A review of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (Cold Fusion) with Dr. Edmund Storms

Transcript

oil would no longer be useful natural gas would no longer be useful because this would be the ideal energy source the cheapest possible energy source involving only water and so if this were real all the other sources of energy um were irrelevant the rational view is a weekly series hosted by me Dr Alan Scott providing a rational evidence-based perspective on important societal issues produced by soapbox media hello and welcome to another episode of the rational View in this episode I start my investigation into the cold fusion controversy in 1989 pons and Fleischmann announced in a hastily convened press conference the discovery of a new clean energy source that would revolutionize power grids and save Humanity from climate change they had measured the production of excess heat and neutrons in a room temperature electrolytic reaction using heavy water and a Palladium cathode it shortly became evident that their claims were not entirely correct after many attempts it was discovered that their experiment could not be replicated and mainstream science summarily dismissed cold fusion as pathological science despite this lack of acceptance many have continued to try to replicate their work and strike it rich now after more than 30 years a pattern of unexplained anomalous results seems to be emerging from the rubble is there something the newly renamed low-energy nuclear reactions field to answer that question I'm interviewing an expert who's been involved in reviewing the work in this field since the very beginning if you like what you're hearing please press like on your podcast app share it with your friends come join the discussion that my Facebook group the rational View [Music] Edmund storms obtained a PhD in radio chemistry from Washington University St Louis and is retired from the Los Alamos National Laboratory after 34 years of service his work involved basic research in the field of high temperature chemistry as applied to materials used in nuclear power and propulsion reactors he presently lives in Santa Fe where he's investigating the cold fusion effect in his own Laboratory an authority in the field he's published two books over a hundred papers and four complete scientific reviews of that field over the years in May 1993 he was invited to testify before a congressional committee about the cold fusion effect in 1998 Wired Magazine honored him as one of the 25 people in the U.S who was making a significant contribution to new ideas he was awarded the preparata medal by the international Society of condensed matter nuclear science and honored as distinguished science by University of Missouri his large collection of literature about low energy nuclear reactions was used to create the website www.lenr.org where information about the phenomenon is available his recent work is focused on understanding lenr and making the effect reproducible Dr Storms welcome to the rational View well thank you very much so you worked as a radio chemist at Los Alamos National Lab for 34 years you published over 50 papers and a book on that topic and you're a well-regarded mainstream scientist at a high profile research lab what prompted you to get involved in cold fusion well I I was working um on materials that were of news in to produce propulsion nuclear propulsion in space and then also later with their energy in space using the ordinary fission technique and when Paul's inflation made their announcement Los Alamos was incredibly interested in the claim because if they were right if the source of energy was real then this would be the ideal source of energy for use in space and for using space travel and so Los Alamos became really excited I mean the entire laboratory got involved uh numerous people attempted to replicate what ponds and placement has done is meetings held weekly attended by hundreds of of scientists uh great enthusiasm was shown funds uh both pawns the inflation came to the Los Alamos and they talks describing what they were what I mean to do and so I actually got interested because I had access to equipment and knowledge that made it possible for me to replicate what they were doing I also knew of them as as scientists and highly respected them as uh has created individuals so I set up to measure tritium uh the group I was in uh studied tritium for the hot Fusion program and so we had available uh to us the world's experts on tritium measurement and pretty in Behavior and so this was the ideal situation um for me because we we knew tritium we knew we knew how to how to deal with it and the anticipation at the time was that tritium would be one of the nuclear products since 30 was one of the nuclear products the hot fusion um thank you and at that time we didn't really understand that's an entirely different totally unusual mechanism was operating uh in the uh these materials having no relationship whatsoever through hot Fusion but lucky um for us uh that mechanism Also may trade and so I was able to make some tritium um and so did a lot of other people at the same time that pretty much convinced me that this was real and a condensed people at the laboratory it was real a number of other people uh Tom clayder was one of the others that made tritium by a different technique I was using electrolysis the classic concentration technique uh Tom plater was using a gas discharge technique but she continued to use and it was continually successful for many many years uh so the evidence of tritium production uh was very well established at Los Alamos the only problem came later when the doe essentially