This investor is chasing a new kind of fusion

[think]

Last edited Tue Sep 29, 2015, 05:26 PM - Edit history (1)

Brief excerpt from the article & interview:

This investor is chasing a new kind of fusion

by Brian Dumaine SEPTEMBER 27, 2015, 12:00 PM EDT

A prominent North Carolina investor is backing a new kind of fusion that operates at much lower temperatures than thought possible, which would make it easier to commercialize. So far the early results show promise.

Tom Darden, the founder and CEO of the $2.2 billion private equity fund Cherokee Investment Partners, made his mark by acquiring and cleaning up hundreds of environmentally contaminated sites. Today he is also an early stage investor in clean technology, having put his own money into dozens of companies in areas ranging from smart grid to renewable energy, and prefab green buildings. More recently he’s backed a new approach to fusion, a potentially abundant and carbon-free form of energy that would operate at a much lower temperatures than big government projects around the world, which require temperatures of 100 million degrees centigrade and more.

This new technology, called Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) is related but very different from the cold fusion technology that in 1989 researchers Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann claimed to have licked when they revealed to the world a simple tabletop machine designed to achieve a fusion reaction at room temperature. Their experiment was eventually debunked and since then the term cold fusion has become almost synonymous with scientific chicanery.

What does Darden, a no-nonsense, investor with a sharp eye on the bottom line and a successful track record, see in this new, risky technology? Fortune’s Brian Dumaine spoke to him to find out.

Q: How did you get involved with low-temperature fusion?

A: Well, I thought the issue was moot after scientists failed to replicate the Fleischman and Pons initial cold fusion experiments. I was literally unaware that people were working on this in labs. I’ve made about 35 clean technology investments, and I thought that if someone’s doing this I should have heard about it. Then three years ago I started to hear about progress being made in the field and I said, “Damn, you have to be kidding, it doesn’t make sense.”...

Read more:
http://fortune.com/2015/09/27/ceo-cherokee-investment-partners-low-energy-nuclear-reaction/

LENR has the potential to provide the world with inexpensive, non polluting, & non radioactive source of abundant energy that could help power our world and end our dependence on fossil fuels.

LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reaction) research has been a very controversial subject with many outright dismissing it as fraud. In the above article the person being interviewed, Tom Darden, is taking a very cautious approach in discussing the new technology. His main scientist, Andreas Rossi, has been at the center of the accusations of those claiming this is junk science and that Rossi himself is a fraud.

{Edited}The US patent office has now issued Rossi a patent on his technology as has the Italian government. Scientists, including one from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, has done lengthy studies and reviews of Rossi's devices on two different occasions. They found that it created excess heat in relation to the energy being inputted. While there is a still a considerable amount of debate as to the actual process that creates the excess heat there is a growing consensus that it is happening.

Darden's company, Industrial Heat, in cooperation with Andreas Rossi has an actual unit in a manufacturing facility where it producing heat energy for their customer while they monitor and upgrade the unit at the facility.

There are many other companies working to enter this possible new emerging field and getting positive results.

If anyone is interested in learning more or following developments in this field E-Catworld.com is a great place to visit and track the progress of this technology.

[Duppers]

1. There are patents

And there are patents. But the Swedish peer review sounds hopeful.

[caraher]

2. So basically an investor has decided to throw money at this on a hunch

Q: The conventional wisdom is that LENR violates the laws of physics.

A: That’s right. To create fusion energy you have to break the bonds in atoms and that takes a tremendous amount of force. That’s why the big government fusion projects have to use massive lasers or extreme heat—millions degrees centigrade—to break the bonds. Breaking those bonds at much lower temperatures is inconsistent with the laws of physics, as they’re now known.

Q: What changed your mind?

A: Scientists get locked into paradigms until the paradigm shifts. Then everyone happily shifts to the new truth and no one apologizes for being so stupid before. Low temperature fusion could be consistent with existing theories, we just don’t know how. It’s like when physicists say that according to the laws of aerodynamics bumblebees can’t fly but they do.

In other words, it's just like something that never happened in the first place: http://www.snopes.com/science/bumblebees.asp

As far as I can tell, nothing in the interview suggests that any of the efforts to test Rossi's scheme has made it through peer review. The Wikipedia article on this kind of fusion says (as of now)

In May 2013 a non-peer-reviewed paper describing "results obtained from evaluations of the operation of the E-Cat HT in two test runs" was submitted to the arXiv digital archive.[37] Although the authors of the paper wrote that they were not in control of all of the aspects of the process, they concluded that, even by the most conservative of measurements, the device produced excess heat with a resulting energy density that was at least one order of magnitude, and possibly several, higher than any other conventional energy source, including gasoline.[38][39][40] The test was partly funded by the Swedish energy research consortium, Elforsk.[41] Elforsk stated on their website that the results were very remarkable, but that it was highly questionable to speculate whether nuclear transformation had occurred when no access had been provided to the reactants.[42] In a response to the original manuscript archived on arXiv, commentators criticized the testing as not truly independent, described the report as having "characteristics more typically found in pseudo‐scientific texts", and stated that "The authors seem to jump to conclusions fitting pre‐conceived ideas where alternative explanations are possible."[43][44][45] Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel commented at ScienceBlogs saying Rossi did not allow the reactants or products to be measured on this occasion. In the previous tests there were not enough 62Ni and 64Ni (the only two nickel isotopes which can fuse with hydrogen), at 3.6% and 0.9% respectively, in the reactants to explain the 10% copper output; these isotope levels are typical of natural copper, rather than of fusion by-product. According to Siegel, Rossi also refused to unplug the machine while it was operating despite it being an easy way to surreptitiously power the device. He also added that the supposedly independent testers had to rely on data supplied by Rossi.[46]

