Jun 122020
 

Book Review: Transmutation, The Inside Story
By Steven B. Krivit

June 12, 2020

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

Transmutation, The Inside Story was written by physicist Robin Marshall and self-published on Sept. 12, 2019. The paperback version is 137 pages. (ISBN-10: 107974584X / ISBN-13: 978-1079745849)

Robin Marshall is an emeritus professor of physics from the University of Manchester, recognized science for his research in the field of high-energy physics. Among other awards and honors, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society, was a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and was awarded the Max Born Medal and Prize by the German Physical Society.

From the back cover: “This is a true story. It is a story of Manchester, discovery and physics, and very little comes truer than that. When the year has a ‘19 in it, you can be sure that Manchester will be at the fore. 1819 was the pinnacle of the ‘19s – Peterloo, when Manchester made sacrifices for the Nation. In 1919, Ernest Rutherford, later Sir, even later Lord, became the planet’s first alchemist.”

I must disclose that this is not an impartial review. In fact, my actions may have precipitated Marshall’s decision to write this book. Before discussing Marshall’s book, some backstory is required for context. In 2014, I was writing my own book, Lost History, which I self-published two years later, in 2016. During research for the book, I identified and described the perpetuation of a 70-year myth that depicted physicist Ernest Rutherford as the world’s first successful alchemist. According to the myth, he performed the experiment which demonstrated the first artificial transmutation of elements, specifically, changing the element nitrogen to oxygen.

In May 2019, I learned that the University of Manchester, in collaboration with the U.K. Institute of Physics History of Physics Group, planned to hold a one-day meeting to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Rutherford’s discovery of the first artificial transmutation of elements. On learning about the meeting, scheduled for June 8, I immediately contacted the organizers and university officials. I informed them that the title and the basis for the meeting were factually incorrect.

According to my investigation, Rutherford’s 1919 papers did not mark his discovery of the first artificial transmutation performed at Manchester. Rather, those papers marked his discovery of the proton, in experiments he performed at Manchester. The credit, I explained to the organizers and university officials, for the first artificial transmutation, actually belonged to Patrick Blackett, when he published, in 1925, experiments he performed at the University of Cambridge.

Before the meeting took place, Marshall reacted adversely to my surprising news. He disagreed strongly with my analysis of the history and my conclusion. Marshall took to Twitter to express himself. He promised his readers that the key speaker for the planned meeting, Rutherford expert John Campbell, was going to show that I was wrong. Marshall imagined that I had intended to shut the centenary down rather than encourage the centenary to mark the proper discovery, that of the proton. Marshall’s response was not unique but it was the most extreme reaction that I had encountered. His reaction added drama to what would have been an otherwise dull story about science history.

Three days before the “Centenary of Transmutation” meeting, Marshall wrote on his Twitter account that he was asked to comment and review my “paper.” (Actually, it was not a journal paper but my news article “University of Manchester to Celebrate Wrong Transmutation Discovery.”) He had submitted his review to an unnamed journal in an attempt to show that I was wrong about the discovery credit. Marshall complained on Twitter that the editor had rejected his review, but he was nonetheless determined to triumph. He posted his entire review, as screenshots, to his Twitter feed with exciting preambles to each page.

The “Centenary of Transmutation” meeting took place as scheduled on June 8, 2019, without any change to the title or agenda. Peter Rowlands, a 30-year member of the U.K. Institute of Physics History of Physics Group, opened the meeting with a 38-second introduction and emphatically asserted that the University of Manchester held the bragging rights for the first artificial nuclear transmutation.

“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to this celebration of the centenary of transmutation, which took place in this very department 100 years ago,” Rowlands said.

Sean Freeman, the head of the University of Manchester School of Physics and Astronomy spoke next. I had previously been in communication with Freeman. A year earlier, on June 26, 2018, I had written to Freeman and Martin Schröder, the vice-president and dean for the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Manchester. I told them both that a Web page from the physics department depicted the incorrect version of the transmutation discovery. Schröder wrote back to me the following day and, for the most part, expressed his agreement with my findings and conclusions. He thanked me for bringing the error to their attention and, after two rounds of edits, he and Freeman brought the page much closer to the facts as shown by my investigation. (Their page still contains a minor conflation of the historical events.)

After Rowlands’ introduction, Freeman gave his talk — and contradicted Rowlands. Rutherford expert John Campbell followed Freeman. He too, contradicted Rowlands. Freeman and Rowlands discussed many details about Rutherford’s achievements, but neither of them claimed that Rutherford had performed and discovered the first artificial transmutation. Instead, Freeman and Campbell discussed the correct discovery associated with the centenary: Rutherford’s 1919 discovery of the proton.

