Dr. Michael McKubre: Experimental Cold Fusion, Pseudo-Skepticism, & Progressing LENR

Transcript

today I have with me Dr Michael mcub Dr mcub is an accomplished electrochemist who has been working in the field of cold fusion for over 20 years he joined Stanford Research Institute in the late 1970s and served as the Director of Energy Research up till present day he has made countless contributions to the field including important replications in the mid1 1990s that demonstrated an important correlation between excess heat and healan production and a variety of experimental setups in 2009 he was interviewed for and prominently featured in the 60-minute segment cold fusion is hot again in which the successes of cold fusion over the past 20 years were brought into Focus Dr mcub thank you for being with me today you're very welcome so can you elaborate a bit more about your background your credentials and your entry into the LR field sure I was trained in as an electrochemist I um actually started my undergraduate work in the US at George Washington University in Washington DC and spent a couple of years they went back to New Zealand uh where my family was from finished up my bachelor's Masters and PhD in electrochemistry at Victoria University Wellington New Zealand and I came to do a postdoctoral fellowship the number one school of electrochemistry in the English speaking world is the University of Southampton in England uh it was that because of the presence of Martin Flashman who's who I Knew by reputation to that point to that point and um so I went to spend two years in England working for sir Graham Hills who is head of the chemistry department at Southampton but the principal Department in chemistry was the electrochemistry department headed by Professor Martin Flashman so I got to see a lot of Martin I knew him very well I understood him to be probably the brightest and most able experimentalist that I'd met met in my career up to that time or since so I had intermittent contact with Martin over the years I left Southampton in 1978 joined um SRI and I've been at SRI now 35 years the only place I've ever worked starting as electrochemist was a program manager of electrochemistry for a while and when cold fusion came on it was just a natural thing for for me and my group to get involved in this idea of MS what I've said before is that had it been anybody else other than Martin Flashman I probably wouldn't have bothered to rise up out of my chair and move into the laboratory to test it the idea seemed so unlikely at the time and for something like a decade before March 23rd 1989 in fact since my arrival in U at SRI in November of 1978 I've been working on the duum Palladium system we developed a hydrogen sensor to measure the uh concentration of dissolved hydrogen gas in the cores of uh well in the in the coolant systems of conventional nuclear reactor systems uh we happen to be testing that device in the can do reactors the Canadian reactors are heavy waterbased so I had a decade of experience with detarium and padium before I ever heard of the cold f Fus announcement of Flashman and ponds so my group was well equipped well well established well set I knew the players I knew the tools I understood how to load detarium into padium I understood the kinetic techniques of electrochemistry that you needed to do that and we had already in hand a technique for measuring the extent of loading this is by means of the resistance ratio so the first thing that my group did really to contribute to the the development and advancement of the field was to properly quantify the calibration of the resistance ratio versus loading function in the extremely high loading regime that was clearly going to be necessary before anything as unexpected as as a nuclear effect would be found in the jerum padium system can you talk a bit about the work that went into correlating helium production with excess heat production yes well we first the first thing we started out to do was to check out whether muttin was right or not we gave it about a 50/50 shot again only because it was muttin anybody else I'd have given a much lower probability but we set up some experiments as carefully as we could to interrogate the hypothesis that a nuclear level heat effect can be seen in the the deuterium Palladium system when deuterium is loaded to a sufficient degree into Palladium we knew it had to be the high loading regime because none of these effects had been observed before and the plaum duum system was well investigated in the low loading regime so we tried to design an experiment that we could get this Palladium is as loaded as as loaded as possible uh low temperature solubility increases with decreas inreasing temperature high pressure solubility increases with increasing pressure and uh as higher electrochemical current density as we could achieve in a you know a safe apparatus so we took us about two months of just thinking head scratching and thinking to design a calorimeter that would give us an unambiguous and conservative result uh under the conditions that we were seeking to test High loading so we had a result by about June perhaps late June of 1989 so April May June three months we spent thinking about the experiment setting it up and about a month operating it and we had a result which which um confirmed our hypothesis there was in fact a heat effect that could not be accounted for by chemistry and that set us thinking about what should we do next the two things to do next obviously were build a better calorimeter at that point I was not very experienced with calorimetry none of my group was so we set out to design a modern calorimeter that would be give us conservative results under all conceivable operating conditions so by the time we we' set up our second now