Posts by Dr Richard

An awful lot of conjecture and arguing on this topic could be cleared up if we just recognise that 1) there is something to LENR/cold fusion but 2) its very difficult to commercialise so 3) maybe we do need someone like AR to break all the rules and plough on ahead regardless. I certainly respect the progress (even if it is partly fictitious) he has made in promoting LENR and attracting funding by convincing at least some investors that this is not a completely dead subject (as other mainstream physicists would like to have us believe!). You don't have to believe what he is going to demonstrate on 31 Jan is going to be the God's honest truth but I say let's just go along with it, let's give him our support in promoting LENR, then let other big enterprises like IH and BEC follow along in his trailblazing footsteps as they have always done up to now. LENR per se has everything to gain but nothing to lose by supporting good ol' AR!

And another thing-in a complex plasma cloud of electrons, protons, deuterons, transition metals / carbon nano or pico-particles He Xe and Ar gas atoms as catalysts (might as well throw in the kitchen sink as well!) the heavier atomic structures will be relatively stationary with respect to the electrons zapping about. Sufficiently high voltage RF stimulation could well accelerate electrons to say 0.995c ie just below light speed giving them a relative mass 100X their stationary mass, approaching in effect half the known muon mass of 207X. The probability of protons or deuterons undergoing fusion due to muon-like electrons whizzing past could be therefore half that of muons which do, of course whizz past at similar velocities and have 2 millionths of a second half-lives. How electron spin or consequent magnetic fields fits into this scenario I am not sure, but it is conceivable that interaction with P or D magnetic fields could promote tunnelling through the Coulomb barrier (if we now assume that the nuclear strong force is a magnetic interaction between up and down quarks)...all just bog standard physics really?

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Because cold fusion running on muons has been well established since Luis Alvarez's work in the fifties and the D-u-T complex has since been observed experimentally. Muon catalysed fusion does generate gammas of similar spectra to Russ George's published data (on here) - why propose much more esoteric mechanisms like vac energy and evo's when we have one clear well researched mechanism already in existence? Maybe one idea is that under certain conditions ordinary electrons can be made to act like muons-could their effective mass be artificially increased by applying RF pulse/laser stimulation for instance? Is this mode of stimulation understood in terms of its effect on electron spin and thus magnetic field...possibly increasing effective inertia and thus mass? Wyttenbach's theories have really concentrated on proton spin rotatoral issues, maybe more theoretical work on electron spin might be appropriate at this point. It would be a neat answer to all the disparate cold fusion data going back to F&P's electrolytic expts - were they simply synthesizing muon-like heavy electrons which in turn catalysed D-D fusion and thus a vast release of energy causing one or two melt-downs? If the electron spin is increased towards infinity could its effective mass increase relativistically to mimic a muon? Relativistic electron mass increases by an amount equal to the Lorentz factor of 100X as their velocity approaches the speed of light. This could explain both Brillouin Energy's conservative, cautious over energy results and Rossi's claims (which we all agree he tends to exaggerate).

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Reading through G. Egeley's reviews certainly focuses the mind on what is needed for LENR to work reliably, for a commercial fusion reactor. The central theoretical idea is that unless we have a tried and tested method for producing muons ie heavy electrons to form D-u-D complexes (to overcome Coulombic repulsion) ending up with He and GeV of energy release, all we are going to see is very low rates of LENR. Enough to detect some transmutation of elements etc but no reliable energy source. Unless AR has somehow found a way of doing it? Maybe by some freak of chance he has found a way of splitting the proton into quarks and then re-synthesized them into long-lasting muons, for example, but then he's not even using deuterium. Utter genius. He's managed to make it work just with hydrogen!

Claiming radiation release from the SK is surely just another way of AR attracting attention to himself and increasing his self-advertising profile-throw in a bit of pathology and then you have maybe some of his critics feeling sorry for him! All just psychology in action, he certainly knows how to manipulate his audience. Or maybe he read about the gamma release from Russ George's reactors and saw this as very positive evidence for fusion reactions occurring against a possible mounting investor scepticism. Who knows, time will tell.

No good results to report after all that time and money invested? Not good news for LENR-will we ever see any real success?

Well the one degree temperature rise wouldn't really convince the examiner as being useful tech or that it even works. All that tech for a one degree rise in your central-heating system for example? Some Russian workers presented data at the Sochi meeting showing a 25-30 degree increase compared to control.....what's wrong with IH, maybe they have Rossi-itis (afraid to make any outlandish claims).

No patents filed on the SAFIRE-LENR topic as far as my limited search goes-maybe they couldn't file anything because they'd have to officially acknowledge the existence of cold fusion and LENR and potentially lose scientific credibility. No such restrictions on us retired mavericks. Just like to see some benefit from all the LENR research to date. I think the IH patent covers the SAFIRE project methodology apart from the gas-filled hollow anode which was M. Childs invention even though plasmas or double-layers are not mentioned specifically. Sad but true.

Sorry Alan, all I know is that the Safire group put 'patent pending' on their last vid release. I'll try a search for it.

