HOW TO SAVE OUR ECONOMY

BRADENTON, Fla. -- There is one, and only one, answer to America's burgeoning national debt, now in the many trillions of dollars and seemingly impossible to repay. There is a way - and also a means - that can be summed up in two words. The first is prosperity.

What happens when individual American suddenly once again have cash in their pockets, jobs to go to, and money in the bank? If the prosperity endures for any length of time, debt begins to fall as tax revenues grow. So what is the word that is going to make that happen? Well, there was a different word that made it happen in the Clinton Administration: Internet.

The Net exploded on the world scene in 1994, when a clever man by the name of Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web. Soon, from the University of Illinois supercomputing center, came the first Internet browser, called Mosaic. With the advent of Mosaic, e-mail - pretty much the only widely accessible function then - was overtaken by the advent of jazzy Internet graphics.

With HTML encoding, such as I do by hand for every edition of The American Reporter (we don't use any templates), the power of the Internet immediately began to emerge. By the turn of the century, revenues from all Internet operations closed in on $1 billion. By the end of the past decade, advertising revenues alone reached $23 billion.

But even in 1999, according to an otherwise flawed report by the University of Texas McCombs School of Business in Austin, jobs traceable to the Internet had gone from the dozens in 1993 to 2.67 million by 1999. Oh, what a little invention can do!

Because of the Internet, President Bill Clinton could leave a $127 billion surplus in 2001 for the Bush Administration to squander (it was all gone by 2003). By 2005, Bush was running a budget deficit of $519 billion, according to Bloomberg News. So the question becomes, "Where can President Obama find another Internet?"

That's the second word: energy. Back in 1988, "cold fusion" and its discoverers, the late Dr. B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and English chemist Dr. Martin Fleischmann, were being tarred and feathered for their claims by both the media and fellow scientists. A "60 Minutes" segment in November 2009 would later rehabilitate them and their theory, which now has been replicated at least 2,000 times.

But in April 1989, one observer was just a few steps outside the fray. Soon he, too, would be disparaged, but never on the same scale. His name is Dr. Randell C. Mills, a graduate of Harvard Medical School who'd been encouraged by a mentor there to study bioengineering at nearby MIT. Some of our readers were not yet born when Drs. Pons and Fleischmann were branded as fools, so let me recount a little of what happened.

On March 23, 1989, the day before the 10.8-million-barrel Exxon Valdez oil spill on the pristine shores of Alaska's Prince William Sound, Pons and Fleischmann held a press conference. Even as a number of universities and other laboratories rushed to claim the same achievement first, they told the press in Salt Lake City that they had produced "tabletop" or "cold" fusion, i.e., that they had harnessed the power of the sun. And not in a hugely expensive magnetic bottle, as physicists expected to do some day, but in a couple of plain glass vessels on a laboratory countertop in the chemistry building at the University of Utah.

Pons and Fleischmann declared that during simple electrolysis, using palladium as the anode and deuterium, or heavy water, as the electrolyte, the reaction to an electric current was demonstrably emitting far more energy (as the palladium's lattice absorbed a high percentage of deuterium) in the form of far more heat than conventional chemistry could account for.

For five years starting in 1983 they had labored to do this, and just as other labs threatened to beat them to a patent, the university, Fleischmann says, pushed them to hold the press conference in advance of publication of their paper on the topic, in the obscure but peer-reviewed Journal of Electromagnetic Chemistry. The story was a huge one, making headlines across the entire world; the Valdez story was on the front page with it.

The irony in that coincidence has escaped most historians, but the two stories together created a tale of breakthrough and disaster that could be a great tragedy, if well-told. That’s because in the seeds of cold fusion are the death of Big Oil.

But the Pons-Fleischmann claim was more immediately and profoundly threatening to a group of well-funded physicists whose careers were buttered with tens of billions of dollars in federal funding for their fruitless hot fusion projects, such as the Tokomak reactor.

To date, none of this funding - perhaps $50 billion worth so far - has produced a working hot fusion reactor, or saved an American consumer a single cent. The return on taxpayers’ $50-billion investment: zero. The advent of a simple, cheap, competing technology, if it were allowed to stand, would be absolutely ruinous to them, these men knew. So, they didn't wait to publish, either.

Instead, with a poor understanding of what occurred in Utah, they rushed through attempts at replication. Instead of the lengthy times needed to allow the palladium lattice to absorb that high ratio of deuterium, they invariably tried to get the reaction the Utah scientists did quickly and easily - and it didn't happen. NASA scientists later criticized the would-be replicators harshly for flawed and "hurried" experiments.

Meanwhile, new billions of taxpayer dollars were in the pipeline for all kinds of hot fusion studies and projects. Their spokesman was Bob Park, the president of the American Physical Society and a columnist for the society's prestigious scientific journal, Physical Review. His "What's New" column relentlessly attacked cold fusion and its discoverers, and later Randell Mills.