mass flow ceromer we had the ability to produce n not on every occasion but you know in about a third of the experiments we were able to produce a heat effect that was very clearly not of chemical origin it didn't look very nuclear either and that the expectation that had been visited on us by I think in part malicious particle physicists but they took the word Fusion to mean hot Fusion of course and fusion is a reserved term in the Nuclear Physics world when you say Fusion you're supposed to be talking about one and only one reaction possibly two reaction between duum and duum to produce neutrons and Trum and the reaction between dyum and trium also may be used uh the word Fusion may be used but both cases hot Fusion both cases energetic products in neither case could these could these reactions explain what was being observed we were seeing the heat consistent with nuclear reaction but we were not seeing neutrons we were interrogating the system for neutrons all of our experiments have always had radiation health safety level of uh Neutron detection although neutrons have been seen in some of these experiments we've we've never seen them and they're certainly not present commensurate with the with the heat if they were Flashman ponds all other successful experimenters in the area and um their students would be irradiated it would be obvious so whatever it was it was obviously not hot Fusion as as Julian Scher pointed out what is the product we measured for tritium on occasions we have seen tritium but in no case have we seen tritium commensurate with the with the heat there's there's some tritium and a single atom of tritium produced from a chemical reaction would would be highly anomalous and possibly worthy of a Nobel Prize so we've seen know uh 10 to the 17th tritium atoms produced in our experiments no Nobel Prize but that's still not enough to account for the heat the heat has to be pro has to be produced in a reaction that gives a nonradiative and non-energetic particle or product otherwise we'd simply have seen it at Le leaves you with very few choices there are some transmutation choices at at higher Atomic uh masses but the most logical and obvious and and almost the qu uh the the thermodynamically necessary consequence of a reaction between two deuterons is helium 4 and if you were to take uh two deuterons put them away in a box until the end of time and come back in and interrogate the Box you would always find hel four in the box it is The Logical thermodynamic product of the interaction of deuterons problem is that it's it's almost impossible to do it as as heis anger and others pointed out in a simple pairwise reaction it's it's uh it's not possible to conserve uh energy and angular momentum so the deuterons will react together to produce uh helium four it's it's a downhill thermod ially downhill process yields 24 million million electron volts which is huge so we set out to make measurements looking for uh helium 4 I should point out that we were not the first to think of this or the or the first to do it the first people to think of examining their experiments and looking for a correlation between helium and heat was Mel miles Melvin miles at China Lake that the naval weapons sent Center at China Lake in California and Mel miles working together with Ben Bush at University of Texas Austin it developed a very very clever experiment to correlate heat with uh helium in the off gas from calorimetric cells thermodynamically open these cells evolved their gas they simply took gas samples and submitted them to a mass spectrometer for analysis and I think in all Mel miles has run approximately 20 experiments when there is heat there is helium helium for when there is no heat there is no helium for and a simple statistical analysis of their observations and non observations of heat and helium gives you a probability of better than one part in uh a million that they are wrong there a million to one chance that they are right simply statistically so Mel miles was the first to do it uh it took a while for others to catch on first thing I did was hire Ben Bush on sabatical actually to Sri and we replicated the miles Bush heat helium results at SRI in the early to mid 990s so we were able to confirm what Mel miles had shown in 1991 1992 by 1993 1994 we were able to confirm that particular result in that particular mode then we set up to perform different types of experiments different calorimeters gas cells as well as uh electrochemical cells to see if in fact there was a quantitative correlation between the appearance of heat and helium for we know how much heat should be associated with each helium 4 atom 24 million electron volts now the trick is to make enough helium four that you can distinguish it from the background the air that we're breathing right now you and I in our different locations but the air that we're breathing right now is 5.22 parts per million helium flate it's the same everywhere all over the surface of the planet it doesn't sound like much but nuclear uh energy efficiencies nuclear energy densities are so much greater than chemical they're approximately 10 million times greater than than chemical energy densities and that's what makes them interesting and important but to produce 5.22 parts per million of helium for and a gas sample requires the production of a lot of energy so we had to build our experiments up make them more robust and reliable and make them produce more energy in order to to give us some increased confidence Ence in the search for helium FL as a product but we did it by the mid '90s mid to late '90s we had three different experiments and three different geometries with three different modes of calorimetry all displaying a correlation between the quantity and time of production of heat and