Oak Ridge Nuclear Cavitation Confirmation

July 18, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

This is Part 1 of a New Energy Times Special Report

This report discusses the scientific research and associated conflict experienced by a team of six researchers, led by Rusi Taleyarkhan, a nuclear engineer and a professor in the Purdue University School of Nuclear Engineering. This phase of the group’s research took place between 1999 and 2002, while Taleyarkhan was a research scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Taleyarkhan’s group was part of the Oak Ridge Engineering Technology Division.

Since 1982, when inventor Hugh Flynn was issued a U.S. patent for a “Method of Generating Energy by Acoustically Induced Cavitation Fusion and Reactor Therefor,” researchers have been attempting to create conditions with sonoluminescence to achieve nuclear reactions. In the past, this research has also been called acoustic inertial confinement fusion, bubble fusion or sonofusion. Some researchers hope that eventually nuclear cavitation can lead to a new source of clean nuclear energy.

The Taleyarkhan group got there first, but between 2001 and 2002, two researchers in the Oak Ridge Physics Division, Dan Shapira and Michael Saltmarsh, discredited the Taleyarkhan group’s discovery.

Shapira and Saltmarsh ignored the two scientific criteria – excess tritium and excess neutrons – used by the Taleyarkhan group. Instead, the two researchers made up their own criterion, called “coincidences.” Unlike the data obtained by the Taleyarkhan group, the data available for Shapira and Saltmarsh’s criteria did not support the Taleyarkhan group’s claim. The two researchers then told the scientific community and the public that they had disproved the Taleyarkhan group’s claim.

Dan Shapira and Michael Saltmarsh

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Oak Ridge Nuclear Cavitation Confirmation

July 17, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

Tomorrow, New Energy Times begins publishing the first of a 12-part series of articles that compose the New Energy Times special report “2001 Oak Ridge Nuclear Cavitation Confirmation Uncovered.”

Our report turns part of the history of nuclear cavitation on its head. What has been reported — until now — as a failure by Dan Shapira and Michael Saltmarsh to confirm the nuclear cavitation work of Rusi Taleyarkhan and his group at Oak Ridge National Laboratories was actually a confirmation.

In 2012, New Energy Times obtained the full set of internal ORNL technical reports that reveal the events that took place behind the scenes. We also obtained live video footage of nuclear cavitation experiments performed at Oak Ridge in 2003. (A previously released video is shown below.) Together with a brief telephone interview we conducted with Shapira, the facts shed new light on one of the most heated science controversies in the past decade.

We will publish each part over the next 12 days. Part 1 will be viewable for free; the remaining parts will be for subscribers only.

Sergio Focardi

Sergio Focardi died June 22. He was 81 and had been in declining health for many years. Focardi was a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Bologna. He was a key associate and friend of Francesco Piantelli, who discovered the nickel-hydrogen-gas LENR method. New Energy Times wrote two feature articles about their work in 2008. Piantelli and Focardi were never able to achieve high rates of repeatability for their work, nor did they ever achieve widespread recognition for their significant contribution to the field.