officially uh concluded that one's in placement had made a mistake and so all work at Los Alamos on the cold future was shut down can you talk a little bit about the initial um uh results or lack of results or lack of ability to reproduce upons is inflation as results obviously the scientific Community kind of declared it as a dead field some people thought of it as pathological science and yet you say that there are results where you're getting tritium there there were sporadic results of anomalous anomalous stuff happening there what how certain were those results and were they overlooked by the community or you know what what happened there well this was a a fantastic study in a psychology and um the way in which the human brain operates uh discoveries of course have always suffered um from rejection early on so this this isn't new the magnitude of this rejection is is new and the duration of the rejection is due but the rejection came about to some extent from Two basic reasons one with a certain amount of Integrity in the other without any Integrity whatsoever the the ability to cause a any kind of nuclear reaction within a chemical system uh was impossible I mean everybody anybody that studied uh nuclear chemistry um understood that that what that claim was completely impossible it could not possibly happen the understanding of the relationship between chemistry and nuclear interaction of the interaction of the nucleus was fairly well established thanks to the hot Fusion program and uh so so we knew what was possible and this was not possible also if it were possible you would expect to see the nuclear products that people had identified coming from the hot Fusion program they were absent yeah I remember one of the biggest refutations was the lack of neutrons right the because if if the power had been created by hot Fusion the nuclear the neutron flux would have killed the researchers and I remember that refutation you know it was very held up as you know they obviously don't know what they're talking about it was you know some some ridicule was involved in that it was really easy to detect and so many physicists and many Laboratories have the ability to detect neutrons and so all of them essentially set up like the living cell with some Palladium in it and put their Neutron detector in front of it and um set away your beliefs and nothing happened and first of all they knew that neutrons had to come out no neutrons were coming out so therefore this was not correct this was not actually uh happening the way upon some Fleischmann uh claimed to happen simultaneous with that uh legitimate reason for being skeptical was um the the awareness by uh the people in charge that cold fusion were real the hot season program was toast there's no reason to put any more money into that and in fact is why we understanding billions on that right that was huge they spent a huge amount of money on that but what was worse oil would no longer be useful natural gas would no longer be useful because this would be the ideal energy source the cheapest possible energy source involving only water and so If This Were Real all the other sources of energy um were irrelevant and the people in charge are not stupid but they they realize that and in fact the president at the time was Bush the owner and of course he was very strongly involved with oil and um he could see the writing on the wall his his whole livelihood could be in Jeopardy If This Were Real so there was a certain incentive on the part of people who we're in the power structure and we're uh had a relationship to the normal energy sources so try to diminish the possibility of this uh being a competitor in the future and that was easily done because of the natural conflict between what people expected to see and what they actually saw now a few of us mostly by as a result of luck this was not easily produced the conditions within the material are not easily created you have to create very special and unusual conditions within the material ordinary material does not work and most people got their hands on ordinary material and they tried to make it work and it didn't work and we now know why it doesn't work and we know that just don't use ordinary material that just is not the way to do it but if you have material that has been treated in a particular way and has certain characteristics it will work every time we didn't know that then we do know that now now in the interval a lot of that knowledge was accumulated was denied uh access to many of the journals so many of the scientists never had an opportunity to learn anything about what was discovered so a lot of the rejection right now is based totally on ignorance so yeah you've published a sign of several scientific reviews of this field uh over the years uh and as you say most of the work was not being published in mainstream journals at the time they they were kind of shut out of Nature and Science and and had to publish in what so-called Fringe journals in a lot of cases and they held their own independent conference I believe uh soon after the announcement there was a there was an annual conference that they would hold to to discuss the research so the standards of peer review for their annual conference have been scoffed at by critics the lack of skepticism of course if you're under attack by the mainstream obviously you don't want to add fuel to the fire there's kind of a circle the wagons mentality that happens but it also results in perhaps a lack of skepticism on the part of the proponents that must have made your work difficult how did you account for the quality of research in your in your scientific reviews your