I suppose I'm being somewhat sarcastic/facetious but I can just imagine this patent being presented to the board of investors (eg Woodford's £139 million) in IH - so how big a temperature rise do we get per £million invested.....oh yeah one degree!!! Surely they knew roughly how much excess heat would be produced from other expts, then couldn't they engineer the heat sink thermal capacity to show a clear temperature rise? I mean a one degree difference between test and control could have been due to draughty window! Glad we have Ecalox doing sensible work.

Well reading further......go to Fig 6 in the 27 Dec patent and we see a slightly less than one degree Celsius difference between the D reactor and control (no D)-well, that's just pathetic and extremely disappointing. Why on earth show such a pathetic, useless graph? Have they lost the plot completely, maybe trying to sabotage their own patent application

I think they've just patented the 'Safire' type plasma based reactor we were discussing earlier. This type of containment vessel functioning as the cathode would set up a 'just-below' arcing plasma with the 5000V RF applied to the central anode.-providing optimum conditions for medium-range temperature D fusion to occur. Oh well, bang goes my pressure-cooker home-made fusion reactor idea! Still, better plasma control could be achieved using a PULVA1 type reactor-maybe they could try it out since this tech is already in the public domain.

The patents on cold fusion go back and back in time to even before F & P if you look at Russian literature, so I don't believe anything more can be patented other than what has already been done, it's all 'prior art'. Except perhaps for Wyttenbach's new Rotatatoral Collapse Field Coupling 6-dimensional mathematical approach, which isn't all that complicated if one assumes 3 dimensions in space and 3 in velocity. And that the strong nuclear force is just a magnetic field holding nucleons together. If the examiners don't throw it out on prior art grounds this patent could form the basis for providing the backgound unique IP for such a cold-fusion device-so then we have a SK type reactor that works and the theory underlying precisely how it works. Can't do better than that.

Interesting. Might Rossi be then induced into some kind of partnership with the 'replicators' in return for a percentage of each SK-copy sold? He would also have the option of sponsoring more advanced reactor research/designs in addition to his own. He'd probably just tell us to FO and mind our own business. So we could knock them out like hotcakes here in the UK once we've left the EU behind - removing EU patent restrictions too!

So say we were able to replicate the SK with our own recipe and obtained a reliable COP of say 5-10 for several months, what would be the next step? Obtain a licence to manufacture from Rossi & flood the market with copy-e-cats (since AR is not actually selling them, only the heat}? This would certainly raise confidence in LENR, promoting the SK as a simple central-heating device availiable from Wal-mart etc. For larger reactors generating electricity we could develop the Safire plasma-type reactor operating at higher temperatures with much larger LENR fuel supplies.

Surely we know enough about the QX, and additionally the whole backgroung to LENR including atom ecology,

to do a replication of our own now?

So what is the over-view now of all things LENR? Looks like we're all back to the drawing board if even Rossi is now admitting to gamma radiation release from his reactors, which would put domestic commercialization back about ten years without heavy lead screening etc. EMC testing would never pass such hazardous devices and scaling up to the 20 kW SK must make the radiation problem far worse! So maybe power-station sized, gamma or neutron shielded, MW LENR reactors are the only viable solution, which is disappointing because we all thought LENR would de-centralize power production. Still, the success of the Safire project in demonstrating LENR in their spherical discharge reactor suggests the way ahead would be replication of this by a dedicated LENR team. Or use a PULVA1 type reactor which have been used to study dusty or complex plasmas. This would allow studying LENR purely in the plasma phase-catalytic nano-powders of Ni Pd Ti Li or C being suspended in the plasma with ionized H or D with other known catalysts He or HOH etc. Well you might think R.Mills has already done this type of experiment, but I suspect he has only looked at zapping systems ie only non-steady state whereas a steady-state plasma study might be better for energy production. Or maybe someone with a tokamak has tried adding in LENR catalysts to their precious deuterium-tritium plasmas? Unlikely, though a desperate commercial outfit might give it a go!

How about forming nanowells < 1nm diameter on the surface of the titanium sheet, expose to H2 or D2, then lightly coat with lithium metal. According to Wyttenbach's new theory this should evolve nuclear fusion reactions on passing a high current through this electrode in either an electrolytic or dry setup (like in a fuel cell maybe?). Be nice to find out if this works.

Fusion research is an international field - there should be no geographical restrictions on LENR research - but if no collaborative effort can be established then its down to whether I can put together a small team here in the UK to study it further.

The trouble is nobody really knows whether the QX really is a plasma-based system-its all at atmospheric pressure (or higher) and the temperatures are probably less than those claimed. Its all dubious data. I do however believe Alan and Russ's new reactor-based work in producing gammas and excess heat, this is valuable new data and their collaboration with Wyttenbach's theories seems to be the best approach to date. They also did test out a gas discharge tube system but are not at present thinking of extending their experiments to look at low temperature dusty plasmas in PULVA1 type reactors or in modified SAFIRE systems. The inertial electrostatic confinement group no longer have any working reactors, instead they're spending all their time modelling reactors with computer simulations. So although dusty plasma research is an intensive field of mainstream physics, nobody is using this technology to study LENR. This approach may ultimately produce the first generation of fusion reactors to produce reliable energy-its definitely worth investigating. Maybe we could set up something with S. Brink/R.Mills or even L. Holmlid or to have a look at this.