This one has been around before. From 2012 What makes it interesting is the folks who are saying “confirmed”. Toyota. Mitsubishi. This are not small outfits prone to excess of zeal.
http://www.lenr-coldfusion.com/2012/12/09/yasuhiro-iwamura-ans-presentation-lenr-transmutation/
Mr. Krivit also notes on his blog that Toyota has replicated the work of Mitsubishi demonstrating transmutations utilizing Iwamura’s method.
The physicist, Yasuhiro Iwamura, told the ANS audience that the Toyota researchers confirmed that nuclear changes from one element to another took place without the use of high-energy nuclear physics. Most scientists who have not followed this field closely consider such profound claims inconceivable. Toyota used a LENR deuterium-permeation transmutation method that Iwamura invented.
The video demonstrates some of the best evidence to date for the existing of LENR. Whereas excess heat results may be debatable, the formation of new elements of atypical isotopes is very convincing that the LENR effect is real.
Then there is this more recent one that claims to find isotope shifts in CFLs in normal operation:
Lattice Energy LLC-Are LENRs Occurring in Compact Fluorescent Lights-March 7 2013
by Lewis Larsen on Mar 07, 2013Peer-reviewed paper by Mead et al. just published in February (Environmental Science & Technology) contains amazing new experimental data on anomalous shifts in abundances of Mercury isotopes found in compact fluorescent lights (CFL) used in homes and businesses. When viewed through the conceptual lens of the Widom-Larsen theory, their carefully collected Hg isotope data suggests that low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) transmutations may actually be occurring at extremely low rates in CFLs during normal operation. We discuss their paper and its implications in a new 102-slide Lattice PowerPoint presentation dated March 7, 2013. Therein, we conclude that if the intriguing possibility about LENRs in CFLs unveiled in this data is substantiated by further experimentation, it provides yet more proof that LENRs are likely to be a truly ‘green’ nuclear technology that has great promise for use in CO2-free power generation, providing LENR device heat outputs and operational longevity can be scaled dramatically upwards by applying and adapting recently acquired technical knowledge found in nanotech, plasmonics, and advanced materials science.
Not sure I like the idea of my CFLs fusing…
;-)
While Japan discovers that shutting down low cost nuclear power and sucking up fossil fuels by the megaship load is not so good for the economy.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512151/japans-economic-troubles-spur-a-return-to-nuclear/
Japan’s Economic Troubles Spur a Return to Nuclear
Some of the nuclear power plants shut down after the Fukushima disaster could restart soon.
By Kevin Bullis on March 8, 2013
As the second anniversary of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima nears, Japan is considering restarting nuclear reactors across the country in an effort to ease a recession that began at the end of 2012 after years of economic stagnation.
[…]
But shutting down the reactors has strained the country’s electricity supplies, making it necessary to import large amounts of fossil fuels to make up the difference.In Japan, natural-gas power plants can cost several times as much to operate as nuclear power plants, says Paul Joskow, the president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and formerly a professor economics at MIT.
[…]
The report said that the shutdown of reactors in Japan, and the ensuing increase in fossil-fuel consumption, has hurt the balance of trade and increased electricity prices by 15 to 20 percent. It has also led to the loss of about 420,000 jobs as manufacturing is transferred out of the country, the report said.
So looks like if you want jobs, nuclear helps. If you get rid of cheap electricity, jobs leave too. Perhaps we can get someone in the US Government to see this… (I have given up hoping someone in California government can ‘get it’).
Note to politicians: Folks do not like being unemployed, cold, and hungry.
The economic problems seem to be shifting public opinion in Japan. Last September, the ruling party issued a plan to permanently phase out nuclear power (see “Japan Approves Nuclear Phase-Out by 2040”). But it quickly softened its stance (see “Japan Isn’t Going Nuclear Free After All”). In December, the government lost power to Prime Minister Abe’s party, which promised to improve the economy and is emphasizing the need for nuclear power.
It also looks like we can cut the costs of nuclear facilities even more:
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512321/safer-nuclear-power-at-half-the-price/
Safer Nuclear Power, at Half the Price
Transatomic is developing a new kind of molten-salt reactor designed to overcome the major barriers to nuclear power.
By Kevin Bullis on March 12, 2013
Why It Matters
Nuclear energy is a potential source of low-carbon baseload power, but it needs cheaper, safer technology to take off.
Transatomic Power, an MIT spinoff, is developing a nuclear reactor that it estimates will cut the overall cost of a nuclear power plant in half. It’s an updated molten-salt reactor, a type that’s highly resistant to meltdowns. Molten-salt reactors were demonstrated in the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Lab, where one test reactor ran for six years, but the technology hasn’t been used commercially.
MIT tends to be folks who know what they are doing.
The new reactor design, which so far exists only on paper, produces 20 times as much power for its size as Oak Ridge’s technology. That means relatively small, yet powerful, reactors could be built less expensively in factories and shipped by rail instead of being built on site like conventional ones. Transatomic also modified the original molten-salt design to allow it to run on nuclear waste.