Sean Freeman speaking at the “Centenary of Transmutation”

Freeman also told the audience that Blackett, at Cambridge, had shown the transmutation of nitrogen to oxygen. In each of their respective chronological narratives, when Freeman and Campbell arrived at the year 1919, they spoke accurately and precisely about Rutherford’s proton discovery.

Marshall had promised his Twitter followers that Campbell was going to “state more strongly Krivit was wrong.” Instead, Campbell said nothing in his talk about Rutherford transmuting nitrogen to oxygen. Instead, Campbell admitted that he was wrong. He said that he had relied on secondary sources that were to blame for his mistake:

“I just assumed that the people writing about Rutherford who knew him were right, but then I’ve found out they never looked at the article — I assumed — records of the day, and just formed their own guesswork.”

 

John Campbell speaking at the “Centenary of Transmutation”

In the discussion after Campbell’s talk, the audience had a chance to resolve the incongruity between the advertised purpose of the meeting (Rutherford’s transmutation discovery) and the undisclosed revised purpose of the meeting (Rutherford’s proton discovery). Nearly all the audience discussions centered on transmutation. Campbell repeatedly and accurately responded to the audience that, no, Rutherford never claimed that he had transmuted nitrogen to oxygen. In a separate document, I performed a detailed analysis of the meeting discussion and answered some of the audience questions that Campbell did not answer adequately.

A month later, I responded to Marshall’s Twitter-published review in an open letter. I explained how Marshall had misunderstood a fundamental aspect of Rutherford’s experiments.

Marshall thought that when Rutherford discussed oxygen, that it was in the context of experiments performed with nitrogen gas, and that oxygen was the result of a transmutation from nitrogen. Marshall didn’t understand. Rutherford had performed separate experiments; one experiment used nitrogen gas in the chamber, the other experiment used oxygen gas in the chamber. When Rutherford mentioned oxygen in his papers, he was only referring to the similarities of the particle kinetics of experiments performed in the presence of oxygen to the particle kinetics of experiments performed in the presence of nitrogen.

Marshall wrote and self-published Transmutation, The Inside Story as an attempt to prove that the transmutation discovery belonged to Rutherford. Much of his book is anecdotal and contains ancillary aspects to the history. Only a few pages in the book attempt to provide direct support for Marshall’s thesis.

(Page 56): “Rutherford did have transmutation in mind, but kept quiet about it in public until these papers appeared in 1919. He did mention in a personal letter to Bohr in December 1917 that he was trying to do it and asked Bohr to regard it as private.”

Suffice it to say, Marshall provided no direct quote and no citation. Rutherford said no such thing to Bohr, and had no such intention. The actual quotation from Rutherford’s letter, which is quite well known, is this: “I am also trying to break up the atom by this method – Regard this as private.” In that paragraph, Marshall also associated the word transmutation with his own his own phrase “trying to do it.” But that is an inaccurate conflation. Rutherford’s intention was not to transmute one element to another but to break apart the atom so as to learn its structure and develop support for his satellite model of the atom.

(Page 63): “It is significant that he noticed that what should have been nitrogen behaved like oxygen.”

This is, of course, Marshall’s fundamental misunderstanding of the set of experiments, as I already explained in my open letter.

Lower on the page, Marshall traveled further down the road from fact to falsehood. He displayed an image with two particle tracks. Below the image, he wrote this caption:

(Page 63): “Two alpha particles in a Wilson cloud chamber enter from the left. The upper track was used by Rutherford to identify the stub of the recoil oxygen nucleus.”

 

Again, Marshall provided no direct quote and no citation. In reality, the image Marshall depicts as Figure 6.3 did not come from any of Rutherford’s four 1919 papers. In fact, there are no images of any particle tracks in in any of Rutherford’s set of four papers. Based on my investigation, there is no evidence that Rutherford identified any residual nucleus from his experiments as oxygen before Blackett’s 1925 publication. This image and caption, which Marshall purports to be the primary evidence for his argument, is a complete fabrication.

 

Jun 072020
 

Return to ITER Power Facts Main Page

June 7, 2020

Dr. Kathy McCarthy
Director, U.S. ITER Project Office
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Dear Dr. McCarthy,

Following my second letter to you about the misleading ITER claim on this Web page, ORNL immediately published a press release repeating the same misleading claim, that ITER is designed to produce “500 megawatts of fusion power.”