helium a temporal and quantitative correlation between the production of these uh to nominally Independent products and as far as my understanding goes at least 12 other groups have replicated it yeah I don't know what the total number is three or four groups in Italy two or three groups in Japan I think a group in China a couple of groups in the United States probably adds up to 10 to to 12 so there's been a fair amount of replication of the heat helium it's not an easy experiment requires uh sensitive apparatus requires careful isolation from the environment so you need to do a very good job of keeping your cell helium leaktite and helium helium is the leakiest gas known to man it is the it is it's it's the hardest gas of all to track so you you have to know what you're doing and you have to spend money and the mass spectrometer that we have to to do this job is B for us by japa the defense Advanced re research projects agency and it's in a initial cast $350,000 installed cost about a million do including all of the maintenance and and technician care so you're in a half a million to a million dollar uh range before you can even begin to play this game that's why there haven't been more replications now when we start with dyum as a fuel and we end up with helium as a product that doesn't necessarily shed light on the mechanism is that correct that's correct I think we've got we got the beginning point we got the end point it's like thermodynamics you know what your starting material is you know what your final material is but you know the reaction pathway can be many and several and uh it is at this point to me at least unclear what the detailed mechanism is one thing is for sure it is not a simple pairwise interaction of two deuterons to produce a helium 4 if the only thing in this process were two deuterium atoms my hypothetical two deuterium atoms in the in a box stuck away till the end of time it would take until the end of time to produce this reaction the rates are simply not there and the products are not the right productss so we know actually we knew from the very beginning that this was always made you know as some sort of Revelation or mystery that Fusion was supposed to occur in one particular form and one form only and that we should expect to see neutrons and we should expect to see tritium we always searched for them but we didn't expect to see them at least not in quantita quantitative correlation to the heat had they been there in sufficient quantities the experiment would have told us very clearly it would have been dangerous so the mechanism unclear a number of people are working on mechanis IC ideas it has to be in my view a many body Quantum coherent process there has to be many participant species and two deuterons ultimately do give their uh uh Souls up to become a helium four I I do believe that that is the most likely explanation but I know it doesn't happen as a reaction solely between two deuterons perhaps we'll come back to Theory a little bit later for now I'd like to ask ask about what led up to the 2004 Department of energy review the work that went into that and ultimately what was the outcome yeah we had a very good conference organized by my good friend Peter Haggin in 2003 in Cambridge Massachusetts associated with MIT and Peter Peter works at MIT so we had icf10 the 10th International Conference on Cold Fusion Peter being an academic had set very high academic standards and that was a particularly solid conference technically the energetics folks showed up and spoke for the first time it was sort of very very well selected papers for you know academic motivation high quality papers high quality presenters lots of new stuff lots of good stuff so that conference proceedings is a particularly valuable one just because of the pre-selection but I don't know who it was but somebody from from from doe or somebody associated with doe or maybe one of the MIT folks was sufficiently impressed by the uh conference by the presentation quality of the information being presented to get that uh information back to the to the top folk at doe doe was also approached directly by Peter saying that it's Peter hagelstein saying it's time for a review and of the guys that we had ultimately in the review was politically connected to a former boss of doe so we made a three-pronged approach and doe was very responsive they invited us uh first to a phone conversation and then down there to set up uh the review the review was organized pretty much by Peter hagelstein and I there are other names on the review paper but pretty much all of the writing and and organization was done by Peter heglin and I Peter was taking a sabatical actually it took a six-month sabatical or a summer anyway sabatical at SRI and we were planning to do all sorts of experiments but we got sidetracked by this doe review so we spent the entire summer pouring over the literature discussing this with our colleagues figuring out what information to contain and um putting the whole thing together the review was conducted in two parts there were direct present ations to a subset of the review panel and then the materials that we wrote and recommended were intended to be read by uh reviewers who were not physically present on the day of the presentation it was quite remarkable actually it's around one of the more interesting days of my life the uh review went very well we walked into a room of L Ely skeptical some hostile some friendly but um certainly very cautious group of reviewers that Doe had selected together and made a series of presentations by the end of the day we had pretty much convinced the attending reviewers that there was something of a very great significant we were being congratulated I remember one of the senior reviewers who was also on the first