[…]
Transatomic says it can split the difference, building a 500-megawatt power plant that achieves some of the cost savings associated with the smaller reactor designs. It estimates that it can build a plant based on such a reactor for $1.7 billion, roughly half the cost per megawatt of current plants. The company has raised $1 million in seed funding, including some from Ray Rothrock, a partner at the VC firm Venrock. Although its cofounders, Mark Massie and Leslie Dewan, are still PhD candidates at MIT, the design has attracted some top advisors, including Regis Matzie, the former CTO of the major nuclear power plant supplier Westinghouse Electric, and Richard Lester, the head of the nuclear engineering department at MIT.
Half the cost, modular design, factory produced. Good line up of people too. I think they have a shot at it. Maybe they can talk to the folks in Japan…
Now if they can just find a way to turn all that tungsten from all those old light bulbs into bits of gold and platinum…
Wonder what the world supply of tungsten is like…
Musings from the Chiefio 
EM: It is interesting that people are starting to think that LENR may be occurring in several places where they are unexpected. Eg Lewis Larsen says maybe in auto catalytic converters. As a diesel fancier have you heard about the speculation that an LENR reaction may is blowing up injectors when there is water in the fuel. My diesel engineering friend says, no, it is the 1600 times expansion when water turns to steam. But I counter it with injector nozzles are made of tough materials. What do you think?
Not heard about that with injectors. I’d go with the water as more likely. Modern injectors are not the big old solid things of the past, they are now piezoelectric driven things that sputter out a chain of mini-drops; and at much higher pressures. Very picky about viscosity and contamination (so much so that computer sensors now shut down the fuel system if you try using ‘funny fuel’ in them) Also, were there enough LENR to make a micro-nuclear-explosion, well, it’s not exactly LE anymore ;-)
Lewis Larsen sees LENR happening everywhere. He may be right about that, but his theory as to how it happens has a few holes in that are covered with some hand-waving.
The really interesting thing about the Transatomic reactor idea is that it’s fuelled by the nuclear waste from the earlier reactors, that otherwise needs to be stored for around 100,000 years. By burning this further, it reduces the time that its waste needs to be stored down to the odd century or so. That’s a major advantage, and basically it looks like all the necessary technology is already known and tested so we should really be able to make them a few years after we decide to do so. I can’t see a down side to this idea – the fuel is free, and in fact it’s cheaper to burn it than store it deep in a mountain somewhere. Especially useful for Japan – those waste storage pools that have been the major source of pollution at Fukushima still hold around 97% of their energy, so would fuel the country for years.
Tungsten into gold? Well, that’s very good news for those who have allegedly bought “gold” bullion bars and found them … modified … with tungsten. They can now go into the “carbon free energy” business and correct matters!
http://www.businessinsider.com/tungsten-filled-gold-bars-found-in-new-york-2012-9
One must keep his skeptical glasses on. Electrolysis can concentrate trace elements on an electrode. And the amount of “anomolous” material is very, very small in all the experiments I have looked at. It is easy to fool oneself with this stuff.
I agree with Jim2. Turning tungsten into gold is not a cost-effective way of making gold,
But it is a great way to grab headlines.
Jim2: please note that the Mitsubishi experiments reported at the 2012 Winter ANS do NOT involve aqueous electrolysis; rather, they use a gaseous permeation technique through an engineered thin-film ‘membrane’ accompanied with temperature and pressure in which no external electric current is applied — so in that case the issue you raise about mobile contaminants in an electrolyte is nonexistent. There is no electrolyte in those particular experiments.
Simon Derricutt: your assertion that our theoretical work has “… a few holes that are covered with some hand-waving” is a mistaken, unsubstantiated personal opinion. Your remark is not only technically incorrect, it is factually vacuous … really more of an empty Internet ‘sound bite’ canard than a carefully reasoned technical statement.
Anyone who wishes to verify the rigor of our published physics is welcome to read either or both of the two following peer-reviewed journal papers and come to their own independent conclusions as to whether there is any “hand-waving” involved in our work — there simply isn’t: As-published copies of both papers can be viewed online or downloaded from the URLs provided below:
“A primer for electroweak induced low-energy nuclear reactions”
Y. N. Srivastava, A. Widom, and L. Larsen
Pramana – Journal of Physics 75 (4) pp. 617 – 637 (2010)
“Ultra low momentum neutron catalyzed nuclear reactions on metallic Hydride surfaces”
A. Widom and L. Larsen
European Physical Journal C – Particles and Fields 46 pp. 107 (2006)
Lewis Larsen, President and CEO, Lattice Energy LLC
At some point science will accept that the neutron/hydrogen conversion is a two way street that causes an energy event in Both directions. This is how God makes the elements, one piece at a time, no atom smashers. Then all of this will make sense. pg
Jim2: please note that the Mitsubishi experiments reported at the 2012 Winter ANS do NOT involve aqueous electrolysis; rather, they use a gaseous permeation technique through an engineered thin-film ‘membrane’ accompanied with temperature and pressure in which no external electric current is applied — so in that case the issue you raise about mobile contaminants in an electrolyte is nonexistent. There is no electrolyte in those particular experiments.
