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 »

June 5, 2019 — By Steven B. Krivit —

Fifth in a Series of Articles on the Rutherford Nitrogen-to-Oxygen Transmutation Myth

This Saturday, the University of Manchester will host a one-day meeting titled “Centenary of Transmutation.” The purpose of the meeting is to “celebrate the centenary of the first experiments to successfully transmute one element into another.”

The meeting has been organized by the U.K. Institute of Physics History of Physics Group and the Royal Society of Chemistry, based on the long-held incorrect belief that, in 1919, at the University of Manchester, Rutherford had transmuted nitrogen into oxygen. This transmutation claim has been one of the longest-standing myths in the history of modern physics.

Sir Ernest Rutherford

According to the organizers, the meeting marks “100 years since publication of ‘Collision of Alpha-Particles with Light Atoms: I, II, III, IV,’ by Ernest Rutherford, June 1919” and is intended to “celebrate the centenary of Rutherford’s discovery of artificial transmutation by collision of alpha-particles with nitrogen.”

But the organizers, like most people in the past 70 years, were mistaken about this history. By now, however, most of the meeting organizers and top university officials know that the transmutation discovery belongs to Patrick Blackett, not Rutherford, that those experiments took place at the University of Cambridge, not the University of Manchester, and that they were published in 1925, not 1919. Some of these people have known for two years.

Continue reading »