description of uh a lower standard is partially correct I mean they're many of us who were in the field were not professional scientists or at least we're not um using the tools of professional scientists because the money wasn't there I mean for example the work in Los Alamos I did uh was done under the strict rules of good science and my work was reviewed not only at the laboratory by over a dozen people but it was rebooted reviewed by another dozen when it went to the journal and so the standards uh at Los Alamos were very high but once the doe said that there was no money then the people who could continue to work had to do it outside of the normal system many of these people I mean in my case I retired from Los Alamos for various reasons that's being one of them and set up my own private laboratory that I built in Santa Fe foreign I work with money from private individuals who saw the value and allow me to continue but I brought with me the skill and knowledge that came from having worked at a National Laboratory for 34 years many people who continue the work did not have that background and they didn't have not have the the the tools that came from uh modern science so there was a certain deterioration just on that account but nevertheless they did see excess energy they did see uh helium the Navy got involved the Navy was very uh was supportive initially because obviously if this worked they were floating in their fuel and so um this would be a very nice uh source of energy for the Navy uh and the Navy did some really good work Mel miles for example was one of the leaders that that demonstrated that the major source of energy was coming from the production of helium now when you're making energy by the hot Fusion program the helium decomposes forming giving off fragments of its nucleus and that's the radiation you see in this case the helium does not decompose and then that created a whole nother problem how's the energy getting out there are no there's no radiation there's nothing coming up to carry the energy so it's just he right now people have including myself have measured uh the radiation inside the cell and uh there is radiation inside the cell it just has has a characteristic and an energy that prevents it from getting outside now that's fantastic from a application point of view because you don't have to worry about being irradiated it's really a nuisance from an investigation point of view because is the radiation provides a huge amount of energy that information about what's happening to make the energy that riddle is gradually being solved but it's taken a long time for that to happen but nevertheless the the information was a mixed up bad stuff and so my reviews were an effort identify the good stuff and show how it had a reality to it the problem in this in science of course is that the the messenger is as important as the message and I as a messenger did not have as much pull as some of the Skeptics yeah in in terms of uh well what would you call it reputation in a scientific field and um so a lot of what I had to say was totally ignored so there's been you know 30 years plus of of attempts to to get this to work to go mainstream to commercialize it lots of people uh you know see dollar signs when when they see free energy from water at room temperature um nothing's panned out so far it's been 30 years this I think engenders some some skepticism from the community can you tell us how the field has progressed over the years and and where we're at I mean obviously it's been longer for hot Fusion so you know they haven't got anything either and it's been a lot longer for them so you know this isn't uh something to distinguish the two Fields but but what what what do we know is is true at this point uh of of the low energy nuclear reactions what what can what can you tell us from from your knowledge we know that Tom's inflation were absolutely right their Discovery was in fact uh valid and it demonstrated a new mechanism for causing a nuclear reaction in this case it only happened within a material um having certain characteristics hot Fusion see the problem is that in order for Fusion to happen the two nuclei have to get close enough together that their energy states can interact okay the nuclear have a positive charge so as I get closer together they repel one another and it takes a lot of energy to get them close enough for them to interact the hot Fusion program does this by applied kinetic energy to the nuclei and so they come together smack into each other by Brute Force and and that um High kinetic energy overcomes a cooldown barrier and that kinetic energy is created in a plasma and in order to do that you have to put a tremendous amount of energy into the system in order to heat them up to that for billions of degrees in order for this reaction to take place at a reasonable rate I mean hot Fusion is easy to cause at a low rate I mean it's you can study in the laboratory at a rate that you can detect easily that's not the problem the problem is getting the rate high enough that it makes useful power and they they have made enormous amounts of power but they've never made enough to overcome what it takes to make the apparatus work to make the plasma now Cold Fusion on the other hand has a different problem and it has to also overcome the coolant barrier but it doesn't by neutralizing the barrier as a result of electron charge and in order to accumulate these electrons in a state in a relationship to the nucleus that is non-chemical ordinary electrons have a relationship to the nucleus in The Chemical Context we understand that relationship very very well they have to acquire a different