Here we are, at the beginning of the year of 2012, and the world is in a funk. Even if you don’t support the idea that a Mayan prophecy foretells doom at the end of this year, there is still plenty for people to be concerned about; high unemployment, massive debt, and a looming economic crisis. And, even for those who do have a job, chances are they are young people with a recently minted college degree, saddled with enormous personal debt, and working for minimum wage at service jobs.
So, with all of this gloom and doom, it might be a bit of a surprise to learn that everything is about to get better; much, much, much, better. The year 2012 looks like it may be the beginning of a new era of worldwide prosperity that will literally save the planet from the destructive actions of our past behavior and transform the global economy into one of plenty for all…..or, maybe not. Time will tell but, to date, the signs are promising.
You might be wondering how this is going to happen. The answer is LENR; an invention which is probably the most important scientific discovery since Right Worshipful Brother Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a rainstorm and brought electricity down from the heavens.
Your next question is most likely going to be, what is LENR? LENR stands for ‘low energy nuclear reaction’ and is more famously known as ‘cold fusion’. The scientists and researchers behind LERN are trying very hard to educate the world that LENR is a completely different beast than the now completely discredited concept of ‘cold fusion’.
In 1989 Martin Fleischmann, then one of the world’s leading electrochemists, and Stanly Pons announced an experiment which produced excess heat through some form of nuclear, rather than chemical process. This initial announcement was met with an enormous amount of press and, almost immediately, an enormous amount of skepticism from the scientific community. The skepticism was warranted, as room temperature fusion is scientifically impossible. Nuclear fusion requires enormous amounts of energy for a reaction to occur and there is no way that a table-top experiment at room temperature can work. When other scientists tried to reproduce the experiment of Fleischmann and Pons, the results were mixed. Fleischmann and Pons were then eviscerated in the scientific press and were accused of everything from sloppy research to outright fraud.
For the general public, this is pretty much where the story ended. Very soon no peer reviewed scientific journal would accept any paper on the topic for publication. The patent office would summarily reject any patent application relating to ‘cold fusion’ since it was considered to be discredited ‘junk science’. This largely removed the entire field of research from the public eye, from the scientific community as a whole and, of course, there was certainly no funding available to further this research.
Over the course of the next twenty years a number of scientists and researchers continued work attempting to replicate and refine the original experiment. Over time they would hold their own conferences and share their results in their own publications. However, all of this work was done out of the scientific mainstream, on a shoe-string budget, and was generally considered death to someone’s career to pursue this already debunked field of study.
Contrary to popular belief, many people were able to replicate the experimental results of Fleischmann and Pons. However, for every successful replication there was another failure. And, every time someone would report positive results, the critical response was to assume it was a product of sloppy research and incorrect measurement. Against this headwind the evolution of what we now know today as LENR was a very long and arduous process.
The last few years’ things have been progressing more rapidly. On April 19, 2009 the popular CBS News Program ‘60 Minutes’ did a segment entitled ‘More than Junk Science’ where they reported on the fact that even though ‘cold fusion’ had been written off by most of the scientific community, nevertheless a group of scientists were producing meaningful results.
The most significant development of all, however, was the publication of a paper written by scientists Widom and Larsen published on May 2, 2005 in the European Physical Journal entitled ‘Ultra low momentum neutron catalyzed nuclear reactions on metallic hydride surface’. This was the start of a series of papers and presentations that would establish a theoretical model to explain what was happening inside of these experiments. Most importantly, this explanation used only well established and accepted scientific principles and did not propose that the energy produced was as a result of ‘cold fusion’.
While the Widom / Larsen model is not universally accepted, it has proven to be a very powerful tool for scientists and researchers to refine their experiments and overcome difficulties that have plagued them in the past. One of the biggest problems with this field of research has been the difficulty to reproduce the experimental results reliably. One group of researchers might run an experiment that produced anomalous heat while another group, believing they were following the identical steps, would get a negative outcome. However, with the theoretical model proposed by Widom / Larsen it became possible to understand why this was happening, and how to refine the experiments to produce better and more reliable results.
And this is exactly what has been happening over the past several years. More and more researchers have been designing experiments which reproduce this effect reliably every single time, and have been able to optimize their experiments based on the theoretical principles described in the work of Widom and Larsen.
Over the past year, there have been two groups claiming they have not only achieved reliable results but that they have been so successful they claim to be able to commercialize the technology. These claims remain to date highly controversial for reasons which will be discussed later in this article.
Today the single most significant development towards getting this technology accepted as a legitimate field of research is the recent announcement made by NASA Langley on January 12, 2012 when they released a video to the general public endorsing LENR and discussing just how transformative it will be to our world.
It turns out that it is extremely difficult to explain LERN to the layperson (just try wrapping your head around this 'simple' explanation made available for the general public. Slides 11 and 12 show the exact energy equations which demonstrate that what is happening with LENR is not fusion.) The Widom / Larsen theory of LENR contains four steps that must occur to account for the phenomenon. Of the four steps, only the first step is especially controversial. Each of the remaining three steps are well understood and accepted within the scientific community. The first step contains an assumption that the experiment creates an extremely strong electromagnetic field on the surface of the material. There is some debate about this, but the rest of the sequence of events which follow the first are well understood and accepted processes that produce energy through interactions involving the ‘weak nuclear force’. Conventional nuclear fusion involves the strong nuclear force and overcoming something called the ‘Coulomb barrier' which requires tremendous energies not possible in a table-top experiment.
It is not the intent of this article to describe the science behind all of this. There remains a challenge to the scientific community and the press to come up with a way to explain this technology in a fashion that the general public can at least understand conceptually. Unfortunately, today it nearly requires a PhD. in particle physics to even join the debate and, as pointed out before, not everyone is in complete agreement as to what exactly is going on.