According to the Village Voice, Park actually lied on at least one occasion about Mills' work. His well-read column told the world acupuncture didn't work, that Jesus Christ was an "itinerant healer," and, ever the breathless insider, that the North Koreans couldn't build an ICBM - on the day before they successfully launched one.

By early May, just weeks after they announced their discovery, Dr. Park and the APS took their anti-cold fusion show on the road. By May 9, less than two months after the cold fusion announcement, Malcolm Browne of the New York Times wrote, "Top physicists directed angry attacks at Dr. Pons and Dr. Fleischmann, calling them incompetent, reciting sarcastic verses about their claims and complaining that they had refused to provide details needed for follow-up experiments. A West European expert said 'essentially all' West European attempts to duplicate cold fusion had failed."

Browne was one of hundreds of science writers who felt betrayed and embarrassed by their initial reports, and some - like Thomas Maugh of the Los Angeles Times, who first report I read, would never touch the subject again. The reporters were burned, all right, not by Pons and Fleischmann but by Bob Park and his pals in the publicly funded hot fusion industry.

The denunciations came as Dr. Pons was actually in Washington, getting ready to meet with President George H.W. Bush to ask for $25 million for further study of cold fusion. That meeting never happened. Very quickly, long before any serious effort at replication could be mounted, the tide was turned. It was awful to watch, especially for those whose hopes for a pollution-free future had risen so high, so far and so fast.

Later, when a new patent had already been published in the Gazette of the U.S. Patent Office, a "poison pen" telephone call from Bob Park to friends at the patent office got the patent grant to Mills reeled back in and then denied. That had apparently never happened before.

By himself, Park has probably saved the oil industry twice, and cost Americans countless billions of dollars in cheaper energy costs they might have enjoyed. But more about that shortly.

One scientist who joined Park in denouncing the hydrino theory of Randell Mills, way back in 1999, was physics Nobelist Dr. Steven Chu. Today he is Secretary of Energy. Despite the validation of cold fusion - now called LENR, for Low Energy Nuclear Reaction - and the laudatory revelations of the November 2009 "60 Minutes" piece, and groundbreaking presentations at the March 26, 2010, convention of the American Chemical Society, Chu is not parting with money for more research. The Dept. of the Navy and a private firm had to finance the latest study. But Mills has not sought government funding or Wall Street equity money, and has raised $71 million on his own.

Chu and Park have one thing in common: the craftiness to disable the rise of a new scientific theory just at the point when the public might demand action to implement it, and save Americans the endless billions of expense that then go to fuels and electric power. Park's lightning strike on Pons and Fleischmann came just as a meeting between Pons and the President was about to give them the green light; Chu's came just as Randell Mills was ready to make public his plan to change the way the world used the energy of hydrogen.

"It's extremely unlikely that this is real, and I feel sorry for the funders, the people who are backing this," Chu told the Wall Street Journal's Dow Jones News Service in 1999, when Mills results' were being validated by America's national laboratories, major universities and NASA.

But scientists are catching up with these two deft dodgers. At the March 26 meeting of the American Chemical Society, for instance, Michael McKubre, director of SRI International's Energy Research Center in Menlo Park, Calif., told National Public Radio's "Science Friday" program about an American company in Israel, Energistics Technologies, that has recently demonstrated a 25-fold increase in energy after putting 40 Joules of heat into their cold fusion process and getting 1.47 megaJoules out.

"We're seeing thousands or tens of thousands of times more energy than can be explained by any form of chemistry that I'm familiar with," McKubre told NPR. "If you could do that every time with cheap materials and no dangerous byproducts, that is a practical technology. That is commercializable, just there," he said.

As impressive as they are, the Energistics results from a cold fusion process pale in comparison to those from Mills' hydrino reactors. The inventor of the BlackLight Process rejects quantum mechanics and its relativistic answers in favor of Einstein’s concrete, classical physics that yield hard, clear, testable numbers. That has divided and re-divided the world of physics like a great amoeba. Some physicists have hardened their position against Mills, some have moved from skeptical to undecided, and others have joined his camp. Meanwhile, peer-reviewed journals have published 84 papers on the hydrino and the theory behind it, all in support of Mills' dense calculations.

But Mills already has 20 working 50- and 75-kilowatt reactors at his plant in Cranbury, N.J. (not far from where both Einstein and Edison worked), and big-name venture capitalists (like a former CEO of Westinghouse and formed USAF chief of staff) have so far backed him to the tune of $71 million. In fact, you might coin a new adage in the field of high-energy physics: "One working self-regenerating reactor is worth all the theories of quantum and classical physics combined."