IR panel report coming up to me afterwards and saying I had no idea how much the field had progressed and congratulations we thought this was all very good unfortunately the politics were not done at that point the the uh reviewers who were present were I think uniformly positive the uh a lot of the reviewers who had not been present for our day of presentations had merely read the material or in some cases I'm certain did not read the material some of them came back with fairly negative some some irrationally negative comments and the synthesis that was put together by Doe at the political level read more or less the same as the as the the uh synthetic view of the first Iran panel report you know a fraction of our members of the reviewers believe there was something here I think a third of them believed in the in the heat a third of them believed in the uh nuclear evidence and a third of them didn't believe in anything so so we had certainly a split field but of the people who physically attended I would say pretty much every one of them was convinced that there was either a nuclear effect on the basis of heat or a nuclear effect on the basis of nuclear products but the words that came back from doe is the review panel is mixed some some regard the evidence is clear and convincing there is scope for uh well-designed research projects in this area uh submitted to doe through the normal review process all very well and good and right actually that's the correct thing that is the the exactly correct way of analyzing the situation there looks like there's something here in order to understand it better we need to do more research they encouraged collaboration particularly with the national Labs well you he sort of runs the National Lab so that's reasonable or expected anyway the only problem with that whole process was that in order to get anything new funded out of doe in a zero sum game you're going to have to displace an existing project they didn't provide a new program manager or new funds to handle the influx of proposals the proposals were thrown into the normal review new scam and no special encouragement I think was given to funding these over over any other initiative in fact it was stated explicitly that should be given no more weight than any other uh submission so the consequence of that is the same as the consequence of the first EAB review uh although requests were for proposals were if not solicited at least uh permitted these requests for proposals weren't given any special pathway towards funding also explicitly and no funded proposals resulted from that activity I know a number of submissions and a number of rejections I know of one submission and acceptance of a cold fusion proposal uh to and by Doe where the money was taken back after it had been allocated simply because it was called Fusion so pretty much Politics as Usual I did read in a Washington Post article that at the very least it raised morale to a certain degree would that be correct the field picked up and I I I congratulate doe I congratulate the the the higher level folks who who managed to push this through and get the and get the review undertaken the fact that Doe is paying attention is good it's actually also their job I that's what they should be doing but it is good to see clear evidence that they are doing their job even better evidence would be to accept you know well formulated proposals and it may just be that there haven't been you know well enough conceived and constructed proposals for doe to pick them up that might be the answer I've never submitted a proposal to do de on this topic now over the last 20 years or so how in your view has skepticism evolved if it has or is it do you still hear the same objections that you did in 1989 1990 yeah a lot of lot of the C critics are really really stuck in 1989 and and refuse to learn a very prominent critic whose name I won't mention but closely associated with the American fiscal Society one of my colleagues attempted to put in his hands a paper that would rebut whatever argument he just made you know he said that this isn't so or this is so and he tried to put in his hands a paper which if read would clarify the situation and and negate the the concerns that he was um uttering but he refused to accept the paper he would not allow it to be put in his hands he let the paper drop on the floor rather than touch it this is the level of hostility this is the emotional base for the hostility and for some that hasn't changed what has changed of course is that just as we're getting older so are our our critics and some of the early uh critics are just not operational anymore they're you know they're too old and some of them have died so the cry is taken up by younger crowds to some extent you know you can't measure helium in the presence of D2 mismeasurement of input power and just sort of nonsense things I think that the people who say these you know mou these criticisms are aware that they're nonsense but they are they need to to sew the seeds of doubts and people that don't think as clearly as they do or or we do so you know I I won't believe that you have produced energy until you can boil me water for a cup of tea was Douglas Mar crime as I pointed out on the 60 Minutes piece in one experiment alone we've produced enough hot water to produce um to make, 1500 Cups of Tea we didn't choose to make 1500 Cups of Tea that's uh stupid that's not scientific all we need to do is measure the energy and allocate that energy to a particular process but energy on the scale of teaming has certainly appeared in these experiments but that criticism still comes up people still say it people are not aware of the fact that hundreds of megajoules of excess energy have been produced in these experiments over quite long