NASA and Widom-Larsen Theory: Inside Story

May 24, 2012 – By Steven B. Krivit –

Yesterday, the NASA Langley Future Innovation Department uploaded a short video clip in which NASA said that it wants to test and confirm the Widom-Larsen ultra-low-momentum neutron theory of low-energy nuclear reactions.

New Energy Times made some inquiries, and the inside story suggests a very different picture.

First, let’s review some background information, most of which appears on the main New Energy Times Web site.

For the last 23 years, researchers around the world have attempted to perform LENR experiments to either demonstrate nuclear-scale excess heat or obtain other more-direct nuclear signatures. Most of the researchers who started this inquiry in 1989 thought the underlying process was some kind of “cold fusion.”

But a careful study of the experiments and a comprehensive theory published in 2006 by Allan Widom, a condensed matter physicist with Northeastern University, and Lewis Larsen, chief executive officer of Lattice Energy LLC, showed that LENRs have almost nothing to do with fusion.

Widom and Larsen’s theory has been recognized by DTRA, CERN, Johns Hopkins University, among other institutions.  NASA, in particular, was attracted to LENRs because of their potential for an ideal energy source for aerospace: high fuel density, high power rate and lack of need for radiation shielding.

In September 2011, NASA held a LENR Innovation Forum workshop at its Glenn Research Center. In fact, NASA had explored LENRs many years earlier, as the Fralick slides from the workshop show.

Bring the clock forward to Jan. 12, 2012. NASA released a short promotional video titled “Method for Enhancement of Surface Plasmon Polaritons to Initiate and Sustain LENR” on NASA’s Technology Gateway Web site. Some of the statements made in the video were peculiar, and we ran a short news story on it on Jan. 13.

Here are some key points excerpted from our story:

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Two scientists at NASA’s Langley Research Center, Dennis Bushnell and Joseph Zawodny, saw the promise of the Widom-Larsen ultra-low-momentum neutron theory of LENRs.

For several years, Bushnell and Zawodny spoke favorably and enthusiastically about the Widom-Larsen theory as well as LENR in general.

[On Jan. 12], Larsen told New Energy Times that he spoke with both NASA employees by phone to help them learn about LENRs and his theory.

“I spent six months tutoring Zawodny so he had the basics of the theory,” Larsen said.

Larsen told New Energy Times that Bushnell and Zawodny also led [Larsen] to believe that NASA might provide some funding for his company [Lattice Energy LLC].

“In a series of telephone calls I had during the spring and summer of 2008 with Zawodny and Bushnell, they dangled a carrot ­- the possibly of significant funding from NASA,” Larsen said. “I told them that I was wiling to teach them the basic physics but I would not transfer Lattice’s proprietary knowledge about how to use nanotechnology to improve the reliability of LENRs without having a contract.

“I told them, ‘Under contract, I will show you how to make transmutations every time, but I will not show you how to reliably make large amounts of heat.’

“In January 2009, after an internal NASA meeting, Bushnell and Zawodny informed Lattice that they would not be funding us but they would welcome any free advice we wanted to offer NASA. We declined.”
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The core of the Widom-Larsen theory is that it describes a novel method for producing heavy electrons, which then are used to produce neutrons. Larsen filed a patent application based on the theory in 2005, and the application published in 2007. On Feb. 22, 2011, the U.S. Patent and Trademark office issued patent 7,893,414 to Lattice Energy.

But in March 2010, 14 months after NASA told Larsen it would not offer Lattice any funding, Zawodny, on behalf of the U.S. government, filed a provisional U.S. patent application for a “Method for Producing Heavy Electrons.” Zawodny cited the pending Lattice patent as well as the Widom-Larsen theory in his application. Remember that Lattice’s patent application went public in 2007, but Lattice’s patent had not yet been granted.

Now let’s come back to the Jan. 12, 2012, video produced and published by NASA. At the end of the video, the narrator restates the title as “NASA’s Method for Enhancement of Surface Plasmon Polaritons to Initiate and Sustain LENR in Metal Hydride Systems.”

Even though the NASA video states the essential aspect of the Widom-Larsen theory, when Zawodny appears in this video, he mentions nothing of the Widom-Larsen theory or Larsen’s concept of how surface plasmon polaritons are a primary key to initiate LENRs. In fact, NASA’s video states that the idea is theirs.

At the time, we sent Zawodny an e-mail and asked for an explanation of the omission. He responded and said that the intended audience was not interested in that level of detail.

The next day, on Jan. 14, 2012, Zawodny posted an article on his blog with a more detailed explanation about why NASA’s video failed to credit and recognize the Widom-Larsen theory.

“When I talk to my family, friends, or neighbors about some of my work,” Zawodny wrote, “I do not cite Widom-Larsen Theory or any of their papers. There would be little point in doing so.”

But NASA’s video is not directed at Zawodny’s family, friends, or neighbors.

In his blog article, Zawodny reiterated, as he had done in several public presentations in earlier years, his enthusiasm and optimism for the Widom-Larsen theory.

Zawodny’s article also contained an unusual disclaimer.

“While I do work for NASA, I do not speak for them,’ Zawodny wrote. “They employ me for my professional capabilities and on occasion my professional opinion. Nothing I say should ever be construed as anything other than my personal opinion.”

Oddly, the video was published on a NASA Web site, contained NASA’s logo, discussed NASA, and was produced by NASA.