Meanwhile, the relativistic theories of quantum mechanics seem to have met their match in Mills' unified model of classical and quantum theory, in that his devices work - and have about $700 million in contracts awaiting roll-out. The latest came from a sprawling Italian multinational, the RadiciGroup, which ordered a 750MW hydrino reactor to power all the Group's industrial and corporate facilities in a deal announced on March 19, 2010.

So what is the savior of the economy? Either, or both, cold fusion and hydrino reactors. Both could - by virtue of their relatively low cost and cheap materials, as need for no fuel but water, not to mention emission-free production of electricity - transform our manufacturing base, our employment picture, our state and federal tax revenues - and our lives and burdens - almost overnight. These are technologies that work now and can be implemented now.

With real leadership in Washington, we can be self-sufficient in energy just two years from now and free of fossil fuels in a decade. When the President called on Americans to alert him to any technologies that are "ready to go" to address the nation’s energy needs during a Town Hall session in North Carolina on March 29, 2010, cold fusion and hydrino energy both came immediately to mind.

And like the Internet once did, they can save the American economy - this time for good. Now there is a greater imperative than there has ever been to adopt and fund them: without such a boon, we will become a bankrupt nation, unfathomably deep in debt to China and other trading partners. Those in power have a hard, cold choice: take what the good Lord has given us in these new technologies, and abandon those that have failed and polluted this lovely planet, or die as other civilizations have, in debt, desolation and disgrace. Those are choices that separate the real patriots from the flingers of rhetoric and defenders of the status quo.

Too many people presume that putting the oil industry out of business would be a terrible thing. That's not true. With a new source of electricity that is pretty close to free, hundreds of thousands of small businesses would spring up overnight, both to replicate the technology under license and to develop new applications for it.

In turn, that would stimulate jobs for hundreds of thousands of well-educated engineers and millions of people who will assemble these devices from newly-manufactured parts. Finally, energy-intensive businesses that have gone broke on $3 gas can spring back to life without that burden of cost and maintenance.

Hydrino vehicles, according to the latest "concept car" from BlackLight Power, Mills' company, will get 1,500 miles on a single liter of water. Not only would automotive design soon be back in a big way, but motorists - needing no more fuel than 50 gallons of water for the life of the car - would have tens of billions of extra dollars in their pockets as they put the automakers back to work. You can add billions to that from cheap residential electric and heating costs. The hydrino "cell stack" that powers an electric motor will power a conventional-looking car that costs just $9,800 to build and at 276HP has more than twice the horsepower of my speedy little Saturn SC-2.

Just two words: "Energy" and "prosperity," can save us. The economy, sans Big Oil, will renew and replenish itself overnight if the vast inventive capacity of America is allowed by the Obama Administration to put itself to work again. Even Republicans could vote for that.

Looked at the 2 latest publications from BlackLight. One on the chemical experiments. The other on the plasma/emission front.

First, on the chemical front. Looking at the hydride/hydrino experiments at Rowan and at Blacklight in the past 5 years, the excess energy ratio has decreased from 20:1, 10:1, 5:1, and now 3:1. The trend is approaching 1:1 and there is nothing there to be discovered. Most of the heats of formation of the listed reactants have been compiled back in the 1950’s and have not been updated. The margins of error in many thermodynamic evaluations are often large. Once the Rowan/Blacklight researchers recalibrate for corrected heats of formation, the excess energy ratio is approaching 1:1.

The focus has been on halides: Chlorine, Bromine, and - notoriously - Iodine. Iodine has a strong tendency to produce polyiodide ions: negative and even positive ions composed of several iodine atoms. To a lesser extent, Chlorine and Bromine produce similar polyions. Fluorine, by its small size, behaves quite differently than the other halogens.

Second, on the plasma/emission front. The main failure of Mr Mills’ hydrino model is that the model is a free space model and all experiments by Rowan/Blacklight depends on “hydrino” interacting with other matter. Rowan/Blacklight always talk about catalysis. The simplest and most straightforward experiment is to “lase” some hydrogen gas with UV light at 26 ev. This experiment (and variants) have been done and failed. LASER is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission Radiation. Your common variety of hydrogen plasma gas is - according to the hydrino theory - in a perfect population inversion. Just radiate the hydrogen plasma gas with EUV (>=26 ev) and the outgoing radiation should be of greater intensity than the incoming radiation. BIG FAIL!

Now, one may say that the “hydrino” states are of spherical (s) symmetry and the conventional ground state of hydrogen is also of s symmetry and thus the lasing process is symmetry forbidden. NO PROBLEM! Just optically pump the hydrogen plasma gas to the 2p state (p symmetry) and then lase the pumped plasma with EUV radiation of the appropriate frequency. Again, this experiment has been done: BIG FAIL! Synchroton/Cyclotron produce radiation at all intensities and frequencies.