periods of time but uh the energy is is very very significant gwin on 60 Minutes says I don't think mouy manages to correctly measure his input power well power is the easiest thing to measure and your the meter in your home measures power ACC accur directly otherwise the utility companies would be either cheating you or cheating themselves we know how to measure current voltage resistance time these are things we can easily measure so if there is a problem with these experiments it's certainly not in the measurement of input so I think it would be reasonable to argue that the critics have not evolved their arguments and a very sophisticated way they haven't kept up with the evidence as it's been produced in some ways we're holding all the you know we're we're we we we've done the work we've done the calculations we've spent the time we've spent the energy and the Brain Cycles to think this thing through the people that work in this field are not stupid they uh they're not on the whole self- deluded and they're very capable set of individuals amongst the best group of people that I've ever worked with in my life and and the experimentalists that have stuck with this are extremely capable individual who are well aware of the issues that the critics bring up were aware of them before the critics brought them up the fact that these questions are raised you know in public means that they have to be efficiently rebutted and that is uh that's difficult thing to do particularly for a non-technical audience Rob Duncan of the University of Missouri is somebody I have a lot of respect for because he started off as a skeptic but he was willing to engage with the material he was convinced by the material and so convinced that he organized a 2009 Symposium and I'm sure he was critical in getting iccf 18 over at the University of Missouri absolutely absolutely Rob is Rob is unique as far as I can tell when we were thinking about how the 60 Minutes piece would would be put together the um CBS guys knew that a Critic was needed the the argument couldn't be made simply between advocates people on my side or even the traditional uh critics of old whose whose positions were uh entrenched what we needed was a new a new face somebody to take a new look at the material and make an honest judgment publicly about what he saw and how he evaluated the the evidence of the experiment it was I think our fifth attempt that we found Rob we were able to find physicist sub with you know household names who are willing were willing to take the money and willing to do the job but were not willing to read the materials or travel to see an experiment they knew what their opinion was they were prepared to stand up on camera and state their uh opinion as fact without the effort of going through the physical materials the literature or looking at the experiment so the 60 Minutes guys said well thank you very much we'll keep you in the file but U that isn't what they were looking for but surprisingly not surprisingly large number of quite prestigious individuals were willing to make that public statement without evaluating the evident Rob was special Rob was willing to read through the materials capable of understanding them he has a background in calorimetry which makes him very special indeed that's very rare in physics he he um was president or chairman of the American physical Society measurements uh standards committee exactly the right job he knew how to make measurements had a background with experimentation of his own he was not only a calimet but had experience with national instruments which was what the energetics folks in Israel were using so he was willing to jump on an airplane fly to Israel spend a week evaluate reading the experiment talking to the researchers you know pounding the table asking hard questions at the end of that time he was converted from being a skeptic more than a skeptic he was he was sort of hostile and his expectation was that there was nothing there and he told me later he used to make jokes about cold fusion but he had sufficiently open mind that having been exposed to the evidence and persuaded by it he was willing to change his mind unfortunately rare and even rarer having changed his mind he was willing to speak about it publicly I I think that makes Rob unique I forgotten who it was who was searching with a lamp for one honest man well we we searched with our lamp and we found one honest physicist and that's Rob Duncan that transitions nicely into my next question could you give us a little bit of an overview of Irving DK's work and at energetics in Israel what they're doing there and what their results have been sure I talk spok before about the conference in Cambridge Massachusetts icf1 in 2003 and I was exposed for the first time to the work of energetics I'd seen the guys around they' showed up to a previous conference but not said anything this was the first time they opened their mouths and said something in public and I was I was with Martin fleshman there he happened to to to to to leave the room at the time of the energetics presentation he came back afterwards and and asked me what did I miss and said you missed the best paper of the conference and these guys came after a year or or less of experimentation of their own and were producing results that were Superior to anything that the rest of us were were discussing at that meeting so energetics came out of nowhere and produced better results than anybody in the field people you know such as myself with a decade or so in the field at that point more was 2003 so I've been in it for 14 years these guys were already doing something that I didn't understand and couldn't do myself producing levels of excess heat and consistency of heat production there were far beyond anything that I