LENR 101 Part 1 Origins of Cold Fusion

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome to the energy 2.0 society's webinar on low energy nuclear reactions today we will hear from Matt Luen and his presentation titled lenr 101 an introduction to low energy nuclear reactions uh this webinar which is sponsored by the energy 2.0 Society uh is being attended by a widely diverse Geographic group that we have seen from the advanc registrations and so we'd like to thank each one of you uh for your interest and participation in this webinar as we hear from Mr Luen today you will be hearing from someone who has written extensively on the subject of lenr Matt's is a senior staff writer at my Technic Stockholm Sweden the major technology weekly in Scandinavia and he is also the managing editor of next magazine Matt's received his Masters of Science degree in engineering physics from Royal Institute of of technology in Stockholm Sweden he has been present at many LR demonst strations and has written about cold diffusion in Andrea Rossi in his book an impossible invention and in case you're not familiar with that uh book it's available on Amazon and uh and also in electronic format so we're very pleased to have Matts here today to uh give his presentation so thank you and welcome maths okay so thank you very much bill for that introduction and thank you everyone for being here today I'm I'm um I'm really glad to be invited to talk about low energy nuclear reactions the situations today and um just before starting um uh I think uh it's very exciting today because there is so much going on right now and I think 2016 is going to be very interesting here uh from this aspect regarding this phenomenon and this the technologies that that are coming out of new low energy nuclear reactions and what I'm going to talk about today uh is divided uh not so clearly but anyway in into three parts first I'm going to give you a historical background called fusion and lowy nuclear reactions and some Basics to explain what it really is from a physical point of view even though we don't know exactly what it is yet and then I'm going to talk about how I got into this field for Real uh about Andrea RI the Italian inventor and he signal the the energy catalyzer or the ecat at the last part I'm going to talk about what's happening right now and the things are going that are going on and might U come to show up in in interesting events uh in the next future uh during this year so let me start cold fusion disrupting energy and more and this is the aspect of it that I think is so fascinating that it's completely clear that if cold fusion low energy nuclear reactions are for real uh they're going to disrupt the energy industry but so much more every other other other industry will be touched because energy is the very base of technical technical progress and progress in general in the world energy is needed everywhere and and the thing about energy today I could say that already now is that if you look upon energy energy is something that is controlled by a few um powerful entities organizational countries uh through nuclear power or oil specifically oil and if you would have such a technology as cold fusion law and nuclear reactions you would be able to distribute the access to energy at a low price uh in the same way as information that used to be controlled by a few has been distributed today and accessible to anyone at a low price so it's really a huge change huge disruption that would come along with cold fusion as a technology not only from the energy aspect but let me start um about uh talking about uh what Bill Gates said in his annual letter uh last year the most tramatic problems caused by climate change are more than 15 years away but the long-term threat is so serious that the world needs to move much more agressively right now to develop energy sources that are cheaper can deliver on demand and emit zero carbon dioxide this is very insightful because what people tend to do when they look at the climate crisis of Po the pollution from carbon fuels fossil fuels uh is how we could come away from that situation maybe by reducing our energy consumption which is important because we need to optimize but uh they're only looking at the technologies that we have present today like solar or or wind or um even nuclear power then um but you know not even looking outside of the boundaries of what could be possible if you invent something else and here Bill Gates realizes that that is not enough because solar weight is not uh it's not enough to substitute the the consumption of energy that we have through oil and it's not on demand you have still have the problem with um storage and you need enormous amount of batteries and batteries in the sell phys technology which includes lots of chemicals which is a problem itself so here what Mig Gates basically says is that we need a a kind of Revolution we need to look for it to find something beyond what we know today and that's very right what it doesn't explicitly say is cold fusion could be such a technology but that is what I believe and and um that's the reason why C Fusion or low energy nuclear reactions are so important that they actually fulfill the need that uh Bill Gates here uh specifies cheap on demand and zero carbon dioxide so what if if could have a technology that would give us clean water to every person on Earth that would give us a heat source that is clean and doesn't produce smoke or other things that are hazardous dangerous for your health like open fires that are used in in large parts of the world today to to to produce heat uh for cooking and for heating houses and if you could have cheap energy very cheap energy and uh making it accessible to to much more people in the world and if you could have an energy source that would be so compact that you would have the total amount of fuel for a car's lifetime that would fit into your hand or if you could have an energy source that would let us phase out fossils and that would let let us phase out nuclear power and that was that would let us solve the climate crisis so what if we could do that well cusion does that should do that