This claim is misleading, although it is technically valid.

Context is everything, however, and in your public communication to people who are not fusion experts, the claim is inaccurate. The problem with “500 MW of fusion power” is the difference between what it says and what it means.

Fusion experts know that “500 MW of fusion power” accurately states the projected power of the fusion-produced particles in ITER. Crucially, fusion experts also know that this statement does not account for or consider the input power required to operate the reactor.

However, for the general public, “500 MW of fusion power” means that the ITER reactor will produce 500 MW of potentially usable thermal power and that this accounts for the input power required to operate the reactor. But the 500 MW value does not account for the 300 MW of electrical input power required to operate the reactor. With an input of 300 MW, the potentially usable net power, after conversions, will be about zero — if the experiment works as planned.

You are representing an effectively net-zero-power reactor as a 500 MW-producing reactor. Although this type of misrepresentation has been prevalent for at least a decade, international organizations, including the European Commission, EUROfusion, and FuseNet, have recently corrected their ITER power claims. I ask that you correct the ORNL power claim about ITER to make it accurate, as well.

Sincerely,

Steven Krivit
Publisher and Senior Editor, New Energy Times

cc:
Thomas Zacharia, Director, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Johnny O. Moore, Manager, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Site Office
Martha J. Kass, Division Director, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Site Office
Lynne K Degitz, Senior Communications Specialist, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Frank Rusco, Director, Natural Resources and Environment (ENERGY), GAO
John Neumann, Director, Science and Technology, GAO
Katherine Siggerud, Managing Director of Congressional Relations, GAO

 

May 292020
 

May 29, 2020
By Steven B. Krivit

Return to ITER Power Facts Main Page

New Energy Times just learned that the European Commission has silently removed its misleading claim that “ITER will be the first experiment to generate up to 500 million watts (MW) of fusion power.”

The commission has replaced that claim about the outcome of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, known as ITER, with one that is accurate and transparent.

The commission now says that the goal of ITER is “to prove the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion as a future energy source.”

Three years ago, the commission said that the goal of ITER was to show that 1) “fusion energy is possible at an industrial scale” and 2) “ITER will be the first experiment to produce significant quantities of fusion energy, considerably more than required to operate the machine.”

After I published the results of my investigation in 2017 showing that the potentially usable power produced by ITER, if all goes according to plan, will be about zero — after accounting for the input power — the commission made an initial correction. It deleted the two prior claims and replaced them with two new claims.

The commission named two goals: 1) “demonstrat[ing] the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion on Earth as a sustainable energy source” and 2) “ITER will be the first experiment to generate up to 500 million watts (MW) of fusion power.”

After 2½ years and more than 20 communications between me and commissioners, commission staff members, and Jean-Claude Juncker, the former president of the European Commission, the commission now understands that ITER is not going to demonstrate fusion on Earth as a sustainable energy source and that it will not generate any practical level of thermal power from fusion. Instead, ITER may prove that fusion may be feasible, as always, as a future energy source.

===========================

European Commission Fusion Web Page Sept. 17, 2017
“The international scientific community is now building ITER to show that fusion energy is possible at an industrial scale. … ITER will be the first experiment to produce significant quantities of fusion energy, considerably more than required to operate the machine.”

European Commission Fusion Web Page April 6, 2018 (changelog)
“The international scientific community is now building ITER, which will demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion on Earth as a sustainable energy source. … ITER will be the first experiment to generate up to 500 million watts (MW) of fusion power.”

Changes
“The international scientific community is now building ITER, to show that fusion energy is possible at an industrial scale. …ITER will be the first experiment to produce significant quantities of fusion energy, considerably more than required to operate the machine which will demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion on Earth as a sustainable energy source. ITER will be the first experiment to generate up to 500 million watts (MW) of fusion power.

European Commission Fusion Web Page Oct. 29, 2019
“ITER is of key importance in the roadmap, as it aims to prove the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion as a future energy source.”

Changes
“The international scientific community is now building ITER which will demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion on Earth as a sustainable energy source. ITER will be the first experiment to generate up to 500 million watts (MW) of fusion power ITER is of key importance in the roadmap, as it aims to prove the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion as a future energy source.”

