Steven Krivit on Cold-Fusion & LENR

Transcript

i'm tim ventura from americanantigravity.com and i'm talking today about cold fusion with stephen krivit the senior editor of the new energy times and author of a new book on the subject entitled the rebirth of cold fusion which is going on sale november 8th well stephen i guess i should start out by thanking you for uh speaking with us today and then also asking a little bit about your background what can you tell us about um you know kind of goals and interests and what got you into cold fusion research in the first place thank you tim it's a pleasure to speak with you today well i'm actually a computer geek as far as my background i became curious about cold fusion initially in 1989 didn't hear anything about it for 10 years then my curiosity got reawakened in 1999 and i started searching around the web for information about it i found two things one the information that i was able to get through my web search searches were was either too obscure or too technical and i really wasn't able to find anything useful about it the second thing i found was that there was a huge polarity in the different points of view on the subject as there still is today i found references to cold fusion that said that it was going to be the answer to mankind's energy problems i found references that indicated that it was a hoax and it was uh it was a pseudoscience so i said this is really strange so i pursued a course of an investigation on my own uh and i traveled around visited a few laboratories interviewed researchers firsthand and the new energy times website was the evolution of what i found it was my way of sharing with the public what i found and uh at each step along the way i put whatever i found on the website and that's how my interest developed in the subject well cold fusion is certainly an innovative new field and it's had more than its share of criticism you know a lot of it unfairly it kind of started getting criticism right from day one and uh so i guess one of the things i should ask is what's the bottom line in cold fusion is it for real or is it just something that kind of defies explanation i guess well there's several different answers to that and and there's actually several different questions involved in that apparently simple question you asked um in terms of the question is called fusion real it's going to depend to a certain extent on one's point of view but on another perspective it if you ask the question is it genuine science is it backed by empirical demonstrations that have been reproduced through a variety of methods methods by scientists who are skilled in their particular area of expertise in many different laboratories around the world absolutely it it it stacks up against the common expectations of what a true science is um if you it also if you ask the question well have the results been ever published in peer-reviewed journals yes they they have as well although very infrequently uh lately but they have in quite a few peer-reviewed journals if you ask the question is cold fusion real in terms of solving the world's energy problems we don't know that yet and that's the big question certainly people who are enthusiastic about it hope so but that cannot be known yet so we might have to wait a little while for a device like say out of the movie the saint where he has the cold fusion generator that blows up the light bulb and generates so much energy it lights up moscow i that was a particular favorite example from the movies for me but oh goodness yes that's uh that's a very popular movie i i have to admit seeing that on more than one occasion um there's actually a somewhat of a common misconception that that movie has conveyed on the subject because people are expecting to see something that dramatic to convince them at least that's what happened in the movie the crowd goes oh wow look at the smoke look at the light look at the flames but it's real but you can't determine that cold fusion is real because from from a a a visual observation cold fusion has been determined to be real by scientists who know what they're doing through very careful instrumentation and very skilled use of that instrumentation and when cold fusion becomes if if it becomes commercially viable we may never see something that dramatic of course there are plasma displays that occur in various types of experiments that do show dramatic light and smoke and heat but [Music] those don't mean anything those those could be effects of a profound energy source or they could just be effects of that particular experiment that just happens to be converting one form of energy into into light or it it it doesn't actually mean anything sure sure well there are a couple of uh things that are being generated in the lab and one of those apparently at least from my reading has been lots of excess heat in lots of experiments and the other which is a little bit more of a smoking gun from what i've read are nucleotides and these are almost fusion byproducts uh suspended in solute in the water that uh seem to indicate that there are fusion reactions happening you know they weren't there when they start the experiment but they are at the end exactly and again there's a very significant uh point of view on under the evidence to support the nuclear reaction the claimed nuclear reaction now if you are if you are a chemist and you are familiar with chemistry and you know how much heat is supposed to come out of an electrolytic cell and you see what goes on in a cold fusion cell you say something's wrong here you're getting a thousand a million times more heat out of an electrolytic cell than you should be getting and so the chemists see this very clearly uh when they look at the excess heat that um it's not chemistry as we know it or as they know it and they initially uh thought that well it could be nuclear could be something else but subsequently when they found that helium-4 seems to be the dominant byproduct through these reactions and that the amount of helium-4 that is measured from these reactions seems to correlate very closely with the amount of heat that comes off it matched the uh the the understanding of what happens when you wait when you fuse two deuterons to deuterium atoms together the mathematical equivalent of that uh indicates that you get a certain amount of excess energy and and heat and that's what they found now if you're a physicist well i'm generalizing here but most physicists don't have experience in measuring heat it's not something that's part of nuclear physics but they have experience in measuring