It has been a few years since I last paid any attention to the ECat /LENR cold fusion saga, however Tom Whipple's latest column (The Peak Oil Crisis: A Bizarre Twist) caught my eye this week.

Apparently Andrea Rossi found an American company called Industrial Heat willing to pay him if the technology could be successfully tested over a 350 day period.

The company ended up deciding the test was a success (though there seemed to be some problems with too much energy along the way) and made the initial payments, however there is now a dispute over whether or not the remaining licence payments need to be made, with Whipple speculating this is because Rossi is now claiming he has an even better version of the technology under development.

A cynic might think all this light and noise is being generated to draw investors into the process like moths to a flame, however I guess we can all hold our breaths and wait for another decade or two to see if this really is a viable means of generating power.

Tom Whipple at the FCNP has an article on the cold fusion / free energy world, displaying rather less skepticism than I feel comfortable with (but I guess it's a change from the intense doomerism he traditionally emanated back in the heyday of peak oil) - The Peak Oil Crisis: Hydrinos In Your Future?.

One of the companies mentioned, Blacklight Power, has received a reasonable amount of press lately - see these links for some examples - Impact Lab: Hydrino Theory validated by Harvard tests, EarthTechling: HYDRINOS A PIE IN THE SKY CLEAN ENERGY? and Next Big Future: Move over Rossi. Blacklight Power is claiming megawatts from their super-controversial hydrino process and devices.

In recent months I have written about the progress being made in “cold fusion” which is short hand for a third way to extract energy from the forces binding atoms together. Some who are familiar with the details of what has been going on appreciate that we are nearly over denying that cold fusion is real as at least three companies have mastered the technology at lab bench level and are working on commercial-scale hydrogen powered devices that hopefully will one day replace fossil fuels as a source of energy for heat, electricity, and transportation.

The Italian developer Rossi seems to have linked up with a North Carolina company that not only is supplying the cash he needs to develop a marketable product, but apparently has made contacts to develop the technology in China.

The California company Brillouin was recently the subject of a series of videos detailing the current state of development of the prototype commercial boiler it is developing along with SRI to replace fossil fuels as the source of heat in electric power stations. Moreover Brillouin has recently licensed its technology to a Korean manufacturer who hopes to have a prototype in operation before the end of the year. The major take home from the videos, however, is that scaling up cold fusion from lab bench to commercial boiler size will involve some difficult engineering.

The third major contender in the race for cold fusion, Defkalion Green Technologies, announced last week that they are making good progress and hope to “commercialize’ their technology by the third quarter of this year. All three of these companies say they have had their technology verified by outside scientists, but have no intention of releasing their proprietary techniques as to how they make cold fusion work at this time.

Last week another contender in the race to replace fossil fuels resurfaced with the announcement by a New Jersey company, BlackLight Power, that it has applied for a patent and will be demonstrating its technology to selected observers on February 28th. BlackLight Power and its technology has been around for over 20 years; has raised and spent circa $80 million developing their technology; and have released a mountain of reports, data and even books describing how their technology works. Every few years they have announced that they were close to a commercial product that could produce heat, but somehow they always slipped back into the R&D mode and were largely forgotten even by close observers of the field and certainly not remembered by the mainstream media.

The biggest problem with gaining acceptance for the technology that BlackLight Power claims to have invented that it is so revolutionary that, should it pan out, the world and much science will never be the same. The simple version of BlackLight’s technology is easy to understand. By taking hydrogen atoms (protons with an electron orbiting around the nucleus), all one has to do is give the atoms a good zap of electricity in the presence of the right catalyst and the electrons drop down into orbits closer to the nuclei – releasing very large amounts of energy in the process.

After the hydrogen atoms’ electrons falls into a lower orbit, the resulting now-shrunken atom was called a “hydrino” by its discoverer, Randell Mills. The main problem with this idea is that our current chemistry says there are no stable states of hydrogen below what is known as the base state. Therefore most scientists say Mill’s hydrino thesis must be wrong. For 20 years, Mills has had to contend with an endless string of naysayers, including some very well-known scientists many of which called him a charlatan for raising and spending some $80 million dollars in search of something which cannot possibly be true – or so they contend.

There has been a bit of buzz lately about an Italian named Andrea Rossi (who seems to have previously been associated with some sort of thermal deploymerisation scheme) claiming to have invented a machine that generates energy using a nickel based cold fusion process. Kjell Alekelett has a brief post on the subject - The sun, Rossi’s ”energy catalyzer” and the “neutron barometer”. There is a reasonably long video on Rossi and co at YouTube - Nickel Hydrogen Reactors After Twenty Two Years of Experimental Progress.

