May 20th, 2013

Finally third party extensive test results are in on the LENR ECAT! This is going to have to break into the mainstream media over the next few days.

Here is the scientific paper. Four professors from different parts of the world collaborated to do the study, and they ran the ECAT device for 120 hours of continuous operation. In the opening summary the paper writes:

“Even by the most conservative assumptions as to the errors in the measurements, the result is still one order of magnitude greater than conventional energy sources.“

In the conclusion they write:

“… the results obtained place both devices several orders of magnitude outside the bounds of the Ragone plot region for chemical sources.“

This mean compared to say gasoline or jet fuel or rocket fuel that the reaction going on inside the ECAT is releasing over 10 times more energy than would occur in a device this size if these conventional chemical fuels were used instead.

This is a historic moment. I just don’t know how else to put it. How long before this breaks into the mainstream press? I predict less than one week.

I have searched the New York Times archives in the past for anything recent on LENR research and technologies, and I got nothing. The other newspapers and the media, right or wrong, tend to follow the New York Times lead. Will the New York Times do the right thing and start reporting on these test results? Actually, I think that they will have no choice. The news is just too big. In fact – they should make it a front page story. And they should confess that they failed in the past in reporting on this. They should do this because that is an important part of the overall news story about LENR.

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Update: I’m going to start listing the mainstream media news articles as they begin to appear.

#1: Forbes - May 20th at 10:40 PM (fyi, Mark Gibbs has been one of the few reporters in the mainstream press to cover the ECAT story in the past)

May 20th, 2013

Above are two LENR (Cold Fusion) power systems said to be close to going into production. BTE commenter AlainCo makes this point:

“Scientific community will discover LENR in Wall Street Journal.”

Ha, ha – but this may well prove to be true. The 1MW ECAT shown above, for example, is said to be entering production now. In fact 13 units have been shipped. If it only works half as good as claimed, we will have a worldwide energy revolution on our hands. At the bottom of this post is the spec table from the ECAT website. It says the ECAT has a COP of 6. This means it puts out 6 times more thermal energy than the electrical energy put into it. And what does it run on? You put in hydrogen and nickel. What is the waste product? Copper – because the hydrogen and nickel transmutate into copper. All of the nasty air pollution that you get from burning fossil fuels is eliminated. It’s truly amazing LENR is ignored by the mainstream scientific community and mainstream press. But it won’t be for much longer, I think. As I predicted back in January – 2013 will be the year of Cold Fusion.

Here is a calculator that claims the ECAT could create electrical power for $29.3 per MWhr. Imagine if that is true. That is about one third the cost of the lowest cost electrical power generation methods today. For example,  coal is around $100 per MWhr. Like I said, if LENR technologies work we will have an energy revolution on our hands. And the world  will have to figure out what to do with it.

May 18th, 2013

I’ve seen a lot of web traffic coming to the BTE site over the past few days. I think this is in part due to the excitement about the new movie, Star Trek: Into Darkness, that was released yesterday. I look forward to seeing it. (If you’ve seen it, no spoilers please.)

So let’s talk about one theme that has been in Star Trek from the beginning. Specifically, Star Trek carries a certain optimism  about the future, and this characteristic about Star Trek I find appealing. This optimism is talked about in the 1975 book Star Trek Lives! A reviewer wrote of the book:

The “Optimism Effect” is the view of the future which Star Trek provides. It is a “vision of a brighter future of man, and of a world characterized by hope, achievement and understanding.” Star Trek’s presentation of such a future provides an image of success which can encourage someone seeking success for himself.

The Optimism Effect is not only a statement about the future, it is a statement about the nature of reality. In facing difficulties, discovering their nature and sources, and overcoming them, the Star Trek characters show “that the mind can understand reality and be a useful tool of survival.” This philosophical optimism puts Star Trekin contrast with the view, which is prevalent today, that reality is malevolent and incomprehensible.

Closely related to the Optimism Effect is the “Goal Effect.” This is the presentation of the idea “that important goals are worthwhile, worth striving for and – attainable.” Every episode of Star Trek deals with the seeking and attaining of important goals – the saving of a life, a planet, or even a galaxy, the correction of an injustice, the attainment of co-operation between civilizations.

And the reviewer pulls this quote from the book:

“Man is shown as he could and should be, strong, intelligent, beautiful, confident, solving his problems, heroic – thus furnishing us the fuel to become that way, to reach for the stars.”

Thirty eight years later this all still rings true. And I can think of just the spaceship to build to help remind us daily of this optimistic view of the future!

May 16th, 2013

Not widely known is that in the US there is an oil production boom going on. In states like North Dakota and Texas it is the wild west of the oil boom days again. See the rapid rise in oil production in the graph at the top of this post. And production is still increasing each month.

Unemployment in North Dakota is around 3%. It’s hard to even find housing near the oil fields. The pay is good and there are plenty of jobs. There are plenty of oil field jobs in Texas too.

Since the 1960s we have heard that “peak oil” will soon be upon us. When the peak arrives, some predictions expect a rapid fall off in global oil production and a worldwide  economic catastrophe as a result. Now, it’s true that someday oil production will begin a steady decline. But it’s looking more and more like a rapid fall in production will not happen any time soon, and we will be spared any economic disaster. Things are looking good at least until 2030.

The oil boom – and the natural gas boom that is just as big – are in part happening because new, advanced drilling techniques like fracking have made it economical for businesses to pursue new sources of oil and gas.

Of course in the long term fossil fuels are not desirable for being our major energy source. They pollute the air and also dump a lot of unwanted CO2 into Earth’s atmosphere. But an oil and natural gas production boom to hold off any possibility of peak oil causing sudden drops in the world’s oil supply buys us time for developing alternatives. Alternatives, that is, like LENR or Hot Fusion. (Wind and solar just don’t seem up to the task of replacing fossil fuels.)

May 15th, 2013

One of the blog posts I lost in April when the BTE site crashed was about the Hot Fusion reactor being investigated at Lockheed Skunkworks. In the video below Charles Chase talks about it. If this invention works, this is a very big deal. And this reactor would be perfect to power the Enterprise. But really, until a working prototype exists, skepticism is in order. Hot Fusion reactors are notoriously hard to develop.