tritium neutrons and another nuclear byproducts tritium was the first nuclear product that was seen initially and in fact it was actually seen several weeks within several weeks of the initial announcement of the cold fusion discovery on march 23rd 1989 of course there were many people who failed to see tritium and there were many debates about whether it was real but there's plenty of evidence that shows it showed up in oh i it must be dozens of reports from various laboratories all around the world so tritium has been one of the uh and it's not a i should say it's not a major product of cold fusion it only shows up rarely in small amounts however you can't get tritium from chemistry you can't get tritium in large concentrations higher much higher than background levels you just can't get that in any other way than a nuclear reaction certainly now one of the things that i saw a few weeks ago in the store was an issue of popular mechanics i believe and it had a story on the cover i read a little bit of it and the claim they were making was that cold fusion could be used to produce a nuclear device i guess a weapon of mass destruction and i kind of had a double take on this i guess from one perspective you know it's needless sensationalism i've never seen the possibility of that at least in the short term but on the other side you know it does tend to reinforce the idea that this is a real technology that can generate useful amounts of power after all you know a giant explosion releases a giant amount of energy and i'd like to ask what your take on this might be in the media is this a possibility is this something that a terrorist organization could use and you know if so um you mentioned a lot of nuclear by-products you know how difficult would that be to build well this is a very sensationalistic cover story i saw it actually i i was interviewed partially uh for the story before it came out by jim wilson and interestingly before jim wilson started working on this story before gene mallett was murdered and it was for some reason he uh shifted gears significantly he was originally planning on exposing what happened at mit which was basically a fraud in their cold fusion experiments and once once gene was murdered i guess the story shifted to more of the this conspiracy type and uh weapons concern i i i know that tritium of course is it's unequivocal that that it it does show up in cold fusion experiments now whether tritium can and i've also spoken with several scientists so one of them at los alamos national laboratory a gentleman who happens to know quite a bit about tritium quite a bit about nuclear weapons you know that's the birthplace of a lot of nuclear research he hasn't been able to get produce tritium reliably from cold fusion experiments for several years the best they got was i think a 20 reproducibility but they still couldn't figure out what made it what made it work and it really doesn't show at the moment from what i can tell from what's been disclosed to me that it's a reliable way of of making tritium but this is very early in the this field of science and uh do i think it could inevitably uh be scaled up to uh produce larger amounts of tritium sure yeah that that's that's possible and that would uh you know that would fuel or refuel conventional nuclear weapons what the popular mechanics article was also alluding to which as far as almost everybody in the scientific community says about the article it was really speculative and quite baseless and and quite a few people really don't understand what gene malov was being quoted there even his even his close colleague mitch schwartz doesn't understand the quote that uh was attributed to gene and and and questioned the uh the accuracy of it but uh um the the speculation that you'll get enriched uh plutonium enriched uranium from cold fusion it seems really far-fetched now but i'm not saying that that might never be possible well it sounds like the amount of development that would have to go into it would outweigh kind of the benefits and uh you know i don't know i think if there's any truth to it it's not going to be known for many many decades it it it's much closer to science fiction than any other fact of cold fusions that i know of well speaking of eugene malove one of the things that i'd like to touch on because we had a recent tragedy earlier this year um you know eugene malove was uh unfortunately taken before his time and that seems to have affected the cold fusion community as he was a catalyst for a lot of breakthroughs and just sharing new information that different researchers have been doing with each other um how do you think that'll affect the community how has that affected you losing such an eminent physicist it was it was rough gene malov was not only my friend but my mentor in this he uh for many people he was the spearhead to bring this information out to the world uh over the uh the last 15 years um without it it's quite clear that without gene's efforts through his book i think it was 1991 uh through his magazine which started after that i would say that many of the cold fusion supporters and researchers probably would have either given up or not have had the opportunity to share their information the magazine that he produced was was unique there's nothing there was nothing else like it and i suspect i i don't know how it's going to continue it's they're not having an easy time i know trying to figure out where to go next but i don't see how uh that magazine is going to be replaced in any easy manner at all do you think that uh his loss will have larger repercussions also on the cold fusion research do you think it slows down maybe the development release of some of the next generation power supplies they've been working towards well that's an interesting question i actually started becoming very highly involved in communicating the information about cold fusion to the public within the last year i've been researching it for four years but i've been very active in it within the last year gene actually went through a very interesting phase in the last few years he actually started phasing away from his interest in cold fusion i don't know if you know that or not but his interests started getting into a lot more esoteric areas and yeah well actually at the iccf 10 he he had certain viewpoints about cold fusion but it was actually starting to um be somewhat uh different than a lot of the other uh the cold fusion researchers now gene didn't do cold fusion research much himself he was more of a an editor writer jean's going to be missed most for his