Simon Derricutt: your assertion that our theoretical work has “… a few holes that are covered with some hand-waving” is a mistaken, unsubstantiated personal opinion. Your remark is not only technically incorrect, it is factually vacuous … really more of an empty Internet ‘sound bite’ canard than a carefully reasoned technical statement.
Anyone who wishes to verify the rigor of our published physics is welcome to read either or both of the two following peer-reviewed journal papers and come to their own independent conclusions as to whether there is any “hand-waving” involved in our work — there simply isn’t:
“A primer for electroweak induced low-energy nuclear reactions”
Y. N. Srivastava, A. Widom, and L. Larsen
Pramana – Journal of Physics 75 (4) pp. 617 – 637 (2010)
“Ultra low momentum neutron catalyzed nuclear reactions on metallic Hydride surfaces”
A. Widom and L. Larsen
European Physical Journal C – Particles and Fields 46 pp. 107 (2006)
Lewis Larsen, President and CEO, Lattice Energy LLC
@E.M. Cuº+ Snº = 79
Atomic number of Copper=29
Atomic number of Tin=50
Atomic number of Gold=79
Proportion of both, according to atomic weights:
Copper: 63.546
Tin:118.71
Really we need first to change paradigms and be clear about what we really want, but before all FACE REALITY.
“Low energy nuclear reactions?” Do the names Pons and Fleischman ring a bell? See my blog “Science Frauds” at http://ScienceFrauds.blogspot.com for some fun reading.
@Simon Derricutt & Jim2:
The big thing I saw “missing” in the Larsen links was, well, “numbers”. So they find isotope changes in CFLs. Is that one atom in a thousand? Million? Trillion? How close to what could be explained by cosmic rays hitting the diffuse gas of Hg in the bulb? (As opposed to in an ore body underground).
Similarly the original 1928 or so Japanese “discovery” of transmutation in a large electrical discharge. Looked like a very large tube run a very long time with a huge amount of electricity. Or was it? And how much gold was found? Some of the write up sounds like “significant” while some could just be “contaminant level”, perhaps.
It does look like there is LENR happening, but is it just down in the statistical noise level, or up in the range of useful? No numbers….
On “Transatomic reactor”: I presume that’s a MSR. Yes, we could be building them now if we wished. BTW, the “Tens of thousands of years” to store “waste” is based on getting down to normal background. Yet it never was at background. If you make the criteria “same as the original ore”, it drops to about 250 years. I still think it well worth using that fuel rather than calling it ‘waste’, but the 10,000 years or 25,000 years or more storage times are a bit farcical based on choosing an inappropriate goal state; yet that is “the standard” used.
The original design point of our nuclear fleet was Pu making and reprocessing. That’s why we have so much “used fuel” piling up. We didn’t finish the plan… So we need a new plan.
@Oliver:
I’ve seen an awful lot of headline grabbing… Part of why I don’t whole hog embrace the LENR stories. The MIT professor’s model run was enough for me to move from “Missouri Show Me” to “Maybe it is real”. I figure the MIT guys are pretty darned good and pretty darned picky. So I’m willing to accept that some LENR might happen. But it’s been how long that Rossi is saying “Real Soon Now!” ?? It’s always just a few months away. Just like the transmutations are always just a little tweek away from being large sizes and they have stories of large sizes but right now just a trace…
We really do need just one clearly working and reproducible example that doesn’t take a shed full of equipment and 20 hours of computer time to “detect” the energy gain…
@P.G.:
What I think I’m seeing is that neutrons are, well, neutral, so can wander around all over fairly easily. Even snuggle up close to electrons and protons. But also that they can spit out an electron and become a hydrogen. Yet that implies a reversible reaction. An electron ought to be able to slide into a proton and make a neutron. Now surround that proton with lots of ‘friends’ and put a LOT of extra electrons around and event could find a lower energy path that we do not recognize.
In particular, the ‘bond length’ of hydrogen to some metals (where I looked) sure looks like the H is embedded way down inside the metal ion. (Ion diameter greater than bond length). That implies that proton is inside most of the electron bands. Just a bit more “push” and it could be close enough to the nucleus to ‘snuggle up’ and then you get the ‘dance of the electrons’ as things settle out how many of what particles is most stable. So perhaps a N decay or perhaps a P/e ‘squash together’ in the process.
That’s my hypothesis, anyway…
@Adolfo:
So you making that reaction go? If so, I’ve got a lot of old copper with tin solder on it… ;-)
It’s a nice formula, but without a mechanism, it’s just patterns in symbols. Like:
He -> H+ + e-
(Similar things can be done with Be and Se and…)
Fun, but not real.