===========================

For two decades, when fusion experts spoke to non-experts about the “500 MW of fusion power” that ITER is designed to produce, they didn’t explain that the 500 MW value did not account for the input power required to operate the machine. This led to the nearly universal misunderstanding about what ITER is expected and designed to do. It led the commission to publish a press release a decade ago saying that “ITER will be capable of generating 500 million watts (MW) of fusion power.” Archive Copy

The poor communications by the fusion experts caused the commission to publish a press release six years ago saying that ITER “will be the first magnetic confined fusion device which will produce more power than put into it (it is expected to provide 10 times more power than put into it).” Archive Copy

Fusion experts informed attendees at the European Commission ITER Industry Day event in 2017 that ITER would produce “500 MW of power from an input of 50 MW — a gain factor of 10.”

The worldwide extent of the misunderstandings caused by the poor communications from fusion experts is difficult to assess. At a minimum, the misunderstandings have affected most journalists who have written about ITER and most members of the public who have read or viewed thier stories. They have affected members of the European Parliament who have read incorrect statements published by staff members of the commission and the European Parliament. (Click here for examples.)

Apr 282020
 

April 28, 2020
By Steven B. Krivit

Return to ITER Power Facts Main Page

SUMMARY
The proponents of ITER, the publicly funded International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, claim the device is the way to a future of virtually limitless carbon-free energy from nuclear fusion.

ITER is designed to accomplish a scientifically significant result, the production of particles from nuclear fusion that have a total of 500 million Watts of power. If it succeeds, that result will also show that the reactor can produce the same amount of overall power that it consumes. In other words, it would demonstrate a net overall reactor output of zero Watts. However, ITER was universally misunderstood by the public, news media, and government officials as an overall reactor system that would produce a potentially usable thermal power output of 500 million Watts. How did this misunderstanding happen?

BACKGROUND
The misunderstanding is the result of a long-standing pattern of poor communication by fusion representatives. It began at least by 1978, when Anne Davies, the chief of the Tokamak Systems Branch in the U.S. Department of Energy spoke with journalist Edward Edelson, writing for Popular Science, about the forthcoming Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

After she spoke with Edelson, he wrote that the overall TFTR reactor was designed to get out at least as much energy as was put into the reactor, and possibly more. With an output of fusion particles with 10 million Watts and an electrical input of 950 million Watts, nothing could have been further from truth. The mistake happened because Davies a) didn’t tell Edelson how much overall power the machine would require and b) she led him to believe that the overall input power was going to encompass only the thermal power used to heat the fuel. The fuel, forms of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium, when heated to millions of degrees, become a fusion plasma.

I spoke with Davies in 2018 and asked her about the error in the Popular Science article. (Link to interview) She said “I either assumed the reporter understood what I meant or I actually explained it and he left it out, perhaps to shorten the article.” Two other journalists, after speaking with Davies in 1992 and 2003, came away with the same misunderstanding.

In the 1990s, fusion representatives including Davies told members of Congress that state-of-the-art fusion reactors had produced millions of Watts of power, but only for a few seconds. The Congressional record shows that fusion representatives spoke about TFTR and, by their use of specific language and their omission of specific facts, created the impression that the TFTR reactor produced a net, rather than gross output of 10 million Watts from the fusion reactions. The practical limitation, they explained, was that the reactions lasted only a few seconds or minutes. During testimony, nobody explained that the 10 MW was, in fact, a gross output value. Nobody explained that TFTR was designed to consume 950 MW of electrical power.

The Congressional witnesses during that testimony spoke about ITER in the same way, creating the impression that the projected 500 megawatt output would be a net output value when, in fact, it is designed to be a gross output value. Nobody explained that ITER was designed to consume a minimum of 300 megawatts of electrical power.

Around 2007, fusion representatives shifted the ITER messaging slightly and began introducing an input power value. They began saying that according to the ITER design, the reactor would consume only 50 MW of power. But this was not true.

This pattern of poor communication by fusion representatives took place for four decades. For the last two decades, the promotions by the fusion representatives created the widespread false impression that the ITER reactor is designed to a) consume only 50 megawatts of power, b) produce 500 megawatts of power, c) demonstrate that a fusion reactor can produce 10 times the power it uses, and d) demonstrate that a fusion reactor can produce power equivalent to that of a small conventional power plant.

Soon after I uncovered and published the previously undisclosed power facts about the ITER reactor in my October 2017 investigation, fusion organizations around the world began, one by one, to make corrections to their public claims.

My sources were three independent fusion experts: Daniel Jassby, a former principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory; Hartmut Zohm, the head of the Tokamak Scenario Development Division at the Max-Planck-Institute of Plasma Physics; and Steven Cowley, the current director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and former chief executive officer of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.