relationship now to the nucleus that is not understood and has not seen before in nature but apparently Nature has a way of causing the structure to occur under certain conditions and when it occurs the coulomb barrier is neutralized the two nuclei come together and they result in Fusion and that Fusion produces various nuclear products and those nuclear products now are slowly being identified but because this is so unusual and and happens within a material rather than a plasma it's very difficult to study and it's also very difficult to understand I mean citizens pretty much know how to apply mathematics to a plasma they know how a plasma Works they know how it interacts with with the nuclei um they've never had to deal with the situation that exists in the cold fusion environment where now electrons are interacting with a nucleus in a new and totally unexpected way within a material and so this is brand new territory has not been explored before it's very difficult to describe mathematically and so the normal physics technique really doesn't happen you have to apply chemistry first because chemistry determines whether or not you can create these special conditions has nothing to do with the nuclear process and in fact is what apparently happens is it uh chemistry creates these special conditions the hydrogen nuclei and the electrons accumulate in these sites they don't anticipate Fusion they just anticipate creating some kind of stable structure that nature has allowed them to form and having formed that they suddenly discovered oh my God we we confuse and and the thing blows apart as a result of the energy being produced the equivalent to the structure is ball lightning and also uh a structure that was uh uh identified by Ken Childers uh many many years ago so we have examples in nature of the kind of structure that is occurring at a very small scale in these materials but getting people to see that relationship has also been in a pill battled now I mean physics is is very familiar with you know solid state metals and you know you can have you know we know that hydrogen absorbs into metals and can occupy lattice positions and there's going to be some shielding of the internuclear charge from the electron C of the metal uh and you know this is an understood phenomenon but it it seems to be several orders of magnitude away from what you would need to create Fusion now there's a lot of Theory or hypotheses out there as to what actually has happened I've done a brief scan of the literature there's people talking about hydrenos which is a special new hydrogen atom State like new levels of hydrogen that are lower than the current they understood ground level there's things like hydrogen 4 that seem to require you know things that haven't been observed now obviously we don't know everything we have to have some humility about what we are but where do you stand on on all of these are do you agree with any of these hypotheses from from your studies or or do you even know or do or do you are you agnostic to these hypotheses at this point of course all right and enjoy better than the others but um people started trying to explain this by focusing on the crystal structure the Palladium butyride is a place structure and the hydrogen goes into it and occupies equivalent sites within the uh and because it was happening in that structure people initially said well obviously the diffusion reaction is also happening in that structure so a great deal of attention was that trying to figure out how a chemical State involving the atoms in a crystal structure could possibly get close enough together to interact in a nuclear way and a lot of theories were suggested as how that might happen and they all went down in claims I I believe that that approach is doomed to failure it it is not happening in the lattice itself it is not happening in the crystal structure it has no relationship to the crystal structure a different kind of structure has to be created in which a different kind of relationship between the nucleus and the electrons can form not the one that creates the crystal structure that relationship is well known that's ordinary chemistry that's been investigated for hundreds of years so we know how those nuclei and those electrons interact they do not interact in such a way as to produce a nuclear interaction so there has to be a structure outside of that environment where the actual nuclear reaction is happening now people have suggested a number of places where that might be in my case I believe it's in crack so very small gaps physical gaps that is these would be regions that would be they've got bigger enough you would identify them as cracks you could see them as gaps but they're in order to be nuclear active they have to be much smaller than uh the ability to actually see them there there are 10 maybe 20 nanometer scale and so they're essentially invisible and so that makes it very difficult to study them but nevertheless there's evidence that they are there and that they play a role Nelly then the issue is well what grows within that environment that has the ability then allow nuclear interaction that structure now becomes the focus of uh our efforts and I I believe that's that structure has to have certain characteristics in order to be consistent with the behaviors that we see and that is it has to be a collaborative structure of many atoms in other words it's a supernucleus if you wish it's a energy state that combines the energy states of many electrons and a smaller number of hydrogen nuclei all combined together in a stable arrangement that is it's stable with respect to us chemical energy it's an interaction energy