What looks like it might be real is hydrogen ( Proton) getting embedded ‘inside’ most of the electron shell levels, then a ‘whack’ from outside ‘knocking it’ inside the last bit so it’s inside all the electrons and ‘near’ the nucleus. At that point it has decent odds of being absorbed. Basically, it just needs to get close enough for a little while and quantum mechanics says some of them WILL do that. But the question is “how big is some?”. Need numbers.
I think it really is instructive to look at the ion sizes of some of those metal ions and then look at the bond length of the metal hydrides. The hydrogen bond length is much shorter than the ion diameter…
Terrific column! Black outs do wonderfully concentrate the mind.
Thanks Chiefio.
@Zeke: Not too much to wonder: “As above so below”
Number of people killed in accidents directly related to nuclear power in the US: 3
Number of people killed in gasoline, diesel fuel, natural gas explosions, mining and drilling accidents ??????
@Crosspatch:
Even the disaster in Japan had very very few deaths from nuclear causes. Folks seem to just ignore the massive numbers killed by the Tsunami, and get excited about the radiation that has done very little.
@Lewis Larsen:
Thank you for participating. I’m sorry I did not notice your reply in the “Moderation” queue until this morning.
@Jim2 and Simon, you will want to look back up thread to his reply as it directly addresses you two.
Yesterday, Jeff McMahon, a nuclear science journalist affiliated with the Univ. of Chicago, published a news story in Forbes online featuring Lattice’s March 7, 2013, PowerPoint about LENRs possibly occurring in compact fluorescent lights:
“Tiny Nuclear Reactions inside Compact Fluorescent Bulbs?”
By Jeff McMahon
March 14, 2013 at 12:35 PM
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2013/03/14/tiny-nuclear-reactions-inside-compact-fluorescent-bulbs/?utm_source=followingimmediate&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20130314
Quoting snippets of text from McMahon’s Forbes article:
“Harmless low-energy nuclear reactions may be taking place routinely inside of compact fluorescent light bulbs … Nuclear reactions may be responsible for an unusual fingerprint of mercury isotopes in used fluorescents that can identify environmental pollution from the bulbs … Unbeknownst to the general public, dynamically active nuclear processes are presently occurring in tens of millions of households worldwide …Fortunately, there aren’t any radiological health risks associated with CFLs because no hard radiation is emitted from them … and no environmentally hazardous, long-lived radioactive isotopes are typically created by LENRs … Larsen has suspected low energy nuclear reactions occur in CFLs, he told me, and is encouraged by a February study of used bulbs that found isotopes of mercury that more conventional theories cannot explain.”
Lewis Larsen – the holes in your theory are related to gamma-suppression. If the gammas are created, as you’ve said, then we get two in opposite directions. The shielding effect is presumably just on one side, so we’d see the other gamma. Gammas are also not always emitted promptly, so we’d also expect to see some gammas after the gamma-shield ends. If the plasmons did in fact absorb gammas, it’s not that difficult to irradiate a working Pd-D cell and measure the drop in intensity the other side – no-one has published that measurement if they have done the experiment.
These are not minor problems, and if you could prove that your patented gamma-shield worked you’d get extremely rich very quickly. Because of these problems with gammas, once they have been produced, it seem less unreasonable to posit that no gammas are produced in the first place. As regards how LENR happens, thus, I can’t now accept your theory, though I did before I thought about the problem further. I don’t have a better theory, though. A collective action that absorbs the energy that would otherwise have gone into a gamma may be a better path to take. Hot fusion can only be a two-body problem, whereas LENR is a many-body problem with more opportunity to absorb momentum in the lattice rather than emitting radiation.
As regards LENR happening in a lot of daily situations, I agree that this looks pretty likely and that you’re probably correct in asserting that and in looking for other examples. Possibly not noticed before since nobody looked, and the impurities produced were below the level where they caused any problems.
@Simon:
From the Forbes article, I landed at another, that lead to a NASA video, the has a ‘clarification link’. The video and the link lend some credence to the WIdom Larsen theory:
http://joe.zawodny.com/index.php/2012/01/14/technology-gateway-video/
In general, that posting has the same POV that I have. I does look like something is happening. Nothing big and reliable enough to be useful has been made public (yet).
So with that intro, the video:
And the Forbes story that lead to it:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2013/02/22/nasa-a-nuclear-reactor-to-replace-your-water-heater/
Now I’m going back to try to find the original paper about CFLs making odd isotope mixes…
Dear Simon:
Now you have framed an answerable question to which I will respond.
I appreciate your providing specifics about your concerns involving our concept of the built-in gamma shielding mechanism that occurs in LENR-active sites in condensed matter. What I call ‘shielding’ in this context is really a process of absorption and direct conversion of locally emitted gammas into many more less energetic tic infrared photons at high efficiency while, of course, obeying the law of conservation of energy.
