sounds like another "cold fusion" story to me. i.e. baloney.
Faraday, and Tesla would disagree.
The N-Machine is more of a modern version of Faraday's Rotating-Magnet Electrical Generator (homopolar).
Surprise! Cold Fusion is being closely re-examined!
Still, it sounds pretty silly to me, too.
IF it only needs 1/5 of its power to run, can they disconnect it and run it on off its own output ("break even")?
The title of an unclassified, eight-page, Defense Analysis Report produced by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and released on November 13, 2009 says it all: Worldwide Research on “Cold Fusion” Increasing and Gaining Acceptance. Only the report didn’t call it “cold fusion” but “Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions,” one of the terms under which this work has continued since Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced to the world in 1989 that their eletrochemical experiments had produced excess energy, which they thought could be nuclear in origin, at room temperature. But when most researchers attempting to replicate their results failed, the physics community dismissed their work, which the press labeled “cold fusion,” as lacking credibility.
Since then, according to this DIA Technology Forecast, “Scientists worldwide have been quietly investigating low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) for the past 20 years. Researchers in this controversial field are now claiming paradigm-shifting results, including generation of large amounts of excess heat, nuclear activity and transmutation of elements. Although no current theory exists to explain all the reported phenomena, some scientists now believe quantum-level nuclear reactions may be occurring. DIA assesses with high confidence that if LENR can produce nuclear-origin energy at room tempera- tures, this disruptive technology could revolutionize energy production and storage, since nuclear reactions release millions of times more energy per unit mass than do any known chemical fuel.”
Although much skepticism remains, these once unconventional research programs are now receiving increased support worldwide, including state sponsorship and funding from major corporations. “DIA assesses that Japan and Italy are leaders in the field, although Russia, China, Israel, and India are devoting significant resources to this work in the hope of finding a new clean energy source.”
There is one strange quirk of vacuum energy that opens up a possibility. In a thermal system at rest, the temperature is uniform. There are no differences in temperature that would allow energy extraction. But vacuum energy is different: it depends upon local structures and boundaries. Both in open space and inside a Casimir cavity, the state of lowest available energy is the zero-point energy state. As described earlier, however, the cavity rejects some of the ZPE, and so there is a difference between the energy levels inside and outside the plates. It’s as if sea level were constant, except in some locations. On a real sea, the water would spill from the higher level to the lower, but for a Casimir cavity the local difference in “sea” levels is stable.
There may be a way to take advantage of this natural step in the lowest available energy. Gas flowing into the cavity from outside experiences this drop in ZPE. The gas atoms may drop into a lower-energy state inside the cavity. On the way in, they could emit the difference in energy in the form of electromagnetic waves, according to a patent that was issued in 2008 (U.S. # 7,379,286). After flowing through the Casimir cavity and exiting on the other side, the atoms would be re-energized to their initial state by the ambient ZPE field. The gas could be pumped through the Casimir cavity many times, so that the emitted energy would provide a continuous power source.
This is not like the contracting Casimir cavity described previously, which required the energy gained to separate the plates again. The function of pumping the gas is only to move it through the system, and is not directly related to the energy obtained from the vacuum. The pumping energy required is much less than what could be extracted from the gas emission. The overall function of the system would be to transfer ZPE from the environment and deposit it locally, where it could be used. This approach of using gas flowing through Casimir cavities circumvents the violations of thermodynamics that blocked the earlier approaches.
--Garret Moddel, professor, Elec, Comp, & Energy Engr Dept. at the University of Colorado at Boulder.