Updates from Google on LENR research

    Quote from Shane D.

    the field has tried so hard to rename it LENR, because of the stigma associated with (cold fusion) CF

    Yes

    In regards to the stigma...

    Careers ruined from bucking mainstream science to pursue cold fusion research. Period.

    Yes Historically I agree.


    Yet

    I count over 67 young scientists on Google "Team Cold Fusion"; from Berlinguette Munday on through DoE participants.


    Go ahead

    Ask each one of them if their scientific careers are damaged


    Or improved


    By pursuing 'Cold Fusion' research.


    I guess not damaged. Significant cutting edge and highly worthwhile rewarding. Not damaging at all.


    Quote the DoE


    Just jokingly surmised.


    An old irrelevant question

    The Stigma?


    No? Perhaps yes.

    Matt’s DCVC bio. It seems he’ll be focused on clean energy investments. It will be interesting to see what details filter out over time. Perhaps there’ll be some LENR in there, but who knows. It’s only a guess, but it feels more and more likely that Google’s interest in LENR is over.


    Matt Trevithick | DCVC
    Deep Tech VC firm with over $2B under management
    www.dcvc.com

    7-e57b313283711730503760db6c40effc58c35159.jpg

    Quote from orsova

    but it feels more and more likely that Google’s interest in LENR is over.

    Quote from Gregory Byron Goble

    Inventor(s)

    Thomas Schenkel

    Ross Koningstein

    Peter Seidl

    Arun Persaud

    Qing Ji

    David K. Fork

    Matthew D. Trevithick

    Curtis Berlinguette

    Philip A. Schauer

    Benjamin P. MacLeod


    orsova

    Quote from orsova

    Perhaps there’ll be some LENR in there,

    The recent Team Google/DoE LENR patent that Matt Trevithick invented is "some LENR" in the stuff he might maybe perhaps...


    2 billion dollars...


    Solid State Energy Summit


    Sounds like interest in Team Google and the DoE will be worthwhile to keep informed of.


    I doubt Matt working with investors means he has released all interest in his patent development...

    It seems worthwhile to list known Team Google members while we await further developments in their patent iterations. Team Google has been growing since the dismissive Nature article. The patents have yet to be discussed openly by any Team members.


    The question of this being high energy fusion was brought up...


    With my limited physics, I have always thought high energy physics are part of LENR on a nano scale.


    All of atomic (and sub atomic) physics are seen as being under the same study. Nano physics and Metamaterial physics are a part of all advanced fission and fusion research, Google at LLNL is perhaps, along with CMNS advancements, leaving nothing out.

    It might be that Cold Fusion just leads to much much easier and tinier ways to do fusion...


    I'm reminded, for good reason, that cavitation leads to tiny hot spots...

    Quite hot!

    Anyways

    Team Google patent inventors seem like a good place to start


    Bio

    Thomas Schenkel is a physicist and senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he is the Program Head for Fusion Science and Ion Beam Technology in the Accelerator Technology and Applied Physics Division (http://atap.lbl.gov/). Thomas received his PhD in physics from the Goethe University in Frankfurt. Following time as a postdoc at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he joined Berkeley Lab in 2000. His research interests include novel accelerator concepts, materials far from equilibrium, exploration of fusion processes, and spin qubit architectures.

    Thomas Schenkel

    Team Google patent inventor

    Ross Koningstein

    Overview

    Number of Portfolio Companies - 1

    CB Rank (Investor) 118,976

    Investor Type

    Individual/Angel

    • Ross Koningstein received an undergraduate degree in EE/CS at Carleton University in Ottawa, and went on to get a Ph.D. in aerospace robotics at Stanford University.
    • Ross was the co-founder of SpeedQuest (a product that made PC’s faster). He provided software consulting that developed flight simulation software for the hit game “Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer.” He was also co-founder and vice president at CriSys Limited, a provider of a fault-tolerant map-based 9-1-1 dispatch systems. Ross was the VP of Engineering at two dot-com era startups: On Your Mind, and Bluedog Inc.
    • Ross was Google’s first director of engineering. He is one of the inventors of Google’s CPC AdWords product, has automated and streamlined Google’s ad sales organization, helped with the design and build of Google’s breakthrough data center in The Dalles, Oregon, and is currently an engineer on Google’s RE<C effoJacob's.

    Information above

    is from CrunchBase


    The following is an interview by Jason Jacobs.