but having acquired that relationship that now discovers that nuclear states can overlap can interact and then that leads quite naturally to a future reaction because whenever nature nature always wants to go to the lowest energy state and the helium is a much lower energy State than for deuterons so if two neurons come together they would prefer to make helium if they could they can't because the nuclei can't get close enough together they're making it close enough together in hot Fusion fine so we know that once they get close enough together they will in fact um re reduce their energy by giving it off as as heat well the same thing happens within this material but by a different mechanism I mean there's there is a lot of speculation as as you might imagine um so you're talking about chemical clusters of hydrogen or deuterium atoms and electrons forming in these cracks and having an overlap with with some nuclear structure and it's it's well known I would I would say that low energy resonant nuclear resonance states are not well understood there are there's a lot of uncertainty in whether there are such things available and it's very likely that there are there's some evidence I think of from this Google study actually they were looking at Palladium wires I think and finding some some interesting nuclear Dynamics happening so that I think comes to mind correctly do you have what what uh support do you have for this this model that you're putting together is it something that's been published or is it something that you just picture and your your contemplating personally well I I have how would I put it I have two stories of energy one is is the literature itself and I've read practically every paper and and uh analyzed actually every effort so I have available to me information that most people don't have in terms of what is known come from other sources I probably have the most biography bibliography in uh endnote so that I can search it uh very conveniently and so I have the world's knowledge accessible and so on I use that and the other is that I'm doing experimental work in my own Laboratory and so I can actually see what happens um with my own eyes as a result of doing various things that um I anticipate having some benefit by combining that information I come to a conclusion now that conclusion is not shared by many many other people because most people don't have a collection of knowledge and that collection of understanding to some extent because a lot of what I've done in the laboratory is not published or is not easily available so I come to a conclusion and I hope that conclusion is close to reality and I tell anybody that wish to wish to know what my conclusions are of perfectly happy to tell you but now explaining or justifying them becomes more complicated because now you have to understand what's known that takes some difficulty in explaining and then you have to understand what I've done and seen well that takes probably an hour to explain so justifying in a conversation such as this is practically impossible you can just have to say well okay this guy has a whole bunch of information that he's got a whole bunch of different ways and he's come to this conclusion and um he's an on a sinus trying to figure this out so maybe we'll give him the benefit of the doubt yeah I mean certainly uh you know I'm open to to new ideas and and looking forward to learning more as I explore this field a little bit uh I certainly don't have your depth of uh background in in the necessary chemistry or or even the physics here and you know as as you say there are things like uh ball lightning that are poorly explained by known science um another one that that comes to mind in this field is is uh the single bubble sonoluminescence um experiments people have have looked at you know uh you can make bubbles cavitate in solution uh using sound waves and you can measure x-rays coming out of them these things are are little tiny accelerators as the bubbles collapse they're creating huge pressures and temperatures at the core of the bubbles maybe that anyway I like to speculate that maybe that has something to do with it and probably this crack propagation mechanism may have similar uh physics associated with it so I you know I'm open to to poorly understood phenomena being at the root of this because we know that they exist it's not something that you know it's not uh picking under the air but well I mean it's not something about it that produces hot to use it that's not cold season hot Fusion can be also made by bombarding a material containing deterior with energetic deuterons that also makes up Fusion occur that's not cold season um you can also make hot Fusion occurred by what's called fractal Fusion uh it when cracks form in a material containing the deuterium there's enough voltage created across the track to accelerate the big rods so high enough energy so that they a few of them will fuse and because a future is very easy to detect thanks to the neutrons you can detect it until correct very very low rates that's that happens during cold years people see uh neutrons occasionally being given off during cold fusion when uh coherent neutrons should not be produced and these are being produced by what's called fractal Fusion you're confident that you're confident that the observations that are being made in in low energy nuclear reactions are not hot Fusion because you're not detecting the the neutron flux but you are detecting the heat so there's a Delta there that's unexplained by hot Fusion is that your the basis of that conclusion that's right the amount of heat that's coming off is far in excess of any possible