Looking at the graphs of the Blacklight publication, the helium experiment shows some peaks in the EUV region but they are faint. The same faint peaks show up with the hydrogen experiment: these peaks are characteristic to the grating surface. The helium experiments show little continuum radiation in the EUV region and this is no proof - direct or indirect - of hydrinos. The continuum radiation is essentially a resonance phenomenon (with respect to the geometry of the grated surface).Helium, having a mass 4 times that of of hydrino would produce the same type of continuum radiation at about 1/2 the frequency.

BlackLight cannot see the forest for the trees. It is so focused on the EUV region and did not look at all radiation ranges.

The piece by Joe Shea is just a rehash of some dated publicity pushed out there by “KevMo”. The following is a comment on the posted piece by Joe Shea.

“...which now has been replicated at least 2,000 times. “
Half correct and totally dishonest. The majority of the runs were FAILURES. A small minority of the runs showed excess energy. What the likes of “KevMo” are suffering is called Confirmation Bias: the failures do not register with them.

“...but never on the same scale. His name is Dr. Randell C. Mills, “
Incorrect. The scientific community looked at Mr Mills’ hydrino theory and found it lacking in mathematical consistency and physically inconsistent. To paraphrase the late Wolfgang Pauli, Mr Mills’ theory is incorrect and - what is even worse - it is not even wrong! It is irrelevant. The arguments for Mills’ irrelevancy was given in a previous posting of mine.

Let us compare Mr Mills’ situation with that of an obscure worker at the Swiss Patent Office by the name of Albert Einstein. His theory of special relativity was disruptive to the scientific community. The german scientific establishment condemned this “jewish” science. Mr Einstein was unfazed and said the arguments of 1 person or experimental results suffice to disprove him. What is more pertinent, Mr Einstein was not “married” to his theory whereas “KevMo” and Mr Mills are so “married” to the hydrino theory. Soon, predictions made from special relativity were confirmed by experiments. In the case of General Relativity the picture was a little bit different: many complicated models of Mercury’s (the planet) had a better experimental fit than Einstein’s 2-parameter model. However, for other astrophysical behavior, Einstein’s theory fit much better the experiments than the many-parameter models of others. Applying Occam’s rule, slowly Einstein’s theory was accepted. This not the case with Mr Mills’ model.

“But the Pons-Fleischmann claim was more immediately and profoundly threatening to a group of well-funded physicists whose careers were buttered with tens of billions of dollars in federal funding for their fruitless hot fusion projects, such as the Tokomak reactor. “
Moonbat theory. First of all, the British (in 1995) went BEYOND the break-even point with the Tokomak reactor. The key point: the fuel used was tritium gas. The american scientists grumbled with envy. But tritium is much more expensive than even deuterium and tritium-based methods are not commercially feasible (too expensive). So talking about “fruitless hot fusion projects” is so much nonsense. The above statement by Shea reflects some kind of tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory.

“To date, none of this funding - perhaps $50 billion worth so far - has produced a working hot fusion reactor,”
Incorrect. Read the above paragraph.

“Instead of the lengthy times needed to allow ....”
Half correct and totally dishonest. The Pons’ electrolysis went on for an average of 10 days before any remarkable heat surge occurred. So one had a large energy input and a large output. Most of the time the output was less that the input. Here Shea and “KevMo” show symptoms of Confirmation Bias. Although not mentioned in Shea’s piece is the account of a lab explosion. The accounts I read about this explosion remind me of UFO accounts: “ the extent of the damage was so extensive, it cannot be explained by a chemical reaction... BLAH. BLAH. BLAH.” Yep. You are producing hydrogen gas for days on end and no venting/ventilation system is perfect. The experiment which exploded was run by a graduate student. A similar explosion occurred at SRI and the account of that incident sounds like a UFO account.

“But Mills has not sought government funding or Wall Street equity money, and has raised $71 million on his own. “
Good for him! So far, no tangible results. With much less funding, atomic energy was demonstrated in Germany in the early 1930’s, well before the Manhattan project. Think about it: if one subscribes to the tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory, the Coal and Oil industry would have suppressed Nuclear Energy.

“As impressive as they are, the Energistics results from a cold fusion process pale in comparison to those from Mills’ hydrino reactors. “
A lot of hyperbole. Please quantify “pale”. Here, one enters the Twilight Zone. Recently, General Electric had a EcoImagination competition where individuals and companies compete in the areas of Energy (green preferably), Energy Distribution and EcoHomes. Personally I kept a lookout for any suggestions made by “KevMo” and his ilk. None and “KevMo” missed a great opportunity since GE promised a minimum of 100K investment which can grow to $200 million at the commercialization stage. However there were submissions based on such “wingbat” ideas like the Searl effect generator. Hundreds of people voted for the Searl Effect General and other submissions advocating Perpetual Machines. The Hydrino scheme is at the same level as the Searl generator.

