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.

Fairy Godfather of Cold Fusion: Drawing by adw, photo by dubross

June 28, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

Two professors at Uppsala University, in Sweden, have published critical comments about their colleagues’ endorsement of Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat device.

Göran Ericsson and Stephan Pomp, professors in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Uppsala, uploaded their critique on Wednesday to the arXiv preprint server. Their paper reports serious deficiencies in a May 20 paper written by seven researchers, including three professors at Uppsala.

“Wishful thinking seems to have replaced scientific rigor,” Ericsson and Pomp wrote.

The authors of the May 20 paper say they made an independent test of Rossi’s device. They also say, “By the most conservative assumptions as to the errors in the measurements, the result is still one order of magnitude greater than conventional energy sources.”

The authors of that paper are Giuseppe Levi (University of Bologna), Evelyn Foschi (Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics), Torbjörn Hartman (senior research engineer at the Svedberg Laboratory, Uppsala University), Bo Höistad (professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Uppsala University), Roland Pettersson (senior lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at Uppsala University), Lars Tegnér (professor in the Department of Engineering Sciences at Uppsala University) and Hanno Essén (Royal Institute of Technology).

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