was capable of doing and also they were able to load reliably to very high levels duum andum and I I knew how hard that was so I was fascinated by by energetics and I immediately uh invited myself to visit their sponsor man called Sydney Kimel made his money in the uh garment business but uh philanthropist good man good Vision so I invited myself to see Sydney Kimel and basically said to him how can I help with these guys who doing doing is highly important I'd like to become associated with their activity and contribute in any way that I can and I said that three possibilities you know on the basis of the results that are produced by energetics in uh Israel uh either they had Divine guidance or there is something to what Irving D is saying or maybe a combination of the two but clearly what it was that energetics had that was different from everybody else and in my view what it was that made them successful far more successful than anybody else was this crazy crazy wave form that IR dreamed up called the superwave a highly variable waveform containing a number of of modalities it has a wide range of frequencies and a wide range of amplitudes so as a good electrochemist I already understood that the best way to load detarium or hydrogen into Palladium was a constant steady direct current DC experiment controlled situation uh certainly not with a wild and crazy cyclic waveform and furthermore I I I didn't really I wasn't expecting a medical doctor to be able to inform me in my own field of expertise however I was open-minded enough and I'd seen the results so I wanted to understand what a superway was how it worked and how uh I could use it in my own experiments so I got to know Dr dck I got to know Sydney Kimmel I got to know the energetics folks in Israel I visited there three times and still I'm amazed at the potency of the uh superwave driving function to both load hydrogen or dyum into Palladium and other metals and to allow a fluctuation of the loading level which is associated with the flux the movement of deuterium or hydrogen across the interface by that time I by 1995 in fact I'd understood that the excess heat effect is has a number of preconditions two of which are to obtain and maintain a very high loading ratio and to have a high flux of dyum through the interface the problem between 1995 and 20 2003 was I did not know what waveform to use that would allow me to simultaneously obtain High loadings and a high interfacial dyum flux you can have a high flux condition but what usually happens and it happens in every case for the waveforms that I have tried is you lose more on the downside than you gain on the upside you you tend to deload your electrodes so you so you can get the duum moving moving backwards and forwards through the interface you lose more when it leaves than you gain when it returns it's a partially reversible process the only waveform I know to this day that is able to get you a high flux and high loading condition is Herb dtic Super Wave so well I don't understand it fully I have complete uh empirical confidence in in the waveform and its uh and its effects and I pr to spend quite a lot more time studying that very waveform in uh in various systems what kind of output were they getting from their C compared to more conventional approaches well famous uh result obtained in 2005ish and introduced at the iccf conference in Mar was experiment 64 energetics of 64 experiment 64 in the first 17 hours the input power was 40 K 40,000 Jew the output was 1.04 Meg so there is something like 25 times more energy coming out of that experiment and had been put into it that's I don't think that number has been replicated by anybody in fact other than energetics they boiled water so you have 25 times energy gain and boiling water if you could produce a water heater with those characteristics you get 25 times more hot water than the electricity that you pay for and you can boil water with it you would have a product immediately and the only thing that would prevent you from having a product is a that you couldn't do it on demand which we still can't and B that it required bulk Palladium which is expensive but the characteristics that they demonstrate ated in that experiment and a followon experiment a few days later and some later replications the features that they demonstrate are already a product that is produ isable if if you can use that word and they have pretty high reproducibility rates is that correct I've heard 80% quoted I don't know if that is usual we set up and this experiment was so important 64 that I I went to my sponsors at darer and said we have to understand more about this we want to replicate it they got fairly considerable amount of money for both energetics and uh SRI to replicate the energetic 64 result or get something like it we were weren't aiming for 25 times power gain 00% we were aiming for you know 2 3% we thought was a sufficient level to be convincing so we set up a series of experiments I think there were 23 or 24 experiments in all they like 17 of those experiments produced excess energy not at the uh 300% level some did most of them lesser levels 30 40 50 60 70 80% in some of the experiments but all of them well Beyond in the measurement uncertainty so that 17 out of 23 let's call it something like 73% is the most successful series of experiments that we had performed at SRI up to that time and the highest level of replicability that I'm aware of in a uh in an electrochemical know Flashman ponds heat effect type experiment but of course even even 70% 75% isn't that's not enough but if you're going to commercialize you got to get closer to 99.99% people would be very dissatisfied with their caruse or their water heaters for that matter if quarter of the time you turned it on and you didn't get