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.

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 »