chemical source so therefore it must have a nuclear source what news there aren't many nuclear resources available and at the same time um it's not making any radiation which a nuclear source is expected to make so that's what makes it so unique now you've mentioned that you measured the radiation in the cells what what have you measured well I've measured uh initially uh the emission of hydrogen when you create a dailyr effect I guess a discharge you can measure what's coming off as a result of that with a silicon dirty detector and I've measured uh the emissions and studied them with respect to how they respond when you put an absorber in front of them and the the emissions that I measured were ions coming off and ions have the characteristic that when when they pass through a material they lose some energy and then they exit on the other side of the material with less energy but they're still there and so all what you do is you know shift an energy the magnitude of that shift tells you the nature of that material whatever it is the ion is we anticipated the iron to be helium coming off because that's what you see in the gas after you've allowed this energy to be made for a while I did not see helium it was not helium I could tell that it was not helium by its response to the absorber it was an isotope of hydrogen now the question is which isotope hydrogen we know of three there's like hydrogen which is a nude proton there's deuterium with this is a Proton or Neutron and there's tritium which is a proton in two neutrons none of those are being made um and so therefore what were we seeing that would end up making helium in the long run because we do in fact see helium in the long run well the only possibility is hydrogen four and that then decidation 4 then decomposes that is turns into helium by a beta Mission just like tritium turns into helium-3 by Beta emission hydrogen IV turns into Hydro helium-4 by Beta emission that is the Assumption and the assertion that I've made based upon that information and then once you start down that road you come uh to a lot of other logical conclusions about how the other nuclei of hydrogen will interact because materium was the original nuclear isotope of hydrogen that worked but then they and they didn't expect hydrogen ordinary hydrogen to work but now they discovered that ordinary hydrogen works just as easily as Victoria does and so how's that possible and then how can you make uh helium 4 and tritium also with our neutrons I can explain all that and all that comes from a logical relationship to this original work and now recently uh Frank Gordon discovered that when Len R occurs electrons are emitted electrons having significant energy you would not see those easily even in the still itself and it turns out here's a very clever technique but a very standard technique which is cleverly used to show that there that these are these electrons were being emitted and that's where the rest of the energy is the energy of the hydrogen Floor coming out is only a small fraction of the total energy that's being generated each time a hydrogen 4 is produced so something else is carrying that energy he found that as something else was or electrons before that people saw it was photons as it's not photons I I've heard some some discussion about the hydrogen 4 hypothesis um it has been published a bit um there there's a couple questions that critics brought up about this idea one is why have why has no one else seen hydrogen for uh the other is that high energy electrons I think they were saying something like 27 Mega electron volts for the for the electron coming out of this reaction is what's being proposed which is very high energy and should I assume create gamma rays when it interacts with with material which which would be measurable uh how would you respond to those criticisms well the first criticism of hydrogen 4 was that when they made hydrogen floor um like normal techniques which is bombarding uh glitter eyes very high energy sometimes bombarding lithium in any case they get a very brief um nuclei um that is identified as hydrogen four but it's very quickly uh decomposes by giving off a neutron and so the question is that that reaction occurs in the alien R uh environment also and so therefore this cannot possibly be the the explanation my assertion is that the lnr compartment is so different from the way in which they made it in the past causing the neutron that it doesn't that the high energy experience doesn't apply that the hydrogen for can be made at low energy and Healing Arts environment and when it does so it acts like radio which is simply decomposes a vibrator initiative to the helium 4. I mean we have to have something that makes healing important another healing Force being made we have to have something that's not helium coming out so we're stuck with a problem observations the only way of reconciling them is hydrogen 4 coming out and then it decomposes very quickly by Beta emission we don't see the beta and we don't know what the Omega energy is people could calculate the beta energy uh all day and it would not necessarily have any relationship to reality at this point we just don't know enough about hydrogen 4 to be able to make such a calculation accurately so I'm I'm relying on the fact that we have a logical conflict and somehow or another we have to resolve that logical conflict the idea of hydrogen 4 allows that hydrogen that that conflict to be resolved provided to make these few assumptions but wait to see if any if these assumptions are right or not okay interesting so you have a hypothesis you have experiments that seem to be much more reproducible now