transmutations by exothermic fission. It seems most of them, if they were products of transmutation, would have to result from captures or induced emission of small particles, and in that case, unstable products would be more likely than stable. Certainly 60 products, all stable, is not plausible.

Quote

“In any case, radiation associated with such unstable nuclides (even short-lived) would be highly specific identifying the nuclide unambiguously. I have not seen such claims.”

Another claim of speeding up fission (thorium-232) can be found here: […] In this case they used lasers to (allegedly) speed up the natural activity and measured it using gamma spectrometry.

Here I was looking for claims of unambiguous identification of unstable nuclides from the radiation signature, and that’s not what this is.

But, whether or not there are ways to affect half-lives is not relevant to the objection I raised elsewhere. People are claiming ubiquitous transmutation in metal-hydride type LENR experiments, and therefore suggesting that radioactive nuclides could be rendered stable by transmutation. But transmutations of unstable nuclides are never actually claimed in these experiments, even though they could be detected with far greater sensitivity and specificity, thereby lending some credibility to the other claims of transmutation, which are largely dismissed as contamination effects. Accelerating existing decay rates in completely different experiments does not lend credibility to transmutation claims in these experiments.

Quote from Eric Walker

I may have missed the gist of your point, but I think we make too many assumptions by concluding that Barker's (claimed) speeding up of spontaneous fission is not LENR.

The chance that Barker’s claims have merit is vanishingly small, but whether you want to call it LENR or not, it has no bearing on the credibility of the claims of transmutations in metal-hydride experiments. My objection is that people who claim they can transmute unstable nuclei based on alleged transmutations of stable nuclei, do not demonstrate it in that context, even though it would be *easier* to detect and identify.

Quote

“But the patent still provides the basis for an interesting set of experiments to attempt to replicate what he's describing;

I disagree. If he’s actually claiming to affect alpha decay by putting the sample inside the Van de Graaf, then it’s complete nonsense as HG has said. If he’s claiming to use the electric field outside the generator, then it’s not exactly a novel idea to determine the effect of applied external fields on reactions of all kinds. My naive impression would be that since the field he is talking about is just barely strong enough to influence atomic ionization, it would fall about a millionfold short of influencing nuclear decay. And that leaves aside the complete absence of any implementation of the patented idea in decades by him or anyone else, in spite of the huge cost of containing radioactive waste.

Quote

Scientists who require solid evidence of competence obviously may be scared away. But there are also good scientists who have more of an appetite for adventure.

All scientists have an appetite for adventure, and even more of an appetite for honor and glory that such a discovery would bring. And therefore the absence of any scientists taking him seriously probably reflects the fact that good scientists in the field are already familiar with the influence of electric fields on nuclear reactions, and have no confidence in his claims.

Quote

The important question, of course, is whether there is any substance to Barker's claims.

The answer is almost certainly: no.

Quote

I’m optimistic that if LENR exists, it can be nailed down in more than one way.

Me too, which is why the failure to nail it down after protracted effort for 30 years does not bode well....

Quote

The thing I wonder about is whether you're going to get novel nuclides along the lines you suggested and to which suggestion I responded.

And I consider the likelihood of producing more than sixty transmutation products from a wide variety of nuclear reactions, and all of them being naturally occurring stable isotopes is vanishingly small.

>>> I do not know where you came up with that. We really do not have the whole scoop as to why the Commanding Officer shut SPAWARs LENR research down ...

Not only Pd/D

Quote from Louis Reed

Yes it is. I am talking about the first month after the press conference. There were some physicists who were highly skeptical from the start, but they kept their peace initially. The initial reaction in the press and in mainstream science was almost entirely positive.

I have copies of over a hundred newspaper clippings and other mass media records from the first years of cold fusion. They were collected by Eugene Mallove. I have just about every scientific paper and science journal editorial published in the history of cold fusion -- over 4000 documents in all. I have uploaded transcripts of Congressional testimony and the NSF conference from 1989.

What you are saying is flat out wrong. You have not read original sources. You have not read the books by Mallove or Beaudette. You have not met with Fleischmann, Pons, Storms, Mizuno and the other researchers, whereas I have. I also met with Huizenga and other leading opponents. I have seen dozens of letters from the patent office attacking cold fusion, and letters from government officials who fired scientists for working on this field or publishing papers, or threatened them with deportation, or reassigned them to menial jobs.

The assertion that cold fusion was welcomed and given an opportunity is a lie. It has been spread by opponents to make it seem they were fair, when in fact they attacked it repeatedly starting the day it was announced.

Please do not contradict me on this. You have no original source documents to support your claim. Either you made up that version of events, or you fished it out of Wikipedia or some other sewer. Even if you can point to one or two documents that say what you claim, I have hundreds of others written by scientists and by the editors at the New York Times, Nature, Scientific American and elsewhere that show you wrong.

Quote from JedRothwell

The assertion that cold fusion was welcomed and given an opportunity is a lie.

Sad to tell that the military industry originally only wanted to promote Uranium fusion to finally get cheap Plutonium (-nukes). Now they can built huge & expensive caverns to safely store the remaining(s) of their cold war nightmare. This is what happens if greedy idiots/psychopaths rule the world...

Quote from JedRothwell

I have copies of over a hundred newspaper clippings and other mass media records from the first years of cold fusion.

What part of the “first few weeks after the press conference” don’t you get? I agree that after the APS meeting 5 weeks later, cold fusion was overwhelmingly disparaged. I’m talking about the initial reaction.