Importantly, ALL of the many-body particles found within a condensed matter 2 nm to 100 micron 3-D LENR-active ‘patch’ (in which there is also a total breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation) — surface plasmon or π electrons; protons or deuterons; produced ULM neutrons — oscillate collectively and — key point —are mutually quantum mechanically entangled with each other. This unique characteristic of LENR-active surface sites is explained in great detail in several Lattice SlideShare presentations and is well-supported by recently published, outstanding work by other researchers who are totally outside the field of LENRs.
Because of the above, when an ULM neutron is created collectively, its 3-D DeBroglie wave function must perforce span the three spatial dimensions of the particular patch in which it is ‘born’. In the brief interval of several picoseconds before such a neutron is locally captured by some atom located with the (we think) oblate spheroidal spatial boundaries of the neutron’s extended DeBroglie wave function, it is interacting with MANY different atoms that ‘compete’ amongst each other to capture it (many-body scattering cross-section, NOT 2-body).
Note that only a modest percentage of the total number of mass-renormalized electrons located within the 3-D spatial Q-M domain of an LENR-active patch have absorbed enough energy from the very high (> 2 x 10*11 V/m) local electric field to cross the threshold for making ULM neutrons by a direct e + p electroweak reaction. Most of the heavier than normal electrons are locally present but unreacted.
Once an ULM neutron is actually captured by an atom located inside the entangled 3-D Q-M domain of an LENR-active patch, there is typically a prompt gamma photon emission. Well, remember that the DeBroglie wave functions of the entangled, mass-renormalized ‘heavy’ electrons are also 3-D, NOT 2-D. Since the neutron capture gamma photon emission occurs INSIDE the 3-D quantum mechanical structure of a 3-D LENR-active ‘patch’, there are always heavy electrons available nearby to absorb such gamma emissions and convert them directly into infrared photons. Ergo, it doesn’t matter where the gamma emission occurs inside a given 3-D patch, it will always get converted to IR, which is exactly what has been observed experimentally. You will not see any fluxes of ‘hard’ gammas emerging from such a 3-D patch, no matter which direction you try to measure them from.
Ditto for any gammas that might be produced in conjunction with beta-decays of unstable, extremely neutron-rich isotopes that are briefly present in LENR-active patches before they ‘die.’ The vast majority of these very short-lived intermediate nuclear products will have decayed into stable isotopes/elements before the dynamic local population of heavy-mass electrons goes completely away. Again, this prediction is very consistent with what is seen experimentally: with mass spectroscopy, you observe stable transmutation products in which prompt capture gammas were undoubtedly produced along the likely nucleosynthetic pathway, but no ‘hard’ gamma fluxes can ever be measured during the process of LENR transmutation.
Your idea of taking an operating, current-technology LENR device and looking for measurable attenuation of a standard gamma photon source (e.g., Cobalt-60) passing through it would not work because present LENR devices have only a minuscule fraction (<<<1%) of a device surface that might be LENR-active at any given time. I have already spoken with people who are experts on low-count gamma measurements and they think that the signal-to-noise ratio in such a case would be too low for this to be a meaningful experimental test.
By the way, ULM neutrons are captured locally inside the spatial domain of an LENR-active patch long before they have enough time to thermalize, which takes 0.1 to 0.2 milliseconds. This is why significant energetic neutron emissions are so infrequent in LENR condensed matter systems.
Lewis Larsen, President and CEO, Lattice Energy LLC
Not the original, but a pointer to it:
http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/web/2013/02/Mercury-Fluorescent-Bulbs-Unique-Isotope.html
Looks like it could be isotope fractionation into the glass:
Or maybe not…
http://www.mail-archive.com/vortex-l@eskimo.com/msg77394.html
So, like most things LENR, some-strange-thing then lots of speculation and not so much experimental demonstration and clarity…
OK, found the location of the paper in one of the slides here:
But it’s paywalled:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es303940p
Interesting graph with ‘way skewed’ isotopes. I don’t think it is differential glass absorbing. Hg 196 goes ‘way high’ while the others go low. I’d not expect that much change in one isotope from glass ( but that’s just a belief so could be quite wrong.)
In any case, something strange and interesting is happening inside CFLs.
Lewis – many thanks for the deeper explanation. I’ll take a few days to think about this before I try to answer any of it. The maths is well above my pay-grade, and since normally the better information is behind a pay wall that the pension won’t stretch to, I only read information I can get for free. That may sound cheap, but in fact it is….
In truth we don’t need a theory that just fits the facts we know; we need instead one that will tell us what we need to do to make it happen reliably.
@E.M.. An additional instruction by the alchemists, regarding the above formula of Copper and Tin (in the due proportions): “Solve et Coagula” (Dissolve and solidify) several times.
Dear Simon:
Thank you for your sincere technical question, to which I responded.