anything out of it so we have to get better speaking of commercialization we have three major companies on the horizon so there's Rossy Leonardo Corp you have Brill here in the states and you have de Kon who's in Canada and I think Greece so do you have anything to say about who you think might be furthest ahead best in a position to get to the market first I don't know I I don't know I don't have any inside information for rosi or de Callan I do have inside information for bin which means that I can't talk to you about it but I don't think first matters I mean the field is so huge if anybody gets to the marketplace there will be uh a position to set up and establish a giant corporation that would be larger than anything that any of these guys can imagine there's room for all three of them to succeed and uh you know 20 more people to succeed it's like automobile manufacturing how many how many auto manufacturers are there in the world you know 100 maybe and you know 20 or 30 big guys all of them competing for a very large Market very profitably so I would like to think that bran def calan Rossi and pantelli who is the father of that line of thinking uh all could succeed beyond their wildest expectations Rossi is to be credited for for for some things and he's a he's a different sort of guy not a scientist in the mode that I'm most familiar with but he he did pick up on the idea of pantelli that the nickel light hydrogen system or nickel natural hydrogen system was capable of producing meaningful levels of excess energy this is something that pantelli had spoken about and written about as early as 1992 1993 I think he has patents extending back to 1993 uh we didn't really believe it at the time that we spent all of this work with duum scrupulously avoiding proteum hydrogen and using hydrogen or light water or normal water as our as our calorimetric blanks so the idea that you could perform this experiment equally well with normal water as heavy water was uh first a surprise nickel itself is not so much of a surprise and nickel is Poor Man's padium it sits above it in the periodic table it has very similar chem chemistry and metalogy the difference significant difference between nickel and padium is that diffusion coefficient of hydrogen Isotopes in padium is two or three orders of magnetude higher than it is in nickel so large objects you know big cathod Lo like Martin flashman's 1 cm cubed he was able to load his 1 cm cubed in a month or two it would probably take you know 10,000 years to load that same thing with if the cube were a nickel so so nickel is a problem but only if it's large small Dimension structures should work just as well with nickel as they as with padium the problem that most of us in the field the traditionalists in the cold fusion world had was the hydrogen the proteum rather than the deuterium now it's true that you can react two hes to to produce a d that's where all D in the universe comes from and that is a exothermic reaction that is downhill and you can make the same argument I made for detarium and the helium this is a thermodynamically obvious and logical necessary consequence of the reaction of two protons but it's a very difficult reaction it happens very under very very uh extreme conditions it's hard to get that reaction to go in the Sun so to get an HH reaction going is something that most of us believed and some still believe to be not possible I think if my present thinking the way that I can handwave that away is that brillan if C and Rossy pantelli are not looking at HH reactions well the and certainly believe they are but looking at HD reactions so it's this one part in 6,000 duum in normal water which is providing the reactive species it's a stretch uh intellectually it's a stretch technically and hasn't been proven experimentally but that's that's my hand waving way of massaging away the the sore point of uh of proton proton reactions but with as with you know the the conventional lashman Pond heat effect mechanism unknown we know uh something about the reactants uum seems to help uh protons might work so that's two things we know about the reactant we know something about the products helium 4 has been seen absolutely certainly helium 3 has been seen absolutely certainly tritium has been seen absolutely certainly so we have nuclear products in fact the very products of fusion reactions but the mechanism by which these products come into existence has been uh described by probably 30 theorists in possibly a 100 different theories none of them self-consistent none of them well they're not not the group is not self-consistent and and most of these theories as Ed storms likes to point out most of these theories are not even consistent with the experimental facts that we have available to us so it'll be a while before Theory catches up with experiment this is not the fault of theory this is the fault of experiment we experimentalists have simply not provided with the theorists with a clear enough set of input and output conditions for the theorists to be able to be certain what it is that happens and what are those things that don't happen now we have preconditions that are necessary for the reactions to start and then of course there's the mechanism itself somewhere in between those two I see storms is nuclear active environment Theory which is nanocracks at the surface may be coming into play and if not nanocracks perhaps some kind of surface defect that might be assisting with the reactions do you see any validity in that idea you know I go along with Ed to the to the point of acknowledging the existence of a nuclear active environment this the place that this reaction whatever it is takes place is not normally present and not everywhere present in the metallic lce a special condition needs to be created