    Episode recorded

    September 28th. 2021

    Episode 180: Ross Koningstein, Director Emeritus at Google

    Episode 180: Ross Koningstein, Director Emeritus at Google — My Climate Journey
    Today's guest is Ross Koningstein, Director Emeritus at Google. Ross is currently Director Emeritus at Google and works in the tech giant's Climate and Energy…
    www.myclimatejourney.co

    Source
    myclimatejourney.co was first indexed by Google in April 2019

    gbgoblenote just found this interview by Jason Jacobs and am posting a little bit of it here for discussion. Reading the whole interview is recommended. Excellent... I look forward to learning more and wish Team Google et. al. the best of luck... -end gbgoblenote


    Ross Koningstein

    So we worked with some groups in Washington DC, NGOs who were putting together a campaign to increase the ability of federal policy to support innovation in various types of nuclear technologies. And you know, those folks have been quite successful.


    And lastly, at the time there was an interest in things going on in cold fusion. Now, I'm not like a cold fusion believer, but I do know in the scientific area, if you completely shut off an area of science to any investigation, then that withers and it, you know, you can destroy people's careers.


    So the stuff that we saw in cold fusion was really bad science as opposed to bad topic area. And so we wanted to see if you had a bunch of really smart scientists say, what would they look for in that area in which cold fusion was reputed to be? And we funded them for a couple of years to actually examine those set of conditions, which turned out to be really, really difficult to create and sometimes observe.


    Jason Jacobs: And what was the motivation from Google at the time of supporting these efforts? Was it purely for the collective good or was there any self interest involved and if so, what did that look like?


    Ross Koningstein: I think in any situation where you have people making decisions, they're gonna be doing it both because they have a long term view that there might be something good that comes out of it for society, and often it's because there is a personal interest component.


    And like I was saying at the intersection of why different companies do what, in our case, the plasma fusion partnership was a very clear fit for why Google could move that needle forward. And so once we had landed in that topic area, that one seemed like a really positive way to move forward. So I think, to answer your question, it's a bit of both and I'm sure it varies all over the place.

    A Team Google paper...


    Investigation of light ion fusion reactions in metal hydrides with plasma discharges


    Investigation of light ion fusion reactions in metal hydrides with plasma discharges
    Fusion at relatively low energies is important for our understanding of stellar fuel chains and the development of future energy technologies. Experiments are…
    ui.adsabs.harvard.edu

    Seidl, Peter ;Persaud, Arun ;Ji, Qing

    Abstract

    Fusion at relatively low energies is important for our understanding of stellar fuel chains and the development of future energy technologies. Experiments are challenging due to the exponential drop of fusion cross sections below the Coulomb barrier. We report on experiments on D-D fusion with ion pulses from glow discharge plasmas. With this approach we can deliver relatively high peak ion currents (0.1 to several A/cm2) to metal wire cathodes for several days. With Pd targets, we find neutron yields that are over 100 times higher than expected for bare nuclei fusion at ion energies below 2 keV (cm-frame). A possible explanation is a correction to the ion energy due to an apparent electron screening potential of 1000 +/-250 eV, which increases the probability for tunneling through the repulsive Coulomb barrier. But such a high value is not consistent with theoretical descriptions of electron screening potentials. We discuss possible explanations, ideas of treating metals as analogs of cold, dense plasmas and follow-up experiments aimed at understanding this effect.

    This work was funded by Google LLC under a CRADA between LBNL and Google LLC. LBNL operates under U.S. DOE contract DE-AC02-05CH11231.

    Publication: APS Division of Plasma Physics Meeting 2019, abstract id.TO4.0084

    Yes, the electron screening effect remains the basis of the way of their investigations.

    We have to underline it's wasn't a useless work.

    The same way of experimentations is also investigated by the Polish Czerski currently.

    However as explained the Google team, apparently this behavior shouldn't be enough strong to fully explain the entire lowering of the Coulomb barrier.

    Something complementary must be considered with this electronic clusters, probably some resonant behaviors.

    What, in normal physical terms are spin qubit architectures? A fancy name for quantum computing which thus far has been shown as 'unreliable' compared to known artificial intelligence? Or is this just more obfuscation by 'Team Cold Fusion' (TG) to throw us off the scent that Matt Trevithick and the Berlinguette four have discovered something substantial - their patents cover everything except what is new i.e. E=mc^n which is my sole 'creative leap' unpatentable because it is so obviously true. Allied with Leif Holmlid's creative endeavours on Rydberg Matter all of this is PD (public domain) and thus is unpatentable. What do you think? 8) :) :)

    Gregory Byron Goble


    What you have posted is historical work. It doesn't prove anything about whether Project Charleston is still alive. I would direct you to the presentation that Trevithick gave not so long ago wherein he showed that no new funds have been disbursed by Google in some years.


    You quote these historical publications as proof of an ongoing project, but they prove nothing, and it's not clear that the project is even ongoing. Moreover, you sometimes make oblique assertions that these publications and patents are proof of an advanced program that's not been disclosed. You point to the Fusion Reaction Products patent, for example, but that work isn't even remotely close to a commercially viable reactor. Indeed, the patent makes it quite clear that that wasn't even the goal of the device. I tried to talk to you about this patent previously and you simply ignored me.