Exactly the same question has been asked of me by a number of parties since 2006; you are the very first recipient of a detailed answer.
I chose to answer now for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is because LENRs are finally beginning to enter the realm of ‘mainstream’ science. That being the case, it is appropriate that adventuresome scientists — who may now be contemplating the possibility of taking some risks by entering this heretofore controversial field of study — should rightly be armed with this particular piece of Lattice’s hard-won technical knowledge.
For LENRs to fully blossom and reach their ultimate scientific and commercial potential, the field needs to recruit many more highly skilled new entrants coming from many different scientific disciplines, especially advanced materials science, plasmonics, and nanotechnology. It is in Lattice’s long-term commercial interest to do its part to help make sure that ‘immigration’ process happens forthwith.
Lattice has publicly released less than 10% of what it presently knows about LENRs; the balance is withheld as proprietary intellectual property, know-how, and trade secrets. A small portion of that non-public knowledge base is substantively reflected in Lattice’s five issued patents to date, with more pending. Obviously, as a for-profit, privately held company, we’re not in the business of putting sensitive technical information — on which we have spent a decade of effort and millions of dollars — out in the public domain gratis for our competitors to potentially utilize in their LENR device engineering programs.
We now believe Lattice has indeed finally developed key technical knowledge that is required to begin an LENR device engineering program aimed at building well-performing commercial prototypes with fully predictable, controllable heat output. In that regard, we are presently looking for the capital needed to fund that program. Obviously, we have no intention of releasing any of that extraordinarily valuable engineering-related information publicly in any venue.
For these reasons, I really can’t delve very much further with you into deeper, more detailed discussion of the LENR gamma shielding mechanism in condensed matter — to do so would rapidly move into uncomfortably close proximity to sensitive, non-public technical information. So please don’t expect additional Q&A dialogue with me on this subject.
All that said, since you have demonstrated sincere interest in our work, I am not totally averse to providing you with some intriguing hints that you may wish to pursue intellectually at your leisure.
The hint is this: there is a deep conceptual connection between the commercial embodiment of a Widom-Larsen theory gamma shielding product and the unexpected connection we discovered between the onset of LENRs and localized, evanescent ultra-high-temperature superconductivity in condensed matter. Please look in the following Aug. 23, 2012, 92-slide Lattice SlideShare PowerPoint document for further details on this truly fascinating possibility:
Good luck and good hunting.
Lewis Larsen, President and CEO, Lattice Energy LLC
Hey! ChiefIO! Your blog has been honored by a visit of Mr Larsen himself! Whoot!
@DirkH:
;-)
Lewis – the Slideshare presentation was very interesting – as it happens the only reason I put up with Slideshare’s spam is to read your articles. Thankyou.
At the risk of exposing some more ignorance, it may be worth noting that solid metallic Hydrogen is thought to be a superconductor. It seems likely to me that some tetragonal crystal forms of Hydrogen may in fact exist on a heavily-hydrided surface, and thus some patches of high-temperature superconductivity may ensue from this crystallisation.
It seems likely to me that, if you did publish all your theory and the ways of utilising it, then NASA would most likely put it in their patents – they do seem to have priority on getting LENR patents through. As such, I hope that your ideas for commercialising your ideas go ahead as quickly as possible – although as EM says we’re not going to run out of oil or other “stuff” for a very long time, the cost of energy does need to be a lot lower and the pollution from generating it needs to be also much lower.
Dear Simon:
Re Widom-Larsen gamma ‘shielding’ mechanism that occurs in many-body LENR-active surface sites in condensed matter: I decided to share the detailed answer provided to you yesterday with a wider viewing audience who might also enjoy reading it. Consequently, I edited and expanded my previous post herein and then uploaded it to Lattice’s presence on SlideShare as a 2-page MS-Word document dated March 17, 2013, located at the following URL:
Must confess that I haven’t thought in any depth about the quasi-mythical, yet-to-be-observed-experimentally (as far as I know), speculative subject of metallic Hydrogen and frankly don’t know much about it either, so I have no idea whether it might bear any relationship to the question of superconductivity in LENRs.
My present thinking about the possibility of superconductivity occurring on ‘loaded’ metallic hydride surfaces in condensed matter can be found in a 92-slide Lattice SlideShare PowerPoint presentation located at the following URL:
I beg to differ with your previous statement that, “…they [NASA] do seem to have priority on getting LENR patents through [the US Patent Office]…”
First, Lattice has 5 issued patents that are directly related to LENRs; NASA presently has no such issued patents that I am now aware of, although they certainly have at least one USPTO patent APPLICATION on file that has probably not even been examined yet and moreover was filed ‘on top’ of Lattice’s much earlier priority date gamma shielding patent, which NASA did in fact properly cite as applicable prior art in its pending US application.