in order to facilitate this reaction that's why it takes such a long time in bulk Palladium materials that take hundreds of hours before the reaction occurs even after my preconditions are established you know the loading is there the flux is there the current density is present everything is that I say is necessary is there it's still takes 300 hours for a 3mm diameter padium cathode to produce the effect what is going on what is going on is a reconfiguration of the lce and and it's a reconfiguration close to the surface or maybe add the surface just the very fact that the helium or at least half of it pops out immediately into the gas phas for analysis tells you that the reaction is very close to the surface within a trapping distance of helium from the surface so a special condition is surf is is created at or near adjacent to the surface we'll call that a nuclear active environment and good with that whether that nuclear active environment is nanocracks and what you know and the rest of Ed's Theory chain holds up that it is a linear array of DD or HHH polymeric structures it's a it's an interesting idea I like the idea it might be I have no direct experimental evidence that that is so and we need to set out to test that experimentally if if cracks what size cracks if we get the right size crack then the effect should scale as the quantity of those cracks scale so make more cracks you get more heat nobody has been able to set up experiments to directly test that hypothesis so it remains a hypothesis it needs to be tested if it if it turns out that Ed is right on this then my hat is off to him it's already off to him he's done probably more work than anybody in the field and has done a better job of codifying the information that's available so it is already a cold fusion hero if it turns out that his Nae is a system of micr cranks nanoc cranks and that the nuclear mechanism is along the lines of what he describes then he will absolutely be a candidate for for the Nobel Prize that that Martin Flashman can't get because he's dead the field deserves a Nobel Prize uh somebody should get it if if Ed turns out to be right for these Na and nanocracks and he should certainly get it and I'll I'll promot him for it with the few minutes we have left maybe you can illuminate us about your future plans or current projects you're working on sure we um you know for years and years and many uh years we tried to science this thing into existence do experiments good experiments write up papers present them to the the peer review journals for publication and discussion that didn't work it didn't work that process became derailed by the critics in their attempt to shut the field down the one of the attempts to shut the field down was to prevent publication if you can prevent publication you can prevent uh young academics or people with pretention to be academic from getting involved in the field uh publish or perish if you can't publish you can't give get promoted you can't be an academic very effective very cynical activity on the part of a fairly small but prestigious group of individuals to just kill the field I still don't know why they did it so we weren't able to science this thing into existence the continuity of funding was not available and uh the availability of conventional publication sources and presentation sources were not there we created our own conference we created our own journal still not enough you can't get academics involved so we don't have the horsepower so you can't science this thing in into existence with the uh you know establishment hostility that exists today we tried to use the NASA approach you know appeal to the public play to the play to the gallery the 60 Minutes piece was part of that attempt to to go directly to the people and say look we don't know what there is here but there's something here and that something has to do with energy and the energy that is produced is a whole lot more benign than the energy that we're presently uh using to supply the world uh get get people to write their congressman's congressmen for support uh worked a little bit but not completely the third path that we have to get the Martin flashman's Discovery accepted by the mainstream science establish establishment in mainstream science journals is by uh making a product that does something something you can put on the table just do it go ahead make something make heat make lightning I don't care make something that's useful make tritium which I don't want to do but we we do know how to do so I'm looking to commercialize this activity in existence so for the you know remaining years of my career I moved my my attention away from the pure science side and towards the supporting commercialization activities side and I don't care who wins as I said before you know brnd calian rosi pelli on the nickel light hydrogen stuff I can see why nickel I can see why normal hydrogen they're cheaper or more plentiful uh have engineering potential if any of them succeed of all of them succeed great we can then go back to the physics community and say look we're producing commercial heat we're boiling thousands of people's water for Cups of Tea and whatever at that point when it's unequivocally e evident that commercial objects can be made the attitude of the of the hostility will will dissipate so I'm I'm looking forward to some sort of commercialization activity it doesn't even have to be very good or very large or very successful but the fact of a commercial object is going to change the discussion all right Dr mcub thank you so much I think this has been a really interesting conversation I appreciate your time today thanks John get back to if you have any questions or queries or any clarification needed all right thank you very much we'll do take care