One hundred years ago the sun’s source of energy was a complete mystery. The famous professor Svante Arrhenius is said to have asserted that the sun’s energy output could not be due to combustion and that there was no other explanation. Today our knowledge of physics allows us to explain why the sun can radiate energy for millions of years – hydrogen is transformed to helium. Regarding Rossi’s ”energy catalyzer” there are assertions and facts. If we combine these assertions and facts there is no known physics that can explain the amount of energy released the way the experiment is presented. It is asserted that nickel is transformed into copper and if so the energy can be released, but a transformation requires that the atomic nucleus in nickel is transformed into the atomic nucleus of copper. This transformation can be performed in a physics laboratory and is nothing remarkable. We ourselves have done similar reactions for many years and we know the conditions required. To use a hydrogen nucleus to transform nickel into copper requires a particle accelerator that can give the hydrogen nucleus energy sufficient to approach a nickel nucleus close enough for absorption. Putting nickel and hydrogen in a tube under pressure as described by Rossi does not create the conditions required for this nuclear reaction.

We know from Einstein’s equation that mass can be transformed into energy and if we compare the combined mass of a nickel nucleus and a hydrogen nucleus then we see that it is greater than that of copper. The energy that this difference in mass represents could explain the energy released in Rossi’s catalyzer. The only thing we know with certainty is that there must be a physical explanation for the catalyzer’s energy output. One hundred years ago it was possible to state that the sun is radiating more energy than could, at that time, be explained. Despite their ignorance of nuclear physics the scientists of that time could, nevertheless, make measurements to support that statement. As scientists we are naturally frustrated that we are not allowed to know all the details of Rossi’s experiment. Validation of a scientific discovery requires that an experimental phenomenon be reproducible by others when they are told how to perform the experiment. Verification and explanation are the next two important steps that must now be taken.

You probably think that 4700 watts of clean, radiation-free power from a three cubic inch reactor sounds like yet another impossible hoax. But this was a third iteration demo, designed to satisfy skeptics of two previous demonstration at the prestigious University of Bologna. Attending the third demo were two Swedish scientists. One was chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society and the other was chairman of the Energy Committee of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science. They were both allowed to freely examine the entire setup except for the contents of the tiny, 50cc reactor chamber.

Their written report ended with: “Any chemical process for producing 25 kWh from any fuel in a 50 cm3 container can be ruled out. The only alternative explanation is that there is some kind of a nuclear process that gives rise to the measured energy production.” They also noted that you would have to burn 3 liters of oil to produce 25 kWh. There has since been another confirmation.

The inventor, Adrian Rossi, is very accessible on his blog and has said that more than one hundred of his 4.4 kW reactors are running in four countries. He plans to ship a larger unit in October that produces one MW of hot water. It consists of hundreds of the small reactors in series/parallel mounted in one 2 X 3 X 3 meter box. It weighs two tons. The proprietary nanopowdered nickel fuel will be replenished every six months. Everything has been financed using Rossi’s own money and the customer will pay only when satisfied.

Rossi is an inventor and businessman who decades ago noticed excess heat effects while working with a nickel catalyst to synthesize fuel from hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Using Edison-like experimental techniques, he soon learned to control the heat production. He even kept his factory heated for two years with a prototype reactor. More than two thousand prototypes were built and destroyed in refining the design and learning how to control and scale up the reaction.

Researching the science literature, Rossi soon found Dr Sergio Focardi of the University of Bologna, who had regularly published work on nickel-hydrogen reactors since 1994. Using his own money, Rossi contracted with Dr. Focardi and the university to help him understand and develop the technology as a product. By January 14, 2011 they were ready for a public demonstration of a 10 kilowatt desktop reactor.

The press reaction was muted in Europe and nonexistent in the U.S. Skeptics accused him of hiding a battery inside the reactor so another, longer, demonstration was held, using calorimetry that heated but didn’t boil water to answer other critics. The 18 hour demonstration produced 18 kilowatts average over the entire 18 hours. The U.S. press was still silent and skeptics were still suspicious so two more demos were held.

Still, the silence from the U.S. media was deafening. Rossi announced that there will be no more demonstrations until October 2011, when the million watt heating plant will be shipped to a customer in Greece. If he succeeds, be prepared for a repeat of the Sputnik shock of 1957 when the US woke up to find that they had fallen way behind in science.

