Larsen Uncovers Favorable Defense Department Evaluation of Widom-Larsen LENR Theory

June 6, 2017 – By Steven B. Krivit –

Theorist Lewis Larsen, co-developer of the Widom-Larsen theory of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENRs), recently discovered a favorable Department of Defense evaluation of his and Allan Widom’s LENR theory.

Larsen told New Energy Times that he found the document, an official U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency report, on the Homeland Security Digital Library Web site while carrying out a random Internet search in May.

The report was produced in March 2010, when two physicists, Edward Toton and George Ullrich, under contract with the Advanced Systems and Concepts Office, a think tank that is part of the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency, favorably analyzed Larsen and Widom’s theory.

Toton is a consultant with a long history in defense-related research, and Ullrich was, at the time, a senior vice president for Advanced Technology and Programs with Science Applications International Corp.

Toton and Ullrich summarized their evaluation with a question: “Could the Widom-Larsen theory be the breakthrough needed to position LENR as a major source of carbon-free, environmentally clean source of source of low-cost nuclear energy??”

Larsen spoke with the two physicists from 2007 to 2010 to help them understand key details of his and Widom’s theory of LENRs.

The authors summarized their evaluation in a slide presentation on March 31, 2010, in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Their slides were geared toward a technical audience and included, with acknowledgments, some information and graphics taken directly from Larsen’s slides, originally published on SlideShare.

The Toton-Ullrich summary does an excellent job of distilling Larsen’s explanation of why LENR experiments produce few long-lived radioactive isotopes:

• In surface patches that experience large fluxes of ULM neutrons, populations of neutron-rich “halo” nuclei will build up.
• The half-lives of these nuclei are longer than they would be if isolated because they are unable to emit beta-electrons or shed neutrons into unoccupied states in the local continuum.
• The cessation of ULM neutron production will trigger serial cascades of fast beta-decays from neutron-rich into stable isotopes.
• Few long-lived radioisotopes remain after this process has run its course.