After I published my investigation, Zohm told me about the Japanese JT-60SA project Web site which confirms that “ITER is about equivalent to a zero (net) power reactor.”(Archive copy)

Nick Holloway, the media manager for the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority and Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, later added this to the UKAEA Web site: “ITER should produce about as much fusion power as the electricity required to run the entire plant.” (Archive copy)

REAL PURPOSE OF ITER
The correct power values are defined in the 2002 International Atomic Energy Agency design specification for ITER. But when fusion representatives told people the objectives of ITER, they omitted essential details as well as their unique definition of “fusion power.”

The design specification for ITER provides a power value that applies only to the plasma. The value has nothing to do with the overall reactor power production or overall reactor power consumption. Until recently, fusion scientists did not explain this clearly to the public.

Until recently, fusion scientists also did not explain that the much-publicized input power value of 50 MW excluded the majority of input power required to operated the ITER reactor. Also, they had not disclosed that the 500 MW output power value did not account for the 300 megawatts that will be consumed by the reactor. Nor did they disclose that the reactor would briefly need 400 megawatts of electricity to start the reaction.

Additionally, the publicized input power value of 50 megawatts had been depicted incorrectly because fusion representatives had failed to make another key distinction publicly. According to the ITER design specification, the amount of thermal power that reaches the inside of the chamber to heat the fuel is designed to be 50 MW. (A few sources say that the injected thermal power will be slightly higher.) However, the amount of electrical power consumed to create that 50 MW heating power will be 150 MW, or even higher.

None of this had been communicated clearly by ITER representatives during the past two decades. Instead, as evidenced by nearly all examples, including reports from the most authoritative news sources, encyclopedias, European Union government documents, a White House press release, U.S. Congressional records, and documents published by ITER contractors for their investors, the international fusion community created the false impression that the ITER reactor should produce 10 times the power it consumes.

THREE ELEMENTS
The communication failure about the results of ITER’s predecessor, the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion reactor, and about the purpose and design of ITER comprised three primary elements:

1. Double Meaning of “Fusion Power”
Fusion experts did not tell people that there is a second meaning for the phrase “fusion power.” The first meaning, which most people did understand, is the amount of potentially usable (net) thermal power that would be produced by a fusion reactor. The second meaning of “fusion power,” which most people did not understand, is the gross thermal value of the particles produced in fusion reactions, irrespective of any input power.

2. Real Meaning of Input Power
Fusion experts did not explain that, when they normally discuss fusion reactor input power, they are referring only to thermal power injected into the plasma, not the required input power for the overall reactor, or even the required input power for the heating systems.

3. Hidden Overall Electrical Input Power
Fusion experts did not reveal the actual total input power required for each of the reactors. Before 2015, no Internet Web page disclosed the correct total power consumed by JET. Before 2019, only the Japanese fusion team’s Web site transparently stated the expected overall power balance for ITER.

THE EFFECTS
Collectively, these three communication elements caused non-experts to incorrectly believe that the total electrical input power consumed by JET was 24 MW and that the overall JET reactor made almost as much power as it consumed. In reality, the total electrical input power consumed by JET was 700 MW. JET lost 98% of the power it used. In many cases, the fusion community explicitly claimed that the total input power used to produce JET’s 16 MW result was only 24 MW. With the establishment, years ago, of the false perception that JET made almost as much overall power as it consumed, the claim that the ITER reactor could demonstrate a tenfold power gain seemed reasonable to the lay public.

REDDIT comment posted by user nhillson. Fusion proponents caused people who were not experts in fusion to believe that JET had produced 70% of the power it consumed and the proponents therefore created the reasonable expectation that ITER could produce ten times the power it would consume.

REDDIT comment posted by user nhillson. Fusion proponents caused people who were not experts in fusion to believe that JET had produced 70% of the power it consumed and the proponents therefore created the reasonable expectation that ITER could produce ten times the power it would consume.

 Fusion proponents caused attorneys writing for The National Law Review to believe that JET had produced 70% of the power it had consumed, producing fusion reactions with 16 MW of heat from 25 MW of electricity. It actually used 700 25 MW of electricity. After I contacted the authors, they did not respond. After I contacted NLR Managing Director Jennifer B. Schaller, she took the article down for a month and put it up later without the false JET claim.