“But Mills already has 20 working 50- and 75-kilowatt reactors at his plant in Cranbury, N.J”
Half correct and totally dishonest. The reactors produced at 75-kilowatt for 1 or 2 seconds. And then go dead. And this after considerable energy input. Produce a 75-kilowatt reactors which run continuously for, say, 24 hours and then talk.

The rest of Shea’s piece is so much boilerplate snake-oil sales pitch.

Let us take a high-altitude look at things.
First, the CalTech electrochemists did not run weeks-long electrolysis. But the Japanese and the Italians did: no confirmation of Pons’ results. Other scientists have submitted palladium (and other palladium alloys) under high pressure deuterium for weeks, even months before using such treated palladium in an electrolysis machine: results are mixed: many failures, few successes. Other scientists have treated the high-pressure (palladium-deuterium) mixes under low frequency EM: the issue is that under electrolysis, there is a small non-zero electric field INSIDE the electrode and this field helps the diffusion of deuterium ions into the body of the electrode. High Pressure deuterium helps in the diffusion and the low frequency EM treatment produces non-zero electric fields inside the electrode. The intensity of the EM treatment changes such that diffusion into the electrode is faster than diffusion out of electrode. The results were mixed: many failures. few successes.

Second, the NSF have looked into the cold-fusion issue and found that the hydrino hypothesis has no grounding in reality and the Low-Energy-Nuclear-Reaction (LENR) has some merit. Most nuclear experiments are done in the high-energy regime, thus one has a good picture of high-end of the internuclear potential but gain little detail about the neighborhood of the bottom of internuclear potential well.

Fourth: what are the engineering difficulties for hot fusion and cold fusion?
hot fusion: reactions go quickly but: the plasma density is too low, the plasma residency time is too short. cold fusion: LENR reactions go VERY, VERY, SLOWLY. And the density of the reactants (usually solid form) may be too low: very high pressures (about 1,000,000 atm) may be needed.

I hypothesize that the first-general fusion machine will be a fission-triggered cold-fusion set-up. The steady-state of the machine will be a combination of hot- and cold- fusion regimes with a plasma core (hot-fusion) surrounded by a high pressure liquid-inner mantle, with (perhaps) a solid outer mantle. To prevent the plasma core (20 KeV temp) to make contact with the reactor shell, the liquid mantle will be manipulated by time-dependent EM fields (similar to what is done today in conventional metallurgy)

Now that I have given you the God-given truth, please send me my royalty checks.

From the tone and phrasing, KevMo is just Mark Goldes (Marketing Officer at Chava Energy) who has been a busy camper on the blogosphere, putting the same inane comments elsewhere. Busy setting up websites like the dead www.energyblogs.com.
***Never heard of Mark Goldes. Why does everything have to have a conspiratorial tone? Maybe Kevmo is just Kevmo, and Mark Goldes is Mark Goldes. Occham’s razor can do wonders in simple situations.

The trend is approaching 1:1 and there is nothing there to be discovered.
***Maybe so, maybe not. But my position is that the cold fusioneers have generated thousands of Megajoules at pennies per Joule while the hot fusioneers have produced tens of Megajoules at $10k/Joule, or so. The trend is approaching diminishing returns for hot fusioneers, and there is nothing there to be discovered.

Most of the heats of formation of the listed reactants have been compiled back in the 1950’s and have not been updated. The margins of error in many thermodynamic evaluations are often large. Once the Rowan/Blacklight researchers recalibrate for corrected heats of formation, the excess energy ratio is approaching 1:1.
***Fascinating. And it sounds well informed. Perhaps you have an article or two we could puruse?

Second, on the plasma/emission front.
***As soon as the argument comes round to plasma, I lose tracking. It’s too mysterious for the average layman following this phenomenon.

The main failure of Mr Mills’ hydrino model is that the model is a free space model and all experiments by Rowan/Blacklight depends on “hydrino” interacting with other matter.
***What is wrong with that?

Interactions of charged particles on surfaces
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LawandyNMinteractio.pdf
Nabil M. Lawandya
Department of Physics and Division of Engineering, Brown University, Providence,
Rhode Island 02903, USA
Received 5 October 2009; accepted 11 November 2009; published online 7 December 2009
Charges of the same polarity bound to a surface with a large dielectric contrast exhibit an attractive
long-range Coulomb interaction, which leads to a two-particle bound state. Ensembles of like
charges experience a collective long-range interaction, which results in compacted structures with
interparticle separations that can be orders of magnitude smaller than the equilibrium separation of
the pair potential minimum. Simulations indicate that ensembles of surface bound nuclei, such as D
or T, exhibit separations small enough to result in significant rates of fusion. © 2009 American
Institute of Physics. doi:10.1063/1.3270537