Second, I seriously doubt that NASA will receive any special, uniquely favorable treatment from examiners at the US Patent and Trademark Office with respect to granting their applications’ claims preference over those found in competing patent applications filed by other parties, e.g., individual lone inventors or for-profit companies like Lattice, who are also trying to obtain patent protection on what they believe to be novel, innovative art related to the field of LENRs.
You may be interested in reading a detailed chronicle of various shenanigans that have occurred during Lattice’s rather peculiar, nearly 5-year up-and-down interaction with NASA-Langley; this protracted, not-so-amusing saga with many problematic twists-and-turns has been reported in a blog post by investigative science journalist Steve Krivit as follows:
“LENR gold rush begins — at NASA”
Steven B. Krivit, Editor and Publisher, New Energy Times
January 13, 2012
http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2012/01/13/lenr-gold-rush-begins-at-nasa/
Again, thank you for your interest in our work.
Lewis Larsen, President and CEO, Lattice Energy LLC
Dear Simon:
Re Widom-Larsen gamma ‘shielding’ mechanism that occurs in many-body LENR-active surface sites in condensed matter: I decided to share the detailed answer provided to you yesterday with a wider viewing audience who might also enjoy reading it. Consequently, I edited and expanded my previous post herein and then uploaded it to Lattice’s presence on SlideShare as a 2-page MS-Word document dated March 17, 2013, located at the following URL:
Must confess that I haven’t thought in any depth about the quasi-mythical, yet-to-be-observed-experimentally (as far as I know), speculative subject of metallic Hydrogen and frankly don’t know much about it either, so I have no idea whether it might bear any relationship to the question of superconductivity in LENRs.
My present thinking about the possibility of superconductivity occurring on ‘loaded’ metallic hydride surfaces in condensed matter can be found in a 92-slide Lattice SlideShare PowerPoint presentation located at the following URL:
I beg to differ with your previous statement that, “…they [NASA] do seem to have priority on getting LENR patents through [the US Patent Office]…”
First, Lattice has 5 issued patents that are directly related to LENRs; NASA presently has no such issued patents that I am now aware of, although they certainly have at least one USPTO patent APPLICATION on file that has probably not even been examined yet and moreover was filed ‘on top’ of Lattice’s much earlier priority date gamma shielding patent, which NASA did in fact properly cite as applicable prior art in its pending US application.
Second, I seriously doubt that NASA will receive any special, uniquely favorable treatment from examiners at the US Patent and Trademark Office with respect to granting their applications’ claims preference over those found in competing patent applications filed by other parties, e.g., individual lone inventors or for-profit companies like Lattice, who are also trying to obtain patent protection on what they believe to be novel, innovative art related to the field of LENRs.
You may be interested in reading a detailed chronicle of various shenanigans that have occurred during Lattice’s rather peculiar, nearly 5-year up-and-down interaction with NASA-Langley; this protracted, not-so-amusing saga with many problematic twists-and-turns has been reported in a blog post by investigative science journalist Steve Krivit as follows:
“LENR gold rush begins — at NASA”
Steven B. Krivit, Editor and Publisher, New Energy Times
January 13, 2012
http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2012/01/13/lenr-gold-rush-begins-at-nasa/
Again, thank you for your interest in our work.
Lewis Larsen, President and CEO, Lattice Energy LLC
@Lewis Larson:
No idea why WordPress put those in the SPAM queue, but I got them out…
Thanks for pulling my latest comment out of the spam file. My sincere apologies for the double-posting: at first, I mistakenly thought that my Chrome browser had momentarily ‘misfired’ and simply re-posted immediately. When that second posting attempt mysteriously didn’t appear in my screen, I backed-off on any further posts, suspecting that something may have transpired on your end (which was the case).
Lew
@Lew:
No worries. When I get a moment I’ll compare for identical and delete one of them..
WordPress has an “inexplicable SPAM filter”. It decides on its own what is worthy of The Queue. I think partly it is some statistical key word thing, partly by IP or person, partly by who knows what.
I have been logged in to WordPress, as me, made a comment with nothing I could see about it, and had it go to The Queue.
Best I can offer is that if it says “Awaiting Moderation” you had something that put it there (like more than 7? or so links – settable by the blog manager – i.e. me) and if it just “disappears” then WordPress had “a moment’. ;-)
BTW, any comments on LENR, even about the likely odds that some other guys stuff might actually work, or not, are welcome. Every so often I put up a “LENR” posting and try to catch up with what might actually happen. I’m sure you are much more ‘in touch’ than am I. Things like “The Perpetual e-Cat Real Soon Now” drive me a bit around the bend. It’s been “Public Available Show and Tell next month” for a few years now. Present “slip” moved things to next month, IIRC.
I know that your position may prevent some kinds of comments or disclosures, so will understand if you are circumspect.
E.M.
Lewis – funnily enough the “gold rush” article on NET is one where Krivit actually allowed me to comment. Also at the end there’s a comment by Clint Seward, who does seem to me to have a good chance of making a workable hot-fusion system fairly soon (year or two).