Nickel is plentiful and cheap and so is hydrogen in the tiny amounts used. Nickel is so plentiful that energy becomes virtually free. Rossi’s reactor is very simple in principle. Powdered nickel and a catalyst are simply heated to about six hundred degrees centigrade in a stainless steel chamber filled with pressurized hydrogen. At a certain point, the gradual heating starts accelerating due to nuclear reactions in the metal lattice. The heating resistor is backed off to keep the reaction going at a steady state, with about 15 times more heat output than input. Much higher ratios are possible but can be unstable and dangerous. This is why the 1-MW plant will be built using hundreds of smaller modules.

The reactor is enclosed in a lead shield because some radiation is, unpredictably, produced during operation. However, the spent fuel is not radioactive but contains copper that has transmuted from nickel in the nuclear reaction. The lack of dangerous radiation drives hot fusion experts crazy, but clearly there are things happening that are not covered by the equations used in hot fusion. Obviously, quantum mechanics needs to be rethought to include these reactions. ...

The Fleischmann-Pons announcement should have been the start of a new era of cheap, clean energy that would have saved us from the financial and environmental disasters and wars caused by fossil fuel energy. Instead, denial and dirty tricks caused us to waste 23 years and tens of billions of dollars on failed nuclear projects as though nothing had happened. The Presidents 2012 budget includes $2.5 billion for such projects. The first DEMO hot fusion plant is currently scheduled for 2033.

A surprising natural process was discovered in 1989 that can provide us with clean, essentially free energy. It clearly conflicts with the current consensus understanding of quantum mechanics that works nicely for hot fusion reactions. It seems reasonable to try to improve the theory to accommodate this new reality, but denial has instead tricked many good scientists to try to “shoot the messenger.”

The time has come to admit the mistake and get busy trying to improve our understanding so that we can perfect this amazing new technology. We have spent $20 billion and 55 years trying to reach break-even with hot fusion. Time to give cold fusion a chance.

There have been many painful scientific battles in the past over paradigm changes, but truth has a way of prevailing eventually. Cold fusion work has continued under the radar using the more accurate term “Low Energy Nuclear Reactions” (LENR.) Shunned by the establishment, supporters of LENR have created their own journals and meetings. Much progress has been made.

The reasons for the initial difficulty in replication of excess heat have been identified and the amount of excess heat has increased. By 1995 there were 21 published replications showing excess heat of up to 205 watts. Strangely, the press lost interest after the initial media circus. The media’s face-saving denial has left most people with the impression that cold fusion is still dead. In 2009, 60 Minutes broke the silence and did an excellent update. But the rest of the media simply ignored it and focused instead on less risky reports on newsworthy items like rising gasoline prices.

Annual conferences have continued. A weeklong working demo of LENR was included at the tenth ICCF conference, which was held in 2003 at MIT. The power output was 2.3 times the power in. The most recent meeting was held in San Francisco in 2011 under the auspices of the American Chemical Society. The number of presenters at this meeting have quadrupled since 2007. The results this year were so enthusiastic that the American Institute of Physics refused to publish the 370 page proceedings. The cancellation of the publication contract was a last minute decision, clearly ordered by someone at a high level. This attempted blackout of a new technology will backfire in the long run as results get stronger and stronger.

By using nickel and ordinary hydrogen, several researchers have significantly increased energy output and reduced costs. In 1992, Thermacore, a U.S. military contractor ran a cell for nearly a year with a 50 Watt output and 3X excess energy. In 1996 Dr. Sergio Focardi of the University of Bologna in Italy described an experiment using nickel & hydrogen that produced an average excess power output of 39 watts continuously for 278 days. There are a dozen competing theories to explain how nuclear reactions can produce so much energy without emitting dangerous radiation. Theories are helpful but not necessary. We still don’t really know how permanent magnets work, yet we use them every day. Practical applications can be developed experimentally, just as Edison developed the light bulb.

Now that Rossi and Focardi have shown what can be done, expect to see a flurry of new announcements. New technologies tend to take forever to totally debug, so it won’t be surprising if the October delivery is delayed. There are several other companies such as Lattice Energy LLC, Blacklight Power, Brillouin Energy, and Energetics, who have announced product plans to the press and then gone silent.

Silence is not necessarily a bad sign, as the Bloom Box demonstrated. My bet is that we will have some amazing surprises within a year that will be a wake-up call, just as Russia’s Sputnik launch was in 1954. This moment could have come ten years ago if only we had listened to Fleishman and Pons in 1989.

Some excellent videos to watch: 60 Minutes, one hour movie.