However, the key point here is that the development of a theoretical model, which violates no known existing laws of physics and appears to account for a great deal of the observed experimental data, is what is turning LERN into a reality very quickly. It now appears that the year 2012 will be the time frame when LENR is accepted by the mainstream scientific community, leading to rapid development and possibly even commercial applications.
The focus of this article is to discuss what this technological development will mean to the world population, our planet, and our future.
The ‘fuel’ for LENR can be something as inexpensive as nickel. This isn’t like a nickel in your pocket, however, this is nickel powder which has been specially prepared to work with the experiment. Combined with heat and hydrogen the LENR reaction produces excessive amounts of heat. It produces little radiation, which can easily be contained within the device using lead shielding. The device itself can be quite small. In essence, it is essentially ‘free’ energy. Or, at least extremely low cost. It is compact, distributable, and insanely energy dense.
In the past year two companies claim they have been able to commercialize this technology. Both claims are highly controversial as they have not been independently confirmed through third party validation. Add to this the fact that one of the key figures in this story is a man named Andrea Rossi who is, to put it mildly, a very colorful character (think P.T. Barnum).
People who wish to commercialize LENR have a very difficult challenge. No patent can be issued for LENR since the patent office has a policy to reject all claims of ‘free energy’ and ‘cold fusion’ in particular. This policy is based on the quite thorough debunking that ‘cold fusion’ received over twenty years ago and that policy remains in place today. Since a company cannot get patent protection instead their only recourse is to protect their intellectual property by trying to keep it secret from all competitors. This secretive behavior in turn arouses suspicion of fraud and thus we have a vicious circle where those who might be able to bring this technology to market look like scam artists on the face of it. Or, maybe they are scam artists, there is no way to tell at this time as they have not delivered any commercial products to the general public or made them available for independent testing. Time will tell and within the next 12 months there will most likely be a definitive answer on these two operations, Leonardo Corporation and Defkalion.
While skepticism is warranted about the claims made by these two companies, fortunately we don’t have to rely on them to get an answer to this important question. What is much more promising are the statements made by NASA Langley and the work of other LENR researchers such as Dr. George Miley at the University of Illinois.
So, if LENR is real what does it mean to the world? What we are talking about here is the most disruptive technological development since the invention of the car. Before the car was invented there were half a million horses in the city of New York. Think about that? A half a million horses being fed, stabled, and walking the streets. And, in a very short period of time, they were all gone. As were the jobs created to service this form of transportation. However, as the jobs which used to exist disappeared, an enormous amount of economic activity arose to manufacture cars, build roads, bridges, and the entire transportation infrastructure that supports our automotive way of life.
In comparison, LENR is going to make that look like a minor change. What LENR is going to do to the world is so overwhelming and so amazing that it takes the breath away just thinking about it.
Will coal workers and oil workers, eventually, all be out of a job once coal and oil are no longer needed to meet our primary energy needs? Of course, but this will not happen overnight. It will take decades for it to be completed and, during those decades, the amount of economic activity generated by transforming the energy infrastructure of the planet is going to bring the world out of its global recession and malaise to reach new heights of incredible economic success.
Imagine converting the energy infrastructure of the entire planet? LENR, due to its high energy density, can be installed locally wherever energy is needed on demand. You won’t need to get electricity from the grid; you will be able to generate it in your own home on demand, as needed. Eventually this energy transformation will reach transportation. You might ‘fuel’ your car with some nickel and a little bit of water for the hydrogen necessary to run the power plant and then run it without ever stopping at a gas station for the lifetime of the car!
A substantial percentage of the cost of most goods on the planet is the cost of the energy required to produce and transport them. What if, all of the sudden, the cost of energy is now essentially free? Suddenly, the cost of everything drops; leading to a dramatic rise in the standard of living for everyone on the planet.
You might think that all of these changes are going to put people out of their jobs. The short answer to this question is no, it will have the absolute opposite effect. Yes, over a long period of time, many jobs in some industries will disappear, but that will be offset by the staggering economic activity created by the technological transformation that will occur as LENR takes hold.
Simply manufacturing and installing a new energy infrastructure is going to take decades (not years) and will generate trillions of dollars of economic activity. Entire new technologies will arise based on what can be done with a highly distributable energy dense power source. NASA talks about how this could affect transportation in dramatic ways, from your car all of the way to spacecraft flying through the solar system and beyond.
Some might wonder if the existing companies which make their profits from the current global energy infrastructure might try to stop this transformation. While this is a concern many will have, it’s probably not a legitimate one. The same energy companies which make their profits off of the current energy infrastructure will simply invest in LENR and make their money there as well. While the actual energy cost is cheap, you still need to manufacture, distribute, and maintain these devices. There are trillions of dollars of opportunity right there immediately. Once the energy infrastructure has been transformed there are still trillions of dollars in additional economic activity pursuing new technologies, some as yet unimagined, which will be made possible due to this incredible technology.
Any country which tried to slow the adoption of LENR will fail because we now live in a global economy. Let’s say that the United States decides to regulate LENR to such an extent that adoption is slow to occur. You can be sure that countries like India and China will have no such reservations. And, if India and China have such an incredible economic advantage then the United States would have to follow suit quicky simply to compete with the rest of the world.
Its time the world got some good news. A clean, safe, limitless source of inexpensive and highly distributable energy is going to transform the planet and our own individual futures in such a profound way that is almost difficult to comprehend. It turns out that the year 2012 may not be a harbinger of a terrible end but, instead, the beginning of an incredible future that will raise us out of our economic doldrums, stop the environmental devastation of our planet, and raise the standard of living for everyone in the future.
Let’s just hope LENR is real!
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