if if it is what we believe it is low energy nuclear reactions the first time first time uh um talk about C Fusion was widespread was in 1989 when the two uh very skilled electrochemist uh um Martin fman and Stanley pawns presented their results from their research at a press conference in at the University of Utah in March um 23 1989 so um they actually struck the world with the surprise because they said that I claim that here we got an energy source that produces energy Out of Water uh and it sounds amazing but it was actually what they were doing yeah so Flashman pants had this um small experiment with uh electrolyzes of water which is actually experiment that's being made at high schools all over the world every day it's a very simple experiment where you have uh water uh in a vessel and you have got two electrodes and you put electricity through the water and in uh doing that the water molecules are separated into oxygen and hydrogen so oxygen is bubbling around one electrode and hydrogen at the at the other electrode ER what happened in their experiment uh this small tabletop experiment was that after a few days the temperature in the water rais without explan was Raising without explanation uh quite a lot about 10 or 20 or 30 degrees and there was no apparent explanation no combustion or nothing else no chemical reaction that could explain that temperature difference and there high part this was that the um the hydrogen molecules uh bubbling around one of the electrodes that was made of padium the metal padium uh they were um they already knew that the hydrogen molecules were um uh absorbed into the latice of the padium because padium is a metal that actually have that that Capac of absorbing hydrogen very well and their hypothesis was that inside that ltis with the with the hydrogen molecules being very close to each other the nuclei of the hydrogen got so close that the probability of fusing the nuclear hydrogen nucle um nuclei the hydrogen nuclei to each other uh increased so that actually a fusion reaction a fusion reaction is when nuclei are fusing into each other uh happened more than was would be possible normally actually normally it's quite impossible you need hundred of millions of degrees to make it happen but as in the sun U where it's 10 million degrees but you have got a very high pressure as well but there idea was that having those hydrogen molecules inside the lad is so close to each other the probability probability for Fusion would increase now uh it wasn't actually ordinary water they had they had what was called High um heavy water heavy water is a water molecule where have heavy hydrogen now hydrogen is the most simple element in the UN Universe with one one single proton that's the nucleus with one electron spinning around it heavy hydrogen is when you add a neutron to the nucleus and that doesn't change the element it's still element number one with one proton because the the element is decided by the number of protons but it it becomes double as heavy and um so this was of course if if you can have uh energy produced from ordinary water or heavy water heavy water is uh a small percentage of the water in the water in the oceans but it's enough for basically uh extracting infinite amount of of sufficient amount of energy for thousands of years so that's not an issue basically you would have an energy source that would be clean carbon free and cheap and and and infinite uh and of course that created quite a lot of of Interest all over the world uh but also discussions because the problem was that this according to known physical laws what was supposed to be impossible and I'm going to come back to that as well what happened is that lots of scientific groups were interested and they started to try to replicate this kind of experiment and and they didn't manage a few of them saw some faint signs of the kind of reaction that Flashman and P had discovered but most of them didn't see anything at all ER any thinking about today it's not very strange because fleshman and pant had been working with that kind of experiment for years and it was quite complicated experiment to set up we know that today uh but at that time uh people didn't pay so much attention as they should to that kind of problem they uh basically draw the conclusion that as we cannot re replicate this experiment is probably a faulty experiment and what happened was that after just a few months the kind of discussion turned around in the scientific community and there was this famous meeting in Baltimore in May 1989 by the American physical Society with about 1,800 people present not fleshman ofal they were not there and what was presented that that meeting was the one after another of failed replication attempts and in the end uh Flashman were accused for SEO science or pathological science which is basically when you uh find results that you would like to find but they're not real and and they were actually ridicul at that meeting and people at the end were standing up and were plotting so it was a very strong reaction which I uh normally wouldn't connect with scientific work it was kind of more of a sociological reaction uh later the same year the US Department of energy uh made a report trying to summarize all the replication attempts and and studies that had been made during the year into this kind of experiment and they concluded that um the results were not conclusive and they recommended no funding to be uh directed towards these kind of experiments and this kind of of research and that basically put the end of a common interest in in C Fusion it became uh a non-touch area and no one wanted to deal with it except very few researchers and you can find that strange because I mean it's such a a promising technology from the start and even though you couldn't explain it directly uh uh by some the valid Theory you could at least put some money into it and and continue uh doing research and studying it and investigating but basically after less than one year the scientific communities decided not to look more at it so this is what we saw in in headline headlines we saw in other in some of the newspapers Fusion or Illusion