I saw a document a while back that was a directive to USPTO staff to block (redirect to a special department) all patents that referenced LENR in the same way that perpetual motion devices are blocked. It may take a while to find the reference and URL, but I’ll find this if required. When I looked at Zawodny’s patent, though, it seemed to cover anything anyone had ever thought could be useful in producing LENR, and any materials that have been said to have had a result. Somewhere in there was likely a combination that would work, but the patent certainly didn’t teach me how to do it or give one physical implementation as an example that was specified to work. This vague description should not have been passed through the patent office, in my opinion. I’d thought it had been granted, but have not checked since.
For around the last 6 months I have not been following LENR as closely, having been diverted into helping to revive the Papp engine. I think this has some common ground with LENR, and has the possibility of some sort of fusion energy being relatively easily available. It is certainly a crackpot project, but to me it looks to have enough grounding in truth to be worth the work.
I hope you get enough funding to get to a reliable LENR system. I see the emergence of a cheap and minimally-polluting energy source as possibly the best chance to fix the downward financial spiral we are all in. Having several alternate sources of cheap energy will be better still. Politically, though, it will lead to “interesting times”.
Chiefio,
I don’t know how you do it. Somehow I completely missed this interesting work. While Rossi is an obvious scam artist, Widom-Larsen are different. If you start with pure Tungsten and light elements in a sealed vessel, the appearance of even trace amounts of elements with atomic numbers greater than 74 is proof that nuclear reactions are taking place. Thanks to mass spectrometers we can detect tiny amounts of contaminants so it should be possible to deliver convincing proof that something interesting is going on.
My main reason for doubting the Rossi LENR was the huge power output (~10 kW). This implied ~ 10 kW of gamma rays. Having run such a source for a dozen years I was familiar its extreme lethality and the elaborate “Personnel Protection Systems” required to keep everyone healthy:
To his credit Larsen discusses the gamma ray output from transmutation experiments. Given the nature of the experiments, measuring energy output through calorimetry is not likely to be helpful. The actual “Heat of Reaction” may be milli-watts in which case the amount of shielding needed could be modest.
No matter how inefficient the Tungsten reactions may appear to be, if there is any detectable production of elements with atomic numbers greater than 74, I would recommend investing some serious money in this research. You can bet that ways will be found to increase the reaction rates with a good chance of developing commercially viable applications. Probably with a greater chance of success than ITER and for much less time or money.
Larsen hints at processes that might mitigate the amount of gamma rays produced. I am pretty sceptical about this as it implies “New Physics”. However, better physicists including fellow countryman Brian Josephson consider this a possibility:
http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1150242
Looking at the ‘Big Picture” in a future with transmutation on an industrial scale, dealing with huge multi MeV gamma ray fluxes may be expensive but it is not a “Show Stopper”. There is a miniature mountain at the Jefferson laboratory in Virginia that demonstrates how to do it.
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Here is a link to an open source effort to show LENR, primarily from the work of Celani.
http://www.quantumheat.org/index.php/home
In addition to Rossi, there is interesting information on defkalion that claims to have a working system. The moved from Greece to Canada because of economics. A company in the bay area that has demonstrated a working system is Brillouin. They work with SRI in building the next generation and hope to retrofit an old coal plant to demonstrate their capability.
While Rossi may seem like a scam, I believe he has something that works, but its a control issue. He has some major interest from the military and a major partner to move things forward. I could be a real sucker on this, but I follow things closely. While the delays are maddening, I still believe there is something there.
Googling for “surface plasmon gamma ray photon”, I find this from medical research related to Gold nanoparticles as possible cancer weapon.
http://openi.nlm.nih.gov/detailedresult.php?img=2747351_ijn-4-165f4&req=4
“Meanwhile, the surface plasmon resonance of gold nanoparticles was enhanced obviously after 2-10 kR gamma irradiation.”
I would have to agree with DirkH. Rossi appears to have a working device that yields useful output. That said, it appears that his design is good for testing work but poor for real work. Energy flow looks wrong to me.The marketing of a “mass produced device” appears to be at a stop due to regulatory red tape and business agreements. The hand made commercial devices are being assembled and sold as large assemblies to corporate customers for hot water output. So far all the others that I know of have a maybe real output but need more R&D and money. Meanwhile the Government sponsored high temperature fusion efforts suck up $Billions and are a 30+ year maybe. In my opinion maybe NEVER! Their science is wrong. Anyone that equates LENR with HTNR conditions just doesn’t understand the mechanics. Electron valves (tubes) are very different from semiconductors even if they get the same job done. Solid state electronics were used before the Deforst Valve but it took 50years to get to the first practical transistor and 50 more to get to present 12 micron technology.
It appears to me that core point is in the dance of Hydrogen/Neutron conversion inside the crystal lattice due to packing density of hydrogen next to atoms that are unstable. The key to atomic energy is the Neutron. How you get there is the question. pg