you mentioned the quality of the material is key to getting reproducibility can you discuss that just a little bit to so that we understand why you know it originally just any Palladium didn't work and now you're confident that you can get reproducible results this is something you say you've been working on just just maybe expand a bit on that please well really early in the field people who did get had success did so uh using a bachelor Palladium and then when they would use another piece of that batch they discovered that that would make success also I mean just to give you an example of my personal experience um after the uh DOA shut down the laboratory uh officially working on Cold Fusion I continued to work and I persuaded um my the administrators in my division to give me some money to build a Colorado um to test you know in our um the laboratory at that time had the ability to defy the doe to some extent and so on it took advantage of that so I had a calorimeter now then the question is what do I run well Takahashi and Tech in Japan was having fantastic success reproducing the lnr reaction and in his case um he was measuring neutrons um why he was seeing neutrons is an entirely different issue but nevertheless he he was also seeing some heat and he agreed to send me a piece of the batch that he had had made from which he was getting his samples and he also sent thesis to other Laboratories I put that piece in my calorimeter and it made excess energy it was a first sample I ran and it made significant excess energy so that was exciting for me and and it also demonstrated that the characteristics of the material were maintained through the entire batch not just a individual sample so and then other people laboratory in Canada and other women in Italy also got excess energy from samples that you supplied well then we ran out so Takahashi went back to Tanaka Metals in Japan who supplied this and say here I want another piece and they made him another piece and he sent me a cup a piece of that batch it was dead no excess energy and he couldn't see any either so he went back to Tanaka metals and he said look hey I wanted the same stuff what what the heck what went on here and they said well yeah I mean this is a special thing I mean they make tons of this stuff this was just a special little treat for him and really did it a different way a little bit cheaper than you know the first sample and he said no I wanted exactly the same way so they made a third sample exactly the same way he sent me a piece of that and it made excess energy um a kubri also early in the field was working with material having no success whatsoever he got a spool of wire from Goodfellow which is a company that reprocesses Palladium and sells it in this case it was a wire and he was put it in his calorimeter and almost every piece made an excess energy he did some fantastic work got a lot of detail as a result of that batch once the batch was used up and he started going using an ordinary Palladium it didn't work so something was done to the Palladium that was maintained throughout the entire batch and that had to happen at the process of manufacture not anything was done subsequent to that and it had to survive the treatment that is turning into a plate or turning into a wire or turning into whatever physical form a person was was given it still worked why how could that possibly be explained well my explanation is that the original material has small particles of impurity probably various oxides that came with the Palladium and when and the final treatment of the Palladium after it separated from the other elements is for it to be millered so it forms a solid material then that then by mechanical means he turned into wire plate the but during the melting process any particles uh that are in there will float to the surface because they have a lower density than Palladium unless they're very tiny the smaller the particle the less opportunity for it to float to the surface so to the extent that these fine particles exist were maintained and they would be distributed in a random way throughout the material that has the potential to create the gaps and it does so by when the it reacts when the Palladium is reacted with deuterium when a lady reacts with the terrium it expands and a particle contained in the Palladium doesn't expand it's inert the Palladium around it expands leaving a gap between it and the uh and the surrounding Palladium deuterite if I claim that if that Gap has a critical size it can then host the necessary structure at least in the reaction of nuclear reaction now to test that I have added particles of various sizes to plania and found that in fact the ability to make it work is density to the size of the particle I added and it doesn't matter which particle I mean I can use silicon dioxide magnesium or um calcium oxide a boron nitride all of these are materials that have another plant and excessive really important equation so they are maintained as a solid particle within the milk and so I have evidence that shows that in fact that is the cause of batches of material being active and now I can make batches on purpose by adding particles of a suitable size that's very interesting so there seems to be uh you're claiming that there's reproducibility now and the effects of creating excess heat from the low energy nuclear reactions there's no damaging radiation that comes off of these things so we're back to the to the point of uh Panacea here in energy production uh when should we expect to be producing commercial amounts of energy from from this process and Nobel prizes to be awarded well that's going to be a while um we have