this the Time Magazine how to obscure chemist stir excitement and outrage in the scientific world now that was the end of it U of the large interest in in in uh cold fusion at that time so now let's look a little bit at how this would be possible let me first talk about heat sources in general so we have basically two kind of heat sources they are the most common ones are chemical and that's when you eat some food and you have uh uh chemical reaction in your body uh producing heat or a fire or burning oil burning gasoline your in your car or having gas in a lighter burning so these are chemical reactions and chemical reactions are reactions where electrons are involved electrons are you know those small tiny particles spinning around the nuclear the atomic nucleus then you have nuclear reactions which are on Earth are much less common but in the universe they are very common but on Earth they are very very rare so you got basically two kind of uh nuclear reactions producing heat and the most well known the most used one is fishing it's when you have large nuclei like uranium for example and you split it into to two parts and because of reasons I'm going to come back to in a moment uh you have a release of lots of energy in that reaction and also radiation and and particles like nutrients coming out of the reaction and fish is the reaction that we use in nuclear power plants and also in the nuclear bomb uh the normal nuclear the first nuclear bomb that we had in in Japan in hirashima and nagazaki the other nuclear reaction that is ex exothermal producing heat is fusion fusion is when you have small mole at small nuclei for example hydrogen or heavy hydrogen and you fuse those nuclei together to create another element in this case helium or trium which would be hydrogen with two nutrients and fusion is the nuclear reaction uh which goes on in the stars and in the sun it produces Heat lots of heat actually much more heat per uh nuclear per atom than the fishing reaction uh and we have it in the sun and in the Stars lots of radiations and also free nutrients to get in idea of why these reactions are producing energy and why there is such a big difference between chemical reactions nuclear reactions let me give you this image let let's imagine that the electrons spinning around the nuclei are like house flies a housefly weighs like 20 milligrams you can see that housefly spinning around the nuclear let's say if the electron was a housefly what would the nucleus be well the proton would be like a metal sphere we being 36 gam that would be I think roughly 1 oun one and a half and let's take an element like iron for example which has uh 26 protons if I remember right and some neutrons total of 55 nucleons a nuclei of a nucleus of of iron would would would have the mass of 2 kilos more or less it's like five pounds so it's very much heavy much heavier than the than the electron spinning around them you can you can see that nucleus and and actually the distance between the nucleus and on the house flight the electrons would be like miles like five or 10 or or 20 miles and they're spinning around there those small small small small house flies around that heavy heavy heavy nucleus and you also understand since all the protons are are positively charged they repel each other so there must be there must be very strong forces pulling that nucleus together and when you have reactions in that nucleus you can also understand that those reactions are much more violent they produce much more energy then reactions involving the electrons which are the house flies are flying around at at miles of distance just jumping for one one nucleus to another one this is the reason why if you have the same amount of energy in a chemical reaction you would need uh you would need a million times more fuel to have the same amount of energy out of reaction so that's why the the the heat produced from one or several tons of of burning oil it's the same heat that you get from one gram of nuclear fuel this makes nuclear reactions very attractive because you need very very very little Fuel and then you also of course you it's you don't produce any carbon dioxide so in the end nuclear reactions are very interesting for solving the climate crisis and and and they they have kind of an infinite amount of fuel as well the back side of course that we all know nuclear reactions that you have strong radiation and you have radioactive fuel with efficient and the fusion reaction you don't have radioactive fuel but you have radioactive waste and very strong radiation producing uh rad radioactive garbage because every every material around the reactor is becoming Radioactive so cold fusion cold fusion would have all the advantages of nuclear reactions but not the the the the difficulties first of all you got a temperature uh that is only 100 to 1,500 degrees so let's go back to the fusion reaction that I talked about before fusing small uh nuclei together the only way that we know how to do that since the nuclei are positively charged and they repel each other uh what is called the the colon barrier it's the difficulty to get those nuclei together and and and they get them very close because they uh electrostatically they repel each other the only way we know how to do that today is to raise the temperature because when you raise the temperature you raise the speed with which nuclei are moving free nuclei and you need to raise them in the sun you need to raise raise the temperature to 10 million degrees there you got a very large pressure helping also on the earth in in um in reactors Fusion reactors that we are experimenting with because we don't have them working yet commercially you need to raise the temperature to 100 to 150 million degrees because you don't have the same pressure and that makes the the technology very difficult to handle very expensive to handle cold fusion in Cold Fusion like with the hypothesis that Flashman and P had with that that lattice um the the plaum lattice where the nucle were coming very close to each other you wouldn't need that high temperature you would only need a temperature right 100 degrees up to 1,500 degrees which