A model for enhanced fusion reaction in a solid matrix of metal ...File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Quick View
by KP Sinha - Related articles
The central idea of this paper is that the solid matrix in which LENR takes place ..... K. P. Sinha and A. Meulenberg, “Lochon Catalyzed D-D Fusion in ...
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SinhaKPamodelfore.pdf

Rowan/Blacklight always talk about catalysis. The simplest and most straightforward experiment is to “lase” some hydrogen gas with UV light at 26 ev. This experiment (and variants) have been done and failed.
***Nonsense
Hagelsteinprogresson.pdf
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Hagelsteinprogresson.pdf
06/08/2010
Hagelstein, P.L., D. Letts, and D. Cravens. Progress on two-laser experiments (PowerPoint slides). in 15th International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science. 2009. Rome, Italy: ENEA.

TianJexcessheatb.pdf
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/TianJexcessheatb.pdf
11/26/2008
Tian, J., et al. Excess Heat Triggering by 532nm Laser in a D/Pd Gas-Loading System. in ICCF-14 International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science. 2008. Washington, DC.

LASER is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission Radiation. Your common variety of hydrogen plasma gas is - according to the hydrino theory - in a perfect population inversion. Just radiate the hydrogen plasma gas with EUV (>=26 ev) and the outgoing radiation should be of greater intensity than the incoming radiation. BIG FAIL!
***It appears that Professor Ch. E. Stremmenos begs to differ:
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=338

Let us return to Blacklight’s latest publication on their plasma experiments. They pass a beam of hydrogen (and separately helium less than a millimicron above a grated surface and check the outgoing radiation. Per authors, the radiation in the EUV region is characterized as a “continuum”, not “discrete” and therein lies the failure of the experiment. For - according to Mr Mills - the hydrino states are well defined and thus the outgoing radiation should show discrete peaks. The continuum aspect of the radiation indicates that the transition happen from an excited metastable state (key word: metastable) to the convention ground state. The grated surface is a surface in which narrow grooves were carved in: metastable - and excited - hydrogen gas is produced when the gas atoms is well inside these grooves. Upon exiting the grooves, the metastable radiate EUV into the free space and return back to the convention ground state hydrogen atoms.
***See my previous post. While you’re at it, please explain the excess heat being produced on Cold Fusion experiments. Excess Heat. - This is a complete copy of the book: Beaudette, CG ...File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
Beaudette, C.G., Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed. 2002, Concord, NH: Oak. Grove Press. LENR-CANR would like to thank the author, ...
Http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/BeaudetteCexcessheat.pdf

Let us compare Mr Mills’ situation with that of an obscure worker at the Swiss Patent Office by the name of Albert Einstein. His theory of special relativity was disruptive to the scientific community. The german scientific establishment condemned this “jewish” science. Mr Einstein was unfazed and said the arguments of 1 person or experimental results suffice to disprove him. What is more pertinent, Mr Einstein was not “married” to his theory whereas “KevMo” and Mr Mills are so “married” to the hydrino theory.
***Kiss off, bozo. As I’ve posted prior on this thread and others, I don’t care much about Mills’s theory one way or another, I consider it one of many datapoints in the cold fusion inductive pursuit.

Soon, predictions made from special relativity were confirmed by experiments. In the case of General Relativity the picture was a little bit different: many complicated models of Mercury’s (the planet) had a better experimental fit than Einstein’s 2-parameter model. However, for other astrophysical behavior, Einstein’s theory fit much better the experiments than the many-parameter models of others. Applying Occam’s rule, slowly Einstein’s theory was accepted. This not the case with Mr Mills’ model.
***As I’ve stated, my interest is where this intersects with Cold Fusion.
From Wikipedia’s article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrinos
2007: In a review of cold fusion research, Edmund Storms, a cold fusion researcher, concludes that the hydrino model provides a possible explanation for cold fusion.[20]

When laymen like me start to see professors use the same language as a discredited predecessor, it starts to appear that Planck’s observation is coming true: science progresses one funeral at a time.
Professor Ch. E. Stremmenos begs to differ:
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=338

So talking about “fruitless hot fusion projects” is so much nonsense. The above statement by Shea reflects some kind of tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory.
***No, it doesn’t. It is just the laymen trying to grapple with how someone could spend $Billions and get nothing, while backwater scientists spenc $Millions and show far more progress towards ignition and control over fusion.

“To date, none of this funding - perhaps $50 billion worth so far - has produced a working hot fusion reactor,”
Incorrect. Read the above paragraph.
***Incorrect. Read the average detractor on cold fusion threads who demand that they be able to drive a cold fusion car. The reason why they don’t demand driving a hot fusion car is because they know the position is a cascading failure of logic.

Here Shea and “KevMo” show symptoms of Confirmation Bias.
***And above, “BarracudaBSer” shows his own confirmation bias.