In the new video, which prominently mentions the Widom-Larsen theory, Zawodny states that he “had been working with Larsen.”

New Energy Times sent an e-mail to Zawodny today and asked whether he would agree to a short phone interview.

“Nope,” Zawodny wrote.

Larsen, however, did agree to a phone interview.

Larsen told New Energy Times today that neither Larsen nor his company, Lattice Energy LLC, ever had a formal relationship with either NASA or Zawodny. Larsen went into more detail about his history with NASA.

“Around December 2008, after I had spent months tutoring Zawodny,” Larsen said, “Zawodny called me up and said, ‘I finally feel like I’ve got a grasp on all the basic physics. The physics are correct as far as I can tell. We’ve met with NASA management about all this and it went very well.  They have instructed me to get the lawyers involved to draw up a contract on this at best speed.’”

Around that time, Bushnell got more involved, Larsen said.

Larsen reiterated that NASA told him in 2008 that it would be in a position to fund Lattice and give his company credibility if Larsen gave NASA the basic physics.

“Bushnell said, ‘We can give Lattice the Good Housekeeping seal of approval,'” Larsen said.

He said NASA made multiple attempts to get him to divulge sensitive engineering details that he intends to use in the development of commercial LENR devices as heat sources. But Larsen refused.

“I told them that I would not give them engineering details about how to make a heat-producing device that was optimized for heat production,” he said, “but I would be happy to tell them how to make transmutations repeatedly.”

But NASA wasn’t interested in learning how to use LENR transmutation experiments as a way to test the theory, Larsen said.

In January 2009, Zawodny contacted Larsen and, to Larsen’s great surprise, told him that NASA was not, in fact, going to offer Lattice any funding.

Zawodny said that NASA was, however, going to do an experiment within three to six months that would attempt to confirm the theory and that NASA would attempt to publish the results in a peer-reviewed journal.

Zawodny told Larsen that Lattice could advise NASA for free if it wished but that Larsen would have no control over the design or execution of the experiments.

Two years later, Zawodny’s Sept. 22, 2011, workshop slides show that NASA designed and set up an experiment in August 2011. NASA has yet to report whether it ran such an experiment and, if so, what result it found.

In the May 23, 2012, video from NASA, Zawodny states that he and NASA are trying to perform a physics experiment to confirm the Widom-Larsen theory. He mentions nothing about the laboratory work that NASA may have performed in August 2011. Larsen told New Energy Times his opinion about this new video.

“NASA’s implication that their claimed experimental work or plans for such work might be in any way a definitive test of the Widom-Larsen theory is nonsense,” Larsen said.

“The moment NASA filed a competing patent, it disqualified itself as a credible independent evaluator of the Widom-Larsen theory,” he said. “Lattice Energy is a small, privately held company in Chicago funded by insiders and two angel investors, and we have proprietary knowledge.

“NASA offered us nothing, and now, backed by the nearly unlimited resources of the federal government, NASA is clearly eager to get into the LENR business any way it can.”

New Energy Times asked Larsen for his thoughts about the potential outcome of any NASA experiment to test the theory, assuming details are ever released.

“NASA is behaving no differently than a private-sector commercial competitor,” Larsen said. “If NASA were a private-sector company, why would anyone believe anything that it says about a competitor?”

Resources:

Link to NASA’s May 23, 2012, Video

NASA’s Description of the Video
At Langley, we’re not just working on innovative solutions for today. We’re also looking ahead at the technical challenges we’ll all face in the future. The purpose of the Center Innovation Fund is to stimulate and encourage creativity and innovation within the NASA Centers in addressing the technology needs of NASA and the nation. Funds are distributed to each NASA Center to support emerging technologies and creative initiatives that leverage Center talent and capabilities.

Transcript (by New Energy Times) of NASA’s Video
I’m working on a form of nuclear power that’s apparently very clean and very scalable. In working here at NASA, you’re exposed to a lot of different things and I became aware of a new theory, the Widom-Larsen theory three years ago now, that appears to explain why you can use the weak force to get at nuclear power in a completely different way.

I had been working with Lewis Larsen, one of the authors of the paper, to understand the theory. The way that were looking at this is to take and add just a neutron to an element, increase its mass slightly. There’s binding energy that’s released in the form of nuclear energy. The key here is, how to produce the neutron? That’s the exciting thing that’s been becoming more and more evident in the work from the past 20 years that people have done worldwide.

What we are trying to do is a physics experiment, to understand whether the Widom-Larsen theory and its predictions, at least in part, correct. We made a little device, a centimeter and a half wide by 2 cm long comprised of these little tiles. Each tile is a separate test device and we have 48 different experiments that we can run simultaneously. We run an experiment on this entire thing and we see how this square compares to the one next to it, and so it becomes a differential measurement. The tolerances for making a good differential measurement are greatly reduced. The other thing is uniformity. We process this device the same and it accelerates the science that we do it makes it easier. The interpretation of the data is much more direct and the criticisms that have been levied against previous attempts aren’t valid in this case.

We got to work with a small company on a study to see whether we could do something that’s been desirable by NASA for a long time. It’s a single stage fully reusable space plane, a rocket, something that could take up a reasonable size payload to orbit and return without shedding any parts.

So when you think — when you fully grasp what this represents; a very inexpensive, clean form of power — if we were to have such a thing it would be the sort of technology that would fuel our future growth and expansion and have the ability to raise the standard of living in the entire world.