Mak makes it much easier to handle but that is considered to be one strange thing with cold fusion let me come back to that the other strange thing is that you don't have any radiation all nuclear reactions that we know about have uh rad ration as a sign neutrons or um electromagnetic radiation which is called Gamma or or x-ray radiation so these two aspects of C Fusion is basically what makes most scientists believe that it's impossible because all nuclear reactions that we know uh have radiation and all Fusion reactions that we know need a very high temperature to occur otherwise it's impossible so this these are basically the two main Mysteries with cold fusion there's a third mystery involving the time scale as well but these are the two main Mysteries furthermore cold fusion would have the excellent advantage of of high energy density so only one gram of fuel would correspond to the heat reduced by tons of chemical fuel like carbon hydrocarbons or or petrol the fuel is not Radioactive It's common and harmless elements like nickel padium lithium and hydrogen that we have abundantly on Earth then you wouldn't have any radc waste and you would also have a very portable technology small easy to handle versatile in different form factors that maybe could fit into a car vehicle or even to a computer or watch or mobile phone in theoretically uh once we learn to know how to handle this technology and and develop it further so all the advantages of nuclear reactions and not the difficulties not the problem I think as Bill Gates said cheap on demand and carbon dioxide free too good to be true too good to be true then that's also one thing that people react on what it's too good to be through they don't believe it in they think it's well we can't believe in that it's too good to be true but it's not not a miracle there are some mysterious things about the the uh uh how it can happen but but we can observe that something happens and the thing with with um with cold fusion experiments is the the the the main side of it is that you have a heat which is produced which is much larger than what it's possible to explain with a chemical reaction you I already told you that from the same amount of fuel with a nuclear reaction you have one million times more heat than from the chemical reactions so you immediately can see that the heat produced from such an experiment like for example freshman and pants it's much larger than the heat that could be produced from chemical ele chemical elements being present in that experimental setup so that's why they had the hypothesis that this must be a nuclear reaction an unknown nuclear reaction not the well-known ones fishion and fusion it must be something else and they call it co Fusion so you see the sign of it but you have the problem that you don't have a three theory that could finally explain how exactly how it occurs but it's not a miracle it shouldn't be a miracle let's look back let's uh the thing with the the energy produced is that uh first of all it's not you know energy produced from nowhere the basic theory about energy coming out from a reaction is the formula by Einstein this one the energy equals mass times speed of light squared and what are we what what do we learn from this formul formula we we learned that uh since the speed of light is very large a very tiny amount of mass would produce lots of energy and how would this happen well basically this formula also tells us that there is no real difference between mass and energy it's just two different aspects of the same thing so today scientists basically say that energy and mass it's it's it's it's it's equal it one can be transformed into the other or be it can appear as the other energy can appear as mass and mass can of appear is energy and if you that's the reason why um I mean if you could transform all the all the mass in an object by by making it um go against antimateria you would have all that mass trans transformed into energy and it would be a huge amount of energy from nothing actually when you when you make a calculation on it you will find out that one gram of mass turned into energy would produce amount of energy which would be 25 gwatt hours which is a huge amount of energy it's more or less the amount of energy that's produced from a nuclear power plant in one day it's equal to 570,000 US gallons of gasoline being burned it's an enormous amount of energy but in no reaction all the masses transformed into energy this formula is valid for all reactions for chemical reactions and for nuclear reactions and and although you can't actually measure it because the amount of mass which is transformed into energy in a chemical reaction is so tiny that you actually it's almost impossible to detect but there is a slight if you take uh the gasoline and you burn it and you take all the the the smoke and and uh the rest everything that comes out of it and you weigh that you could you could theoretically theoretically detect a tiny tiny tiny amount of mass missing and that mass is being transformed into heat and the difference with nucle reactions is that the amount of Mass going away being transformed into energy is a million times more so that's why we need less fuel in a nuclear reaction still we can't actually explain how that happened let me uh show you the most technical slide I have today and and this is uh an explanation why we have heat coming up from both fishion and fusion so the thing I have here I don't think yeah I think you see my pointer here are the the the dimension of the elements so the number of nucleons in the in the number of nucleons in the nucleus we have hydrogen up here uh like number one and we go all the way to the very heavy elements like uranium here and the thing about nuc nucleons atoms is that nucleons happen to be let me say relaxed most relaxed around the size of iron uh here with 56 nucleons and it's it's kind of uh you need basically you need more energy to pull the nucleon together you need more it's more tense the situation in nucleon in hydrogen over here uh than you have in in in iron and the same thing for a very large nucleus so you need more what they call binding energy