The word atom is, in itself, an anomaly. It comes from the Greek adjective atomos, meaning “indivisible.” So, when thinking about nuclear power, whether it is hot fusion, conventional nuclear reactions that occur at tens of millions of degrees, or what is termed as LENR, low energy nuclear reactions, either process in itself defies the word because these reactions involve altering the atom, or what was previously seen as “indivisible.”
In the alternative power community there has been a lot of talk about LENR as of late because of many important developments, as well as recent validations on technologies by many experts. These low energy nuclear reactions are now standing in defiance of the conventional hot fusion based nuclear technology and may be winning.
The differences between LENR and conventional nuclear fission is that LENR is based on fusion, the process the sun uses to create light and heat versus nuclear fusion and fission. Conventional nuclear processes involve a system where energy is produced from nuclear binding energy that is released by either fusing together two light nuclei or when heavy nuclei split.
One other important differences of LENR is that the process utilizes non-radioactive materials, so there is no radioactive waste.
Based on what is happening with a company called E-Cat, we may even be able to have one of these units in our homes in the very near future. Inventor, Andrea Rossi just recently sold rights to his LENR technology, Energy Catalyzer (E-Cat) to Industrial Heat LLC from Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina.
“A primary goal of the company is to make the technology widely available, because of its potential impact on air pollution and carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels and biomass,” said Industrial Heat in their press release on January 24, 2014. “Mr. (JT) Vaughn confirmed IH acquired the intellectual property and licensing rights to Rossi’s LENR device after an independent committee of European scientists conducted two multi-day tests at Rossi’s facilities in Italy.”
“The world needs a new, clean and efficient energy source. Such a technology would raise the standard of living in developing countries and reduce the environmental impact of producing energy,” said Vaughn speaking on behalf of Industrial Heat.
News after the release has been relatively quiet from E-Cat as the implications of commercialization of the technology could be very far reaching. In one Youtube video from in October 2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhvD4KuAEmo, towards the end of the video, Rossi answers questions from a truck containing many units. This brings to mind that these units may have been ready for initial testing by others back then in many small applications. Now over three years later, the company is approaching commercialization.
LENR became discredited back when it first began as Cold Fusion and was discovered by Pons and Fleischman who said that they had produced fusion in a test tube. The story was over reported in the media and when other scientists could not replicate the process, Cold Fusion, now LENR, became a pariah.
Now 25 years later, scientists are starting to reconsider.
Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Peter Hagelstein is supportive of LENR/Cold Fusion.
In a recent interview featured on his website he said, “From my perspective, having been in labs, having seen the results, having talked to experimentalists, having looked at the data, having spent great time on it, it looks like pretty much these experiments are real. They need to be taken seriously.”
Also on February 25, NASA held its annual Seedling Seminar, one of the projects receiving funding is a Low Energy Nuclear Reaction Aircraft, with research to be conducted at the NASA Langley Research Center.
The team of scientists evaluated LENR and said the technology has “important advantages, but extremely high risk – if it works, revolutionary to World energy.”
So things are changing with regards to power generation from Cold Fusion now LENR, and how about our perceptions of the atom?
Another company that does not consider itself a LENR focused company, but may be changing the perception of the atom and basis of quantum mechanics, as well as creating new opportunities for power generation is Blacklight Power Inc.
During a demonstration on January 28, 2014, Dr. Randell Mills detonated a “proprietary water-based solid fuel confined by two electrodes of a SF-CIHT cell” by applying a current of 12,000 amps through the fuel. This caused the “water to ignite into an extraordinary flash of power.”
“What you have seen is not possible by any known conventional reaction, so that energy is being released by something entirely different and is entirely dependent on water as being present with the high current,” said Mills. “Theoretically there would be no energy possible.”
The company has produced “millions of watts of power in a volume that is one ten thousandths of a liter corresponding to a power density of over an astonishing 10 billion watts per liter,” according to its recent news updates.
The most controversial and significant scientific achievement of Blacklight Power is that they have been able to consistently predict where the electron is, which has not been possible in quantum mechanics until now. This predictability has been validated and replicated by other scientists.
“You can in fact solve where the electron is,” said Mills, during the demonstration. “Everyone would say, you can’t do that. You can’t do that with current theory, but you can do it with the known laws of the universe. How do you know you have the right solution? Because it gets everything from particle masses, to predicting the acceleration and expansion of the cosmos before it was observed from the observer absolutely correctly and predicts things that people have not heard including in many of the new experiments of the current theory has missed and failed miserably. This gets it correct in every single test perfectly. That’s how you know you have a good theory.”
His new concept is that Natural/Universal Laws work at the atomic scale. Now who would have guessed that?
So, where has that free energy been hiding?