Cold Fusion is Back, Baby!

Cold Fusion is a controversial subject that most scientists and engineers today won't even touch. And most of the rest of the population naturally agree with these experts who don't touch it for fear of ruining their careers. But should the successful careers of some scientists really stand in the way of the progress of humanity and society? I think not. And it doesn't. Because the few who do continue to research in this field, despite being ostracized have made great leaps and bounds towards bringing this technology into production, and this year it is happening in Italy, with the production of the world's first Cold Fusion power station (a one megawatt station developed by Andrea Rossi - see quick facts video in the links at the end). In 1989 when Pons & Fleischmann first announced their success in the area of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR), the world embraced this announcement with open arms. But the warm reception was brief, and with claims from several universities including MIT that they could not repeat the experiment, it was determined that this claim must be based on erroneous results due to errors in calculations or methods used in measuring the result. Even in 1989, there were successful replications, but for some reason these were ignored.

By late 1989, Bockris had replicated the Pons-Fleischmann cold-fusion work. So had another scientist I spoke with, professor Bob Huggins, at Stanford University. "The reaction is real," Huggins told me at the time. "It won't go away." (Hal Plotkin)

Perhaps fulled by money from oil interests, media coverage failed to recognize such progress. Cold Fusion or LENR became crackpot science, and even showing interest in the field became enough to ruin a scientists career. This was a great success for the largest economic sector in the world, the energy industry. Although cheap, clean, energy would benefit humanity and the earth, it would ruin our economy and devalue oil and coal. Scientists have been stopped in their tracks from giving this kind of power to the people throughout history. Nikola Tesla who invented AC current, wireless communication, and wireless transmission of power to name a few, attempted to provide free electric power to the people, but was defunded, and his research destroyed for doing so. Although I can't really find any evidence to support this claim (elsewhere on the inter-webs), it is reported by Thomas Blakesly of Renewable Energy World that the Pons & Fleischmann experiment has been replicated thousands of times since 1989.

You may not have heard that the Fleischman-Pons experiment has been replicated thousands of times by many researchers and that Fleischman has greatly increased the power output in a lab supported by Toyota. In fact, in 2009, DARPA issued an analysis report reversing their previous negative position on cold fusion. Engineering has trumped science. We now know how to make low energy reactions generate power, but there are still many mysteries in the explanation. (Renewable Energy World)

The 60 minutes story in the links below indicates below indicates that the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC confirms this based on experiments funded by the Pentagon. There are several flavors of LENR including the traditional done by Pons & Fleischmann with recent work by Energetics Technologies of Israel using palladium electrodes (slides in link below), a new method using nickel electrodes that has a one megawatt power station being built this year in Italy by Andrea Rossi (quick facts video below), and a method using zirconium developed by Profesor Bolotov of Poland.

Papers:
DARPA Report
Slides:
Energetics Technologies
Articles:
Polish Zirconium LENR/PESWiki Report of
Videos:
Andrea Rossi Quick Facts
60 Minutes