there's so many things about gene that are are going to be irreplaceable he was an incredibly intelligent person incredibly well spoken he knew his science cold he had a very uh very uh thorough background in science journalism it's not going to be easy for the cold fusion community to have anyone replace what gene did in terms of being a an aggressive spokesperson who is able and willing to confront the scientific orthodoxy on cold fusion or the other areas that gene was was interested in but there are several people myself and a few other journalists around the world who have taken up an interest in uh continuing to communicate these subjects to the world and it's probably going to take a half a dozen people or so to fill in the gap that is going to be missing now from from gene's absence that's that's definitely true um now your your website is new energy times and that's just one long word right www.newenergytimes.com that's it yeah and hopefully um you know i know the infinite energy in their url is infinite energy.com i know that they're still in business and christy is making a herculean effort to pick up some of the slack um from you know just the disturbance that that's happened you know one of the things that i talked to gene about i talked to him several times over a two year period regarding lifters new energy technology and occasionally about cold fusion and one of the things that we both shared i guess a view of was that eventually sooner or later cold fusion could be used to power some of the devices that i've experimented with as well as the devices that others are working with a lot of people hold the connection that anti-gravity field effect propulsion devices may tap into the zpe and power themselves and i've never been quite as confident i'd always like to have that backup strategy of you know a high energy output source that you could hook up to the device and power it that's especially pertinent in space where you can't use the turbine to generate electricity or anything along those lines so i that was something that we had shared in common and another i guess in another sense he had been pushing me towards an atherometry website that was run by correa and correa and they were also doing work along similar lines and i believe also hoping to use someday cold fusion to power some of that well i i have a document here that you've sent me and it has just kind of some statistics that i'd like to read off um basically what you're saying is that there are 400 researchers around involved with a worldwide effort researching cold fusion and on average the excess heat effect is 83 that's what they're reproducing they're also on average producing an excess power of 1 watt with peaks up to 80 watts also it appears that the reproducibility goes up to 100 percent within known batches of palladium so it sounds like they're making real progress here is there anything you uh have any thoughts on with regard to that oh i i think they are making incredible progress uh five years ago the uh the survey question i asked the scientists last year at the conference or were faced were included what was your reproducibility five years ago what was it within the last year and on average they said it was around uh let's say off the top of my head i think it was about 40 percent five years ago and the the palladium is a very interesting situation because once they have several of them one uh mill miles who who worked with the the navy uh ed storms who's retired from los alamos antonello de nino works for basically the equivalent of the doe over in italy maybe there's a few others one they've told me that once they found palladium that shows the excess heat effect that exhibits the the cold fusion effect if they use palladium from that same batch 100 of the time they'll get it to they'll get to turn on so that really drives home the point that this is it's not cold fusion is not that unknown to the the scientists at this point it's it's the materials issue which is uh one of the biggest roadblocks right now it's what it's the question of what is going on with this material and it's likely to have something related to the atomic structure of each individual piece of palladium something down at a nanometer level that that makes one palladium a piece of palladium different than another and impurities are likely to have a large uh effect to making it work or not well i wonder if cold fusion in a way at least in a very general sense is tied to some of the other new science technologies out there one of them was the work of dr paul brown and he was working with stimulated decay fission batteries and he'd found that by putting a high voltage static charge on a nuclear material like americium that would be a poor example because it also emits neutrons or some of the other electron emitters he was actually able to generate and sustain a fair amount of current from that another example is the plasma volt that michael mcdonough has been experimenting with and some of the more radical approaches to fusion generation but i think one of the common threads here might be that this technology that the cold fusion technology that's being researched all over the world at the moment in fact it looks like it's being done everywhere except the united states for the most part has the potential to rewrite the physics of nuclear interactions well it is being performed in the united states but mostly in private laboratories sra international is one of the most prominent laboratories that work has been performed and i don't know if they have funding now but they have had funding in the past from some quiet funding from darpa they've had years ago some significant funding from the electric power research institute and i want to touch on a point that you you alluded to that cold fusion may have some relationship to some of the other uh areas of science and research that are being developed and i would have to say that that's probably correct that they're probably all related somehow although i have no expertise in those other areas of dr paul brown's work and i really can't speak for them but i would just venture a guess that inevitably we may learn that they are related and clearly cold fusion represents uh new understandings of physics i can speak more about that if you'd like well you know i i can't tell you exactly what the relationship is either but one of the things that i have noticed just from reading some of brown's notes and from some of the other experiments out there you know even with the lifters people have claimed that by putting a nuclear emitter substance again