In October 2014 a non-peer-reviewed paper by the same authors as the May 2013 report describes results from evaluations in March 2014 of an upgraded version of the E-Cat which runs at higher temperatures. Unlike previous demonstrations, the test was carried out with monitoring equipment and in a laboratory not supplied by Rossi, and was run over an extended duration (32 days).[47] However, as with the previous report, the authors were not in full control of the process; Rossi intervened during the insertion of the fuel charge, start up of the reactor, shut down of the reactor, and extraction of the spent fuel. Overall, the total excess heat measured was calculated to be well beyond that possible by any conventional, non-nuclear source. In this report, they present analyses of samples of spent fuel, concluding from the isotopes found that "nuclear reactions are therefore indicated to be present in the run process, which however is hard to reconcile with the fact that no radioactivity was detected outside the reactor during the run." Following fuel and ash isotopic analysis, the authors speculate that isotopes of especially nickel and lithium being part of the reaction, in particular transmutation of 58 Ni and 60 Ni to 62 Ni, and from 7 Li to 6 Li through some unknown process.

Particle physicist Tommaso Dorigo commented on the 2014 test, called the isotopic measurements “startling” but he expressed deep concern about Rossi being involved in collecting the spent fuel, that the testers may have “overlooked some simple trick” and that “given the extraordinary nature of the claim… this constitutes a major flaw, which totally invalidates any conclusions one might otherwise draw.”[48] Astrophysicist Ethan Siegal was highly critical of the test, stating that the testers were not independent, that Rossi could have tampered with the fuel samples, that the 'open calorimeter' set up used was inappropriate, and that “it’s relatively easy to fake the amount of energy being drawn through a power cord if there is a hookup to an external source.”[49]

So really, this story is, "Investor gambles on idea with questionable scientific support."

[think]

3. Apparently the report wasn't in peer reviewed journals and instead published in

arXiv.org, the electronic preprint service of scientific papers at Cornell University, and on the Swedish sifferkoll.se website.

Are excess heat and isotope changes in e-cat LENR reactor real? – Part 1

A group of Swedish and Italian scientists published technical papers[1,2] that seem to confirm excess heat in a low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) device called e-cat. Even more remarkably, in the recent paper[1], the scientists found in the ash of the spent fuel dramatic isotope changes in nickel (Ni) and lithium (Li), from Ni-58 to Ni-62 and from Li-7 to Li-6, without any harmful radiation. If this finding would be correct – LENR as transmutation of elements without radiation – it would turn our present knowledge of nuclear physics on its head. It would be a true scientific sensation, one the most important discoveries of the century.

The papers were not published in a respected peer reviewed science journal. Instead, they were published in arXiv.org, the electronic preprint service of scientific papers at Cornell University, and on the Swedish sifferkoll.se website.

~Snip~

25 years ago Fleischmann & Pons announced cold fusion at low temperatures. But subsequent attempts by most scientists to replicate the effect failed and since then most scientists are sceptical about cold fusion experiments

Hence the response of the media and academic community has been very muted (so far). Physics Nobel laureate Brian Josephson, British physicist and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Cambridge, commented on the Seven Days page of Nature, one of the world´s most respected science journals, on the release of the E-Cat report[6]:

„the most important news of the year, perhaps, ….The report not only confirms output power far in excess of anything possible by chemical reaction, but also gives a clear indication that a nuclear reaction is occurring, on the basis of a substantial change in the isotopic proportions of Li and Ni over the period of the run. ……. As before, I predict that pigs will fly before Nature makes any mention of the report…“

The scientists who contributed to the research are Giuseppe Levi (University of Bologna), Evelyn Foschi (Bologna), Torbjörn Hartman, Bo Höistad, Roland Pettersson, Lars Tegnér (Uppsala University) and Hanno Essen (Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm). The Swedish R&D company Elforsk AB[7], the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Industrial Heat funded the research....

Full article:
http://blog.stepchange-innovations.com/2014/10/excess-heat-isotope-changes-ecat-lenr-reactor-real-part1/

My bad. I thought the paper had been submitted for peer review. Still the studies and paper were done by very prestigious scientists from important institutions and the results were published.

[caraher]

4. I think the key word of Josephson's comment is "perhaps"

What's interesting to me is what sorts of things Josephson is dabbling in these days. On his own web site, for instance, he seems to think homeopathic medicine might have a legitimate basis, and is interested in telepathy explained by quantum mechanics.

But in any case, if the e-cat claims turn out to be true it would be tremendously important (and shocking!). And they could be legitimate. I would bet against it, though, particularly when there seem to be no truly independent peer-reviewed tests.