Fusion proponents caused attorneys writing for The National Law Review to believe that JET had produced 70% of the power it had consumed, producing fusion reactions with 16 MW of heat from 25 MW of electricity. It actually used 700 25 MW of electricity. After I contacted the authors, they did not respond. After I contacted NLR Managing Director Jennifer B. Schaller, she took the article down for a month and put it up later without the false JET claim. (Before) (During) (After)

Collectively, these three communication elements caused non-experts to incorrectly believe that the total input power for ITER is designed to be 50 MW and that the overall reactor is designed to make 500 MW, 10 times more power than it will consume. In many cases, the fusion community explicitly claimed that ITER would produce power on the same scale as a small working power station. In reality, if the ITER design succeeds, 300 MW of electricity will go into the overall reactor and the equivalent of 214 MW of electricity will come out of the overall reactor from the emitted neutrons, a loss of 86 MW.

TRANSPARENCY
I published the results of my investigation and the previously undisclosed power facts about the ITER reactor in October 2017. (See Timeline) A month later, the ITER organization corrected some of its false claims. Two months later, the organization issued a press release. Although it avoided claiming that the reactor would produce 500 MW of power, it claimed that ITER is a “project to prove that fusion power can be produced on a commercial scale.”

I contacted other leaders of the fusion research community, explained the results of their poor communications, and encouraged them to correct their Web sites. Many of them have made some corrections. All of them have declined to publish the second meaning of “fusion power.” Most of them have declined to publish the overall amount of power expected to be consumed by the reactor.

Leaders of fusion organizations I spoke with said that they were not ethically obligated to do so because ITER is not designed to produce overall net power. ITER, they said, is not designed to demonstrate that it is possible to produce commercial-scale energy from fusion. But those are precisely the two fundamental messages fusion representatives conveyed to the public and legislators in the past two decades that led to their support of the experiment and the expenditure of $20 billion of public money.

=============

Postscript:
MIT used the same three elements in their privately funded fusion project.

 

Oct 312019
 
Lewis G. Larsen (Photo: Lloyd Degrane)

Lewis G. Larsen (Photo: Lloyd Degrane)

Lewis G. Larsen, 72, died on October 25, 2019.

Larsen developed the Widom-Larsen Ultra-Low-Momentum Neutron-Catalyzed Theory of Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions, with Allan Widom. He had been intrigued by low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) research.

Before his career in science, Larsen worked as a quantitative investment analyst, professional commodities trader and technology investment banker. In his first job in the investment world, as a physical commodities trader for Louis Dreyfus Corp., he ran the international export and trading program in sorghum, oats and soybean oil. He was featured three times in Barron’s magazine for his ability to predict patterns in stock indexes, commodity prices and interest rates.

Larsen had studied biophysics and astrophysics and began applying his scientific knowledge to LENRs in the late 1990s. At the time, he was running a technology consulting company specializing in energy and information management and control systems.

One of his clients asked him, “Are there any wild cards in energy?” Larsen remembered the fusion controversy from 1989. Larsen examined the results of transmuted elements in LENR experiments and methodically figured out the necessary steps to explain the process.

By early 2004, Larsen had most of the general concepts put together, but he needed an academic collaborator who was well-published and who had the physics and calculation skills to help him complete the development of the theory. Larsen hadn’t done these kinds of calculations for many years. After an extensive search, Larsen said, he found Allan Widom, a professor of condensed-matter physics at Northeastern University.

Together, in 2006, the pair published what is still the only plausible theory to explain LENRs. Their peer-reviewed papers provide a detailed, mathematically supported explanation of the experimental phenomena, not as fusion but as neutron and weak interactions.

The theory has been evaluated by experts from the U.S. Navy, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, NASA, Johns Hopkins University, Boeing, Booz-Allen, Science Applications International Corporation, the Department of Energy Office of Science, and other scientists in the U.S. intelligence and defense communities.

Larsen was an invited speaker to the Department of Energy/Electric Power Research Institute High Efficiency Thermoelectrics workshop in February 2004. In October, 2006, Larsen and Widom were the only LENR theorists invited to speak at a DTRA meeting hosted at the Naval Research Laboratory.

The theory validates three decades of experimental research that reveals a new nuclear process. For the last 100 years, most scientists thought that nuclear reactions could occur only in high-energy physics experiments and in massive nuclear reactors. But LENR research shows otherwise: Nuclear reactions can also occur in small, benchtop experiments.

The research shows that, unlike fusion or fission, LENRs can release their energy without emitting harmful radiation or greenhouse gases or causing nuclear chain reactions. LENRs show promise of off-grid local-power generation that does not produce greenhouse gases.

 

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