two problems one is um the general academic profession still is unsympathetic and therefore the source of money to do a suitable research is not available and and the third is that we really don't understand how it works I mean yeah I can tell you how I can make a little bit of excess energy happen with much greater reproducibility and that's very useful for research purposes but it's absolutely useless as a it's not information that is known that can amplify the effects of levels that would make it make useful power I mean right now I'm working at levels of a few watts of energy from a small sample I mean even if you made the samples enormously larger uh you still would not have a practical um generator we have to understand the nature of this structure that is actually the actual site of the nuclear reaction and how to make that structure occur at high concentration right now it's occurring at a very low concentration and a very variable concentration depending upon you know what I do and what with each sample I mean I can make it happen but each sample is different each sample will produce a different amount of energy so uh I cannot predictably make a sample that has the ability to make enough energy make it attractive as a as a source now some people have materials and they have treatments um that are producing enough power that they are on the borderline of being practical but I'm totally understand the mechanism and how it works not only had it been made practical but it will not be made legal because nobody's going to give permission for a nuclear process to be operated throughout Society that they don't understand because that understanding could very easily lead to a nuclear explosion or some other unanticipated consequence so The Regulators the cautious people who are trying to protect Society will simply not allow this to be used on a large scale unless it can be proven to be totally harmless yeah I certainly have experience with the regulations being overzealous in the matter of nuclear energy well yeah I mean we paid a price for that ignorance uh with efficient energy um we discovered by uh terrible experience the consequence of obvious the states and or natural consequences uh when that particular method is used this particular source of energy doesn't have that characteristic it can't make a bomb out of it on the one hand that's very good on the other hand it eliminates a lot of interest in the uh and the mechanism so we we have a lot of work to do now for that work to be done a significant amount of money has to be applied I mean after all fishing energy required to the Manhattan Project to get it off uh into a form of usefulness first is the bomb and then later as wow I think I think the reproducibility uh would go a long ways towards interesting mainstream signs I mean that was what uh drove them away at first was the fact that it seemed magical and not reproducible so if we can get something that's at least reproducible we have enough of a handle on it that you can do uh to good research I think and and move forward so I think that you know that it's hopeful that major journals are starting to publish um some of these results the the nature perspectives article by Google researchers recently uh shows that there is some appetite for for reinvestigating the claims although um I guess they weren't successful is that correct in in reproducing the cold fusion effect um they were they were not successful in reproducing it I mean I I worked with Google and at the time so I'm knowledgeable about what went on they were they were not they were interested in trying a variety of different materials that either were suggested that might work or had worked in the past they were not interested in investigating this from a basic science point of view they were hoping that these materials that they chose and that some they supplied to me to look at would work and just a random collection of materials obviously doesn't work I mean that's not the way you go about doing it and uh so it was not unexpected that their efforts failed but nevertheless it got them interested it uh Carl page for example has gotten very interested in this and was very um instrumental in organizing itcf24 in California where he brought uh the attention to a lot of conventional supporters uh outside of profusion and and is working to encourage um financial support and uh further work in the field and that's what it takes you you somehow or another have to encourage people who have the money and who have the um the influence the political power uh to work on something at the scale that's required to understand something so complex is full of fusion and he's working uh to have that happen and that's that's fantastic and that will certainly uh amplify and accelerate uh the the ability to make this work but we still have a lot of work to do well that's uh I think a good place to end our interview on I appreciate you taking your time to come in and chat with us and explain uh your your history and research in this field and and help us to understand what's really going on because it's uh it doesn't have a lot of um it doesn't have a lot of light being shown on it from from mainstream science uh so I think it's good that we're driving these things to ground and figuring out what really is happening here so I appreciate you coming on thank you so much Dr Storms [Music] if you'd like to follow up with more in-depth discussions please come find us on Facebook at the rational View and join our discussion group if you like what you're hearing please consider visiting my patreon page at patreon.podbean.com the rational View thanks for listening [Music]