Although not mentioned in Shea’s piece is the account of a lab explosion.
***And, just in case the average reader didn’t appreciate the fallacy of position that the barracudaBSer takes, here we see the classic fallacy of arguing from silence, an invalid argument.

The accounts I read about this explosion remind me of UFO accounts: “ the extent of the damage was so extensive, it cannot be explained by a chemical reaction... BLAH. BLAH. BLAH.” Yep.
***And note that this article does not mention this episode, so “BarracudaBSer” is proceeding from an invalid argument from silence. Gee, Barracuda, you haven’t pointed out that you are not a paid guvmint disinformation agent, so let’s talk about all the wonderful evidence, blah blah blah, that you are one. See how invalid this argument is?

You are producing hydrogen gas for days on end and no venting/ventilation system is perfect. The experiment which exploded was run by a graduate student. A similar explosion occurred at SRI and the account of that incident sounds like a UFO account.
***More argument from silence. Please, Please take a critical thinking class.

“Later, when a new patent had already been published in the Gazette of the U.S. Patent Office, a “poison pen” telephone call from Bob Park to friends at the patent office got the patent grant to Mills reeled back in and then denied. That had apparently never happened before. “
Incorrect. First, many issued patents have been annulled before. And for Mr Mills, his patent applications have been denied in England. Mr Mills appealed several times and lost every time.
***Well, hopefully this datapoint is useful and trustworthy. Thanks for pointing it out. I have no experience with patents, but I have noted that there are some patents issued to some cold fusioneers over the years.

“But Mills has not sought government funding or Wall Street equity money, and has raised $71 million on his own. “
Good for him!
***Well, it looks like we’re on the same page here.

So far, no tangible results. With much less funding, atomic energy was demonstrated in Germany in the early 1930’s, well before the Manhattan project.
***Ahah, another fallacy: false analogy. Show me one person who was riding around in an atomic car in the 1930’s. That’s the level of demonstration that has been demanded of cold fusion, and it is unattainable. We all know that with a bunch of resources thrown at the problem, the energy was directed to a bomb. I’m saying that this cold fusion stuff deserves similar levels of resources thrown at it.

Think about it: if one subscribes to the tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory, the Coal and Oil industry would have suppressed Nuclear Energy.
***And if one does not subscribe to such conspiracy theories, one ends up in the same spot of vying for resources from the hot fusioneers.

Here, one enters the Twilight Zone. Recently, General Electric had a EcoImagination competition where individuals and companies compete in the areas of Energy (green preferably), Energy Distribution and EcoHomes. Personally I kept a lookout for any suggestions made by “KevMo” and his ilk.
***Yer starting to sound paranoid. At the very least, shrill.

None and “KevMo” missed a great opportunity since GE promised a minimum of 100K investment which can grow to $200 million at the commercialization stage.
***This sounds interesting. This is the kind of opportunity that I would consider to be prime hunting ground for a breakthrough like cold fusion. It is time to open up a new thread and explore these possibilities. I opened my own thread when I made money off cold fusion at Intrade, so I’m keen on layman-level possibilities with low barriers to entry.

However there were submissions based on such “wingbat” ideas like the Searl effect generator. Hundreds of people voted for the Searl Effect General and other submissions advocating Perpetual Machines. The Hydrino scheme is at the same level as the Searl generator.
***I think you’re off in your own wingbbat land on this one. Mills already attracted $70M worth of investors, so he probably isn’t interested in $100k and giving up future control, most likely suffering from entrepreneur’s disease.

“But Mills already has 20 working 50- and 75-kilowatt reactors at his plant in Cranbury, N.J”
Half correct and totally dishonest.
***If it’s even half correct then this is worth pursuing.

The reactors produced at 75-kilowatt for 1 or 2 seconds. And then go dead. And this after considerable energy input. Produce a 75-kilowatt reactors which run continuously for, say, 24 hours and then talk.
***Yeah, right. When the hot fusion reactors can run continuously for 24 hours then let’s talk. In the meantime I’m advocating taking public money from them and sending it this way, towards cold fusion, which has had reactors run for several days at a time.

“The latest came from a sprawling Italian multinational, the RadiciGroup, which ordered a 750MW hydrino reactor to power all the Group’s industrial and corporate facilities in a deal announced on March 19, 2010. “
One way Mr Mills raised his 70-odd million dollars is to sell the snake oil and collect the money from the suckers, uh, investors. Selling vapor generators is a good but temporary business.
***Maybe you’re right, maybe not. Edison had his detractors before he lit up a whole town. It wasn’t easy for him then, and it won’t be easy for whoever fills this void. I can’t tell if Mills is the Edison of our day, but I can tell that the hot fusioneers are the Smithsonian of their day compared to the Wright Brothers.

The rest of Shea’s piece is so much boilerplate snake-oil sales pitch.
***And so was Steve Jobs’s stuff in the 1970’s. Today he runs a $100M company.