americium from a smoke detector battery the claim has been that this makes the lifter work a little bit better because it breaks down and releases ions now i don't know how true any of this is but it seems like the common element there might be this low energy nuclear reaction um you know something that isn't explosive in nature but just delivers energy really what we're looking for in the first place from these things and oh i'm sorry go ahead well i'm just wondering if maybe there's a loophole in physics there and these all fall in that category you know physics tends to claim that you have to have lots of energy in a very concentrated form to be able to make these reactions occur and if these devices work you know as it looks like they may we may have found the perfect loophole for new energy well you said a lot there you've introduced a new term here and let's just make sure people caught it you said low energy nuclear reactions and that is a term that is being used a lot to refer to cold fusion research perhaps as well as other research they use the term low energy nuclear reactions because there are reactions that are occurring with the palladium and deuterium or sometimes palladium and hydrogen or sometimes nickel titanium hydrogen combinations that that are not fusion at all have nothing to do with fusion but they show nuclear reactions they show heat on a large scale they show transmutations of heavy elements and this does indeed open up a whole new world and there's something you've been mentioning that i wanted to respond to about a new a new world in physics opening up and i think cold fusion is starting to show that as a window to what we may see in the future i can give you an example that one of the reasons why cold fusion is so hard to accept and so hard to believe by some people is that nuclear fusion has been understood for 70 years now this theories came out in the 30s and 40s and the work in this in nuclear fusion in hot fusion has basically surrounded this set of theories that evolved 70 years ago and some of the leading physicists theoretical physicists who have been looking into cold fusion have wondered well if cold fusion is possible how can it be possible when one takes into account what is known and understood with conventional fusions theory and what happened is they went back to the original series back in the 30s and 40s and they examined them and they they looked into how they were first arrived and they found that they were derived um based on current experience at the time of nuclear fusion which did not take into account the possible reactions of a nuclear effect within the lattice within the the surface of a metal as occurs in cold fusion and they found that if you take it that factor into account and you also add a few small subtle changes to the understanding of the theory that new theories now do allow for an understanding of how cold fusion is theoretically possible as well as shed light on existing hot fusion theory so how's that well i i think that that in combination with some of the work of uh gene and yourself and others who are helping to publicize this research is finally starting to swing the public feel you know the popular mechanics article was kind of a dystopic view of it or you know but um the doe has recently picked up um you know a renewed interest in this and one of the real parts of the tragedy with uh gene was that he passed shortly after the doe officially decided to reinvestigate this technology um do you have any thoughts on that is it kind of a bright day for cold fusion still to come or well back on on gene's perspective it's it's quite sad however he did he was around long enough to know that they had picked it up again and were starting to take it seriously and if you look at some of his last writings on the subject you can see uh just an amazing sense of hope and and satisfaction in some of his expressions it's really sweet to see yeah yeah it was it was a small consolation too he did start to see it the we're at a very interesting time in history in fact we could be days away from a historic announcement or who knows there could be nothing that comes out but the department of energy has told the cold fusion community well they've told them several things now this this review that has been going on for the last six months the first time since 1989 that the department of energy has officially taken another look at cold fusion and this itself is historical the results of this review were initially promised to come out sometime in september and they were delayed apparently due to some of the reviewers falling behind in their schedule to submit their their written summaries the latest word we have from the department of energy that they are hopeful i don't know if they use the word committed or hopeful but i'll just say that they're hopeful to have the results out by the end of this month which is 11 days from now so if they do hold to their expectations we are either going to see a profound announcement from the department of energy on call fusion perhaps what seems logical to me is that they're going to say yes there is real science behind this research and we should probably look further into it it's it's inconceivable to me that they could come out and say anything besides that they looked at 137 papers or data from 137 papers that showed evidence of supported cold fusion how 20 or so reviewers who are supposedly impartial from government laboratories and universities various universities through the us can conclude anything otherwise it's inconceivable to me however this is politics so something could happen not on the other hand they could come out with no announcement at all we may never hear of anything so we those in the cold fusion community are rather on uh on pins and needles waiting to hear whether there's going to be a profound announcement or not as we speak well and that's a good note to close on for today because we're almost out of time but when the november announcement comes out even if it is pushed back a little while that's something that you'll have up on the new energy times website and that's a new energytimes.com and uh stephen thanks again for your time is there anything you like to say in close oh it's a pleasure speaking with you tim and look forward to speaking with you further as things develop absolutely the pleasure has been all mine it's great to finally get an update on cold fusion and see that you know things are still moving forward and even if there are minor setbacks along the way this technology looks more and more promising every day