to pull it together so when you split uh a Uranian nucleus into into two nucle into two nuclei you're going to have nuclei which are more relaxed and some of this binding energy will be transformed into heat you can also have you can you can look at B it like this it's like the the nucleus is falling down this slope from here now we look talk about fishing falling down the slope and the speed that you gain falling down the slope is the heat that you gain from a nuclear reaction from the fishing reaction now you can do the same thing with fusion and that then you see that the slope is much steeper so when you have a hydrogen nuclear nucleus being fused into helium you see that you you can release lots of that binding energy because the helium nucle nucleus is much more relaxed and that binding energy is released into electric electromagnetical energy like like radiation um gamma radiation also into um into uh kinetic energy of nutrients being released so you can go all the way down here to a iron nucleus and if you want to split that nucleus or if you want to fuse it into heav uh nuclei then you have to add energy again it's like here it's relaxed down at the bottom of this Valley and you have to add energy to make it go upstairs again mostly if you see this diagram here it's going to be turn upside down if so you won't recognize it that's a normal way of present it but I find that this is more intuitive to have the feeling that nuclei are actually falling down this slope here and releasing binding energy into heat into electromagnetic um waves like gamma radiation or heat radiation and the kinetic energy of nutrients so I hope you could understand this picture because this slide was more technical one I'm going to show today anyway again talking about Miracles the the problem is that we we can't actually explain we don't have any valid Con well widely accepted Theory how this nuclear reaction whatever it is in Cold Fusion happens so no one can explain that but it shouldn't be a miracle I mean if you look at Galileo galile in in the 16th century so he observed actually he made the observations through his uh his telescope that um that the the Jupiter had moons going around the planet and what he understood then that in since I can observe those moons I understand that the idea that the Earth is the center of universe and the planets and the Stars Are Fixed On on glass spheres around the Earth is impossible because those moons around Jupiter would would break the glass spere with where the moon where the Jupiter is attached again um when he understood that with his observation uh there was always uh there was already a theory by cernus that said that the Earth cannot be the center of universe the sun must be the center of the universe well later they discover that not even the sun is Center universe doesn't matter but the thing the message is that scientific method the scientific method is based on observations on experiments and you should trust the experiments once you can repeat them and see they happen all over again even though you don't have a theory you should trust your observations because that's the only thing only way you can learn about the the world and if you have observations that go against the theories that you have you have to find new theories so even though you don't have a theory of called Fusion that shouldn't be shouldn't be considered as a miracle you should look for a way to find a theory that can explain what your the observation that you have well you could have another parallel which would be the the the uh right Brothers flying with their aircraft in uh publicly in 1908 at that time was it was considered impossible to fly with heavier than their flight with a mous flight and they demonstrated that that theory was wrong uh evidently they could fly although even in that case you had theories about aerodynamics that had started being developed already in the 16th century or in the 17th century what happened when they demonstrated that it was possible to fly was that the details of some theories were discarded and others had to be uh found and developed because once you knew that actually it was possible to fly you had to find new theories yet the situation in Cold Fusion right now as the end of this presentation of the history of C fusion and and and the the basic ideas behind the F phenomenon is that we have more than a hundred obsurd uh and published in peer review journals uh examples of uh the actually the replication of the experiment by Flashman and PS and other similar experiments showing that the phenomenon is real there is actually no doubt about it today although it's very often very difficult to repeat what people has also have also understood is that um some very specific criteria must be fulfilled to be able to for example replicate the Flashman and PS experiment like T or or 15 criteria I don't remember how many they are and it has also been demonstrated that those criteria were not present when some famous replication attempts were made in 1989 so we today we know why those replication attempts failed what one of the most famous two of the most famous were made by the California Institute of Technology CTIC and the MIT plasma Fusion Center PFC and those fail replication attempts were taken as an argument for showing that cold fusion was impossible today we know that they couldn't have succeeded because certain criteria were not present not were not fulfilled um Michael mcuber famous C Fusion researcher demonstrated that in 2004 and then another researcher Dennis Cravens 2008 so we have those published and and really well defined in and peer reviewed examples over hundred of them of uh observations of the phenomenon and but we can't explain how it happens there are hundreds of theories most of them are contradictory and the interesting part of those theories is that actually many of them touches areas which could open up new aspects of our knowledge on matter and energy and showing that cold fusion uh Beyond being an energy source uh that could disrupt the world might open new aspects of our scientific knowy on matter and energy which makes makes it even more exciting