Other scientists have submitted palladium (and other palladium alloys) under high pressure deuterium for weeks, even months before using such treated palladium in an electrolysis machine: results are mixed: many failures, few successes.
***FEW SUCCESSES? IF there’s even ONE success, it bears further investigation. Guys like you are engaging in pathological antiscience.

Other scientists have treated the high-pressure (palladium-deuterium) mixes under low frequency EM: the issue is that under electrolysis, there is a small non-zero electric field INSIDE the electrode and this field helps the diffusion of deuterium ions into the body of the electrode.
***Unfortunately, I have no idea what you’re talking about.

High Pressure deuterium helps in the diffusion and the low frequency EM treatment produces non-zero electric fields inside the electrode. The intensity of the EM treatment changes such that diffusion into the electrode is faster than diffusion out of electrode. The results were mixed: many failures. few successes.
***The fact that the output is higher than what chemical processes can account for means that it is worth pursuing. By your own words, there have been successes.

Second, the NSF have looked into the cold-fusion issue and found that the hydrino hypothesis has no grounding in reality and the Low-Energy-Nuclear-Reaction (LENR) has some merit.
***Okay, this sorta makes sense, on one or 2 levels. But I consider the hydrino theory to be simply one of many datapoints in the LENR field, which you yourself say has merit.

Most nuclear experiments are done in the high-energy regime, thus one has a good picture of high-end of the internuclear potential but gain little detail about the neighborhood of the bottom of internuclear potential well.
***And with the successes that even you have acknowledged, there is a great deal of potential to be discovered in this arena of research.

Third: The physics of hot fusion has been demonstrated by many experiments by many different teams. The physics of hydrinos have not been demonstrated: at best SOME cherry-picked results may suggest hydrinos but always there is a convention explanation (some of these explanations are given in the previous posting).
***Who cares if the energy output phenomena has some prosaic conventional explanation? My favorite cold fusion theory for now is highly conventional:

A model for enhanced fusion reaction in a solid matrix of
metal deuterides
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SinhaKPamodelfore.pdf
K. P. Sinhaa and A. Meulenbergb
a Department of Physics, IISc, Bangalore 560012, India (kpsinha@gmail.com)
b HiPi Consulting, Frederick, MD, USA (mules333@gmail.com)
Abstract
Our study shows that the cross-section for fusion improves considerably if d-d
pairs are located in linear (one-dimensional) chainlets or line defects. Such nonequilibrium
defects can exist only in a solid matrix. Further, solids harbor lattice
vibrational modes (quanta, phonons) whose longitudinal-optical modes interact
strongly with electrons and ions. One such interaction, resulting in potential
inversion, causes localization of electron pairs on deuterons. Thus, we have
attraction of D+ – D- pairs and strong screening of the nuclear repulsion due to
these local electron pairs (local charged bosons: acronym, lochons). This
attraction and strong coupling permits low-energy deuterons to approach close
enough to alter the standard equations used to define nuclear-interaction crosssections.
These altered equations not only predict that low-energy-nuclear
reactions (LENR) of D+ – D- (and H+ – H-) pairs are possible, they predict that
they are probable.

I hypothesize that the first-general fusion machine will be a fission-triggered cold-fusion set-up.
***Interesting that, yet again, you give credence to cold fusion.

The steady-state of the machine will be a combination of hot- and cold- fusion regimes with a plasma core (hot-fusion) surrounded by a high pressure liquid-inner mantle, with (perhaps) a solid outer mantle. To prevent the plasma core (20 KeV temp) to make contact with the reactor shell, the liquid mantle will be manipulated by time-dependent EM fields (similar to what is done today in conventional metallurgy)
***I hypothesize that Dr. Pamela Mossier-Boss will be given the Nobel prize for her CR-39 tracks research, but only really because both Pons & FLeischman will be dead and Nobel Prizes are not issued to dead people.
‘Cold Fusion’ Rebirth? New Evidence For Existence Of Controversial ...Mar 23, 2009 ... In the new study, Mosier-Boss and colleagues inserted an ... A single atom of deuterium contains one neutron and one proton in ... The scientists then used a special plastic, CR-39, to capture and track any high-energy particles that may ... Pam Boss, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR)) ...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090323110450.htm

Now that I have given you the God-given truth, please send me my royalty checks.
***I’m more than happy to. Let’s set up some contracts at Intrade so that we can take each other’s money. I’ve already made a profit betting on Dr. Yoshiaki Arrata, and I’d love to bet on The Boss.
How I Made Money from Cold Fusion
Saturday, January 23, 2010 12:28:49 PM · by Kevmo · 28 replies · 1,013+ views Exclusive Article for Free Republic | 1/23/10 | Kevmo http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2435697/posts

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