July 8, 2019 — By Steven B. Krivit —

Eighth in a Series on the Rutherford Nitrogen-to-Oxygen Transmutation Myth

When Robin Marshall, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Manchester, learned of my work to correct the historical record of an experiment performed a century ago by Ernest Rutherford, he didn’t take the news well.

Marshall insisted that there was no “justification to strip Rutherford of his transmutation discovery.” In the days preceding the June 8 “Centenary of Transmutation” meeting at the University of Manchester, Marshall took to Twitter to express himself. Here are some samples:

I absolutely love it when the intellectually vacuous try to take me on. They end up not only wishing they’d never been born, they end up wishing their mother and father had never been born.

Imagine a climate denier, flat Earth, 6,000yo Earth vaccine denier rolled into one. He is called Dr. K. and he has just scatter-gun blasted the whole Manchester Uni senior hierarchy; president, deans, and hangers-on like me. We must cancel the Centenary of Transmutation conference 08062019.

[I was] asked to give a sound bite to a reporter on the Yankee who denigrated Manchester’s transmutation centenary: “His utterances bear the same relation to physics as a barking dog does to the English language. Only the dog knows what it means.”

Continue reading »

July 3, 2019 — by Steven B. Krivit —

In a June 27, 2019, press release, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a private spin-off from MIT, said it had raised another $50 million from investors, bringing its total fusion reactor funding to $115 million.

MIT began operating its first experimental nuclear fusion reactor in 1972, funded by and under the auspices of the Department of Energy. The federal program ran until 2016 when the DOE and Congress, after four years of indecision, pulled the plug.

During that half-century, MIT had developed a reputation for being a leading plasma fusion research center and had trained many of the world’s plasma physicists. In the absence of public funding from U.S. taxpayers, MIT decided not to continue operating the reactor. Instead, it developed plans for a new reactor that would be funded by private investment.

A year ago, on March 9, 2018, MIT issued a press release announcing its plans for its next experimental fusion reactor:

SPARC is designed to produce about 100 MW of heat. While it will not turn that heat into electricity, it will produce, in pulses of about 10 seconds, as much power as is used by a small city. That output would be more than twice the power used to heat the plasma, achieving the ultimate technical milestone: positive net energy from fusion.

In the June 27, 2019, press release, Commonwealth said that SPARC is designed to generate 100 MW of fusion power. Commonwealth said that, in six years from now, in collaboration with MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, SPARC will “demonstrate net energy gain from fusion for the first time in history.”

Top MIT executives have been involved in the well-coordinated publicity campaign. On the same day as last year’s press release, the Boston Globe published an op-ed article by MIT Vice President for Research Maria Zuber.

SPARC, Zuber said, is designed to “demonstrate, for the first time, control of a fusion plasma that produces more energy than it consumes.” Continue reading »

June 7, 2019 — By Steven B. Krivit  —

The U.K.-based Woodford Patient Capital Trust PLC is collapsing, according to many news reports in the U.K. this week.

One of the reasons cited is Woodford’s investment in a North Carolina company called Industrial Heat, which had established a license agreement with Italian white-collar criminal Andrea Rossi.

Rossi served time in prison twice and was convicted of financial fraud. In January 2011, he claimed to have developed a commercially viable “cold fusion” device.

In June 2011, I went to Italy to meet Rossi and investigate his device. I filmed Rossi giving a live demonstration and posted this video on the Internet on June 20, 2011:

Continue reading »