    That Trevithick has left Google is a bad sign. That's all I'm saying. In response, you posted walls of text that do not go to the substance of my point, and simply repeated your assertions. It's extremely hard to respond substantively to someone who ignores the substance of what you're saying.


    I have no idea where you get the 2 billion dollars from. That Carl Page is hosting the next ICCF is not proof that Google still has an active interest in LENR.


    The interview you quote with Koningstein is telling:


    And we funded them for a couple of years to actually examine those set of conditions...


    *Funded*. Past tense.


    "I doubt Matt working with investors means he has released all interest in his patent development"


    This statement doesn't mean anything. Of course Trevithick hasn't released his interest in this historical patent. That has nothing to do with whether Google is still funding LENR *on an ongoing basis*. You're conflating an interest in a single patent with the life or death of a research program.


    Furthermore, 'working with investors' doesn't quite capture it. DCVC is not a side hustle. He left Google and got a new job. If he was the linchpin of Project Charleston, would he really leave it if it was an ongoing project with institutional support inside Google? He’s previously described the state of LENR as ‘unconscionable’ and said there’s ‘a place in history’ for the first group to get over the line. He’s as invested as the rest of us in the field. So why is he jumping ship?


    What seems more likely is that those above him balked when it came time to make a decision on a second round of funding, and he subsequently decided to jump. His remit at DCVC will be wider than LENR. Indeed, no institutional investor wants a fund comprised of LENR investments. That's just a fact. You and I might not like it, but it's true. Look at the press Woodford got in The Financial Times for investing in Industrial Heat.


    Trevithick will likely be making investments across a wide range of clean energy technologies, and putting together diversified VC funds. He *might* be able to sneak one or two LENR investments in, but the truth is that most LENR isn't really done by commercially sophisticated, VC investable entities, and most LENR investments are just open ended R&D funding by another name.


    I think it's wishful thinking for any of us to suggest that LENR will be a focus at DCVC. Venture capital firms, like private equity firms, have to raise money on an ongoing basis. They simply can't afford to blow a hole in their record by making a large bet on something like LENR.


    All I'm saying is that the fact pattern is not encouraging. Posting biographies and historical work by the team proves nothing about its future.

    Nice find Gregory Byron Goble . Koningstein also said this in the interview:


    "I help through our group sponsor research, for example, at a couple of universities in Nuclear Excitation via Electron Capture, which is a recently observed form of nuclear transition that might have an energy option. So that could be really cool for, let's call it, designer nuclear power for portable applications."

    Quote from orsova

    Matt’s DCVC bio. It seems he’ll be focused on clean energy investments. It will be interesting to see what details filter out over time. Perhaps there’ll be some LENR in there, but who knows. It’s only a guess, but it feels more and more likely that Google’s interest in LENR is over.


    https://www.dcvc.com/bio/core/matt-trevithick.html

    Nice how they don't shy away from mentioning CF in his bio. Maybe one day the name will come back in vogue:


    "Matt also directed a reevaluation of cold fusion that included sponsored research at MIT and facilitated Alphabet’s investment in Commonwealth Fusion Systems"


    Quote from Shane D.

    Nice how they don't shy away from mentioning CF in his bio. Maybe one day the name will come back in vogue:


    "Matt also directed a reevaluation of cold fusion that included sponsored research at MIT and facilitated Alphabet’s investment in Commonwealth Fusion Systems"


    IIRC, one of the founders has a background in physics, and the other is very interested in nuclear energy.

    186mRe isomers de-excitation via exploding wires plasma [A, pp 20-21]


    "It is interesting to note that a metal from a pure isomer will in fact be a new state of matter. The cost of obtaining the 186mRe isomer

    is comparable to the cost of obtaining an equal mass of 238Pu, which is widely used in radionuclide energy sources." [B, p.11]

    orsova Assist me in finding an article, paper, presentation or interview where a member of Team Google discusses any of the three patents and the research and data which led to the patent(s) development.

    I spend 100s and 100s of hours searching for one...

    If you find one before me I will understand... No I was not ignoring you, just your required proof.

    Quote from Ahlfors

    US20210151206A1

    historical PLOP or NOT.

    I guess US DOE support for the Berkeley lab is fairly routine..

    maybe it amounted to a few thousand $ or so..

    "STATEMENT OF GOVERNMENT SUPPORT

    [0002] This invention was made with government support under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 awarded by the U.S. Department of Energy. The government has certain rights in this invention."


    Apparatus And Method For Sourcing Fusion Reaction Products Patent Application
    U.S. Patent Application 20210151206 for Apparatus And Method For Sourcing Fusion Reaction Products
    uspto.report


    https://www.ucop.edu/laboratory-management/_files/contracts/mod-1123.pdf

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