P&F were briefly treated like rock stars who had toppled big physics. It was a charming narrative and the press ran with it. The reception Pons received at the ACS meeting alone demonstrates that mainstream science was open to the possibility of cold fusion. The positive reactions from the likes of Teller, Carlo Rubbia, and eventual uber-skeptic Morrison corroborate this idea.

Yes, it’s true, I haven’t read everything, and I haven’t met the principals, but Edmund Storms has. He even agrees with you that cold fusion suffered egregious discrimination. But his account of the first weeks after the press conference demonstrates that cold fusion was initially welcomed and taken seriously. Here are a few excerpts (emphasis mine), but there is much more detail in chapter 2 of his 2007 book:

"A day after the public announcement, work was under way at LANL … People were quickly organized … with a speed that is no longer possible at LANL. Everyone scurried off to find palladium and heavy-water before the limited supplies were snatched up by someone else…"

—

"Excitement was building as more people heard about the “discovery” and wanted to get in on the action. If real, such an important discovery hardly ever happens during a scientist’s career, … "

—

"During most of April, large and animated meetings were held every week as people tried to understand what Fleischmann and Pons had done and how the claimed effects might be duplicated. ..."

—

"By April 19, multiple programs were underway at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL), ... [10 other national labs]"

—

"In addition, 56 people, involving 8 teams, were working on the problem at LANL. Of course, non-government laboratories as well as groups in other countries were also working hard. […copious details of labs around the world getting busy…] As this list of laboratories demonstrates, interest was widespread and spontaneous, with studies started in at least 50 major laboratories worldwide involving at least 600 scientists. In addition, many articles in the press and onTV spread interest to the general public. All of the major news magazines featured Fleischmann and Pons on their front covers."

—

"At one point, the director of LANL, Dr. Siegfried Hecker, confided to me that he had not seen so much enthusiasm at the Laboratory since World War II. “Physicists are actually talking to chemists,” he observed with amazement. This attitude was being duplicated all over the world. To be sustained, this huge bubble of enthusiasm needed some very significant confirming results, ..."

—

All that activity, quite apart from the effusive language, demonstrates that mainstream science was *not* dismissive of cold fusion, but enthusiastically open to it. Moshe Gai, at Yale, was so excited, he ate and slept at the lab for a month perfecting a neutron detector to test the claim. Allan Bromley, who became Bush’s science advisor, arranged a collaboration between Gai and Lynn, an electrochemist who had been at Utah, and was inclined to believe the claims. Experiments were done by chemists at Stanford, and physicists at MIT and Harwell, and as Storms writes, at labs around the world.

And Congress opened a hearing on P&F in those early weeks with these extravagant words from the Science Committee chairman:

”Today we may be poised on the threshold of a new era,” Roe intoned. “If so, man will be unshackled from his dependence of finite energy resource."

—

According to The Scientist (May 29, 1989) (my emphasis),

"Other committee members were equally effusive in their praise of the two men, who appeared as conquering heroes in the battle to free the world of its reliance on fossil fuels and nuclear fission. “Gentlemen, the world awaits the crucial details of your amazing claim,” said Rep. Marilyn Lloyd (D-Tenn.), who heads the committee’s energy research subpanel. “We all want this to work.””

"In fact, anything less than enthusiasm would have seemed almost unpatriotic. The scientists had come to ask for $25 million in federal funds for a fusion research center in Utah. The Utah congressional delegation, led by Democrat Wayne Owens, was preparing to introduce a bill that would send $25 million, various tax benefits, and other perks to the Utah fusion researchers. Walker had proposed transferring $5 million from existing fusion funds within the Department of Energy. And Sen. Jake Gain (R-Utah) was taking reservations from his fellow lawmakers for a special chartered flight to Salt Lake City to meet with the governor and with officials from the University of Utah."

—

Of course, we all know that Lewis and Koonin brought everyone back down to earth about a week later, and Congress had second thoughts.

In spite of your objections, I maintain that the record shows clearly that for a brief time, cold fusion was welcomed with enthusiasm, and that initial reaction demonstrates the instinctive open attitude, probably helped by the then very recent disruptive introduction of high temperature superconductivity. The eventual skepticism could not have taken over because scientists suddenly remembered their role as sticks in the mud. It happened after the evidence was properly examined.

Personally, I think the first person to show a "Cant be denied" wont live long.

Quote from H-G Branzell

Since Barkers prescription for increasing radioactive decay rate is comparable to homeopathy take away possible placebo effect it is safe to say that he could not have done it in the way that is described in the patent. ... It would be like trying to cure cancer with a glass of plain water.

H-G, you're approaching this question like the medieval schoolmen: ruling out an empirical claim by reasoning from first principles. One is probably safe doing this with very far-out claims. But Barker's patent is definitely not in the realm of homeopathy; it's setting out empirical details, and it comes with an explanation (at the nuclear level) that if one squints one's eyes is not incoherent. What is needed, then, is to test Barker's claim empirically, possibly enlisting his help if he's still around. It seems plausible that people will sometimes overlay their imperfect understanding of what's going on on top of what they're doing and arrive at the wrong justification for why things seem to be working.

Quote from H-G Branzell

The evidence of a nuclear reaction is violent and easy to detect, comparable to a bank robbery where the evidence is a blown open safe and shrapnel in the opposite wall. ... That's how quantum mechanics works, like it or not.

This is a truism. What will make it insightful will be to apply it to the specific details of specific experiments. Alpha decay, for example, is straightforward to detect under the right circumstances. But it could be occurring in an electrochemical cell and very difficult to detect on the other side of the cell wall.