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This is a portion of an article from one of the many magazines I subscribe to. May/June Issue by Jeanne Manning

Italians Enter “Cold Fusion” Fight
(Could their invention change the Energy Game?)

An “Energy Catalyzer” is the new item on the energy frontier at the time of this writing. Italian engineer Andrea A. Rossi and Professor Sergio Focardi of the University of Bologna announced a technology for a reaction that produces excess heat—at low cost and in quantities that would make it commercially useful. It involves a catalytic reaction between nickel, hydrogen, and some secret elements, but they avoid calling it “cold fusion.” At this time it looks like the Italians do have a viable
technology that uses commonly available materials, doesn’t produce carbon dioxide, doesn’t produce radioactive waste, and will be economical to build.

Will their government support their venture, or at least refrain from interfering? As reported on Rossi’s website
and by researcher Sepp Hasslberger, the Italian inventor already knows what happens to an energy-related technology
that vested interests consider disruptive to their profits. In the 1970s and 1980s Rossi was building garbage disposal
facilities that burned household garbage and used the recovered heat. He also learned how to turn garbage into fuel that could be burned in the same way as coal, oil and gas. By 1989 his company, Petroldragon, was making 20 tons of fuel oil a day. Then the attacks began.

Government bureaucrats began by taxing his fuel as if he was producing alcohol, making his fuel extremely expensive. Perhaps they feared loss of some fuel-tax revenue, but the tax rate they hit Rossi with was overkill. Rossi fought the unjust tax, and then the bureaucracy ramped up the level of challenge. The bureaucrats claimed that the garbage stockpile in his factory wasn’t raw material for his process but instead was a fraudulent attempt to hide and treat toxic garbage. He of course had no license for
toxic garbage because he wasn’t doing that. So instead of being thanked and encouraged for trying to produce an ecologically sustainable fuel that didn’t come from petroleum deposits, Rossi was imprisoned on trumped up charges. Later, after one of his companies was forced into bankruptcy, he was again imprisoned—for not paying his creditors.

Despite those traumatic experiences, it seems that he is one of those relentless inventors who doesn’t give up. His Energy Catalyzer doesn’t involve burning fuel. Only a tiny amount of hydrogen gas is consumed, which indicates a low energy nuclear reaction, not hydrogen combustion. Rossi and Focardi’s announcement didn’t bring much positive attention from the mainstream media. In January those institutions either stayed away from the story or gave it the usual misleading spin. For instance, in referring to the 1989 announcement in which electrochemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann claimed to have demonstrated cold fusion, PhysOrg.com recently wrote “but their experiment could not be reproduced.”

That was true only for a matter of months around 20 years ago. However what I consider the most outrageous untruth in
the PhysOrg article is this: “Since then, all other claims of cold fusion have been illegitimate.”

Whoever wrote that hadn’t done their homework. All the writer had to do was to go to a serious website such as www.lenrcanr.org and see the huge collection of published scientific papers from laboratories around the world, many announcing excess heat and even transmutation—changing one element into another.

The Fleischmann/Pons effect did indeed stretch accepted science beyond what was known about fusion, and prestigious hot-fusion laboratories did fail to reproduce the effect during the months after the announcement, but is the media stuck back in 1989?

Over the years the Fleischmann/Pons process has been replicated hundreds of times with variations. I’m fed up with knee-jerk journalists repeating the so-called received wisdom. For instance, last month a writer in a British Columbia business magazine tossed off the phrase “the cold fusion hoax of the late 980s.” Such phrases have created an unwarranted character assassination of the electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, whose mistake was in prematurely announcing their discovery—not hoaxing.

Meanwhile back in Italy at a press conference in Bologna attended by about 50 invited guests, Rossi and Focardi demonstrated their device. After a brief warm-up, its reaction chamber starts self-heating and they claim it can produce 12,400 watts of heat power with an input of just 400 watts into the electric heating element. They are well beyond the research phase; the plan is to start shipping
devices for industrial use this spring and start mass production by the end of this year.

The Italian scientists also claim transmutation, saying that their fusion reaction produces copper as well as cheap power. (They estimate that electricity can be generated at a cost of less than one cent per kilowatthour significantly less than coal or natural gas power plants.)

It isn’t the everyman’s backyard project, however; you’d have to have a nuclear expert involved in building an Energy Catalyzer of this type. Rossi and Focardi say that the reaction produces radiation, which indicates that it’s at the level of atoms’ nuclei. However they add that the radiation is completely shielded by lead so that none of it escapes the apparatus. No radioactivity is left in the fusion cell after it’s turned off, so there’s no nuclear waste.

Sepp Hasslberger reports that Rossi’s reactor can be run without problems in an industrial environment. “It is expected that industrial sized reactor units will be mounted in shipping containers for easy transportability. It will be more difficult to obtain permits for individual household-type units, because of the requirement for complete automatic and safe operation under all circumstances.

For now, trained personnel that care for maintenance are still necessary, so household units seem to be about a decade in the future yet.”

(snipped)