June 6, 2017 – By Steven B. Krivit –

Theorist Lewis Larsen, co-developer of the Widom-Larsen theory of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENRs), recently discovered a favorable Department of Defense evaluation of his and Allan Widom’s LENR theory.

Larsen told New Energy Times that he found the document, an official U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency report, on the Homeland Security Digital Library Web site while carrying out a random Internet search in May.

The report was produced in March 2010, when two physicists, Edward Toton and George Ullrich, under contract with the Advanced Systems and Concepts Office, a think tank that is part of the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency, favorably analyzed Larsen and Widom’s theory.

Toton is a consultant with a long history in defense-related research, and Ullrich was, at the time, a senior vice president for Advanced Technology and Programs with Science Applications International Corp.

Toton and Ullrich summarized their evaluation with a question: “Could the Widom-Larsen theory be the breakthrough needed to position LENR as a major source of carbon-free, environmentally clean source of source of low-cost nuclear energy??”

Larsen spoke with the two physicists from 2007 to 2010 to help them understand key details of his and Widom’s theory of LENRs.

The authors summarized their evaluation in a slide presentation on March 31, 2010, in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Their slides were geared toward a technical audience and included, with acknowledgments, some information and graphics taken directly from Larsen’s slides, originally published on SlideShare.

The Toton-Ullrich summary does an excellent job of distilling Larsen’s explanation of why LENR experiments produce few long-lived radioactive isotopes:

• In surface patches that experience large fluxes of ULM neutrons, populations of neutron-rich “halo” nuclei will build up.
• The half-lives of these nuclei are longer than they would be if isolated because they are unable to emit beta-electrons or shed neutrons into unoccupied states in the local continuum.
• The cessation of ULM neutron production will trigger serial cascades of fast beta-decays from neutron-rich into stable isotopes.
• Few long-lived radioisotopes remain after this process has run its course.

March 13, 2017 – By Steven B. Krivit –

A Japanese government Web site confirms that two of Japan’s largest automobile manufacturers are participating in the government’s multi-year low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) research program, first reported by New Energy Times in 2015.

The New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), a Japanese government research and development agency, operates the Web site. LENR advocate Jed Rothwell, who speaks Japanese, found the Web page with the update today. (PDF Archive)

Japan is the first nation in two decades to make a substantial commitment to this research, which offers vast, unexplored opportunities in energy and materials science.

The participants in the government-sponsored program include Technova, a member of the Toyota Motor Corp. family of businesses, Nissan Motor Co., and four universities, Tohoku, Kyushu, Nagoya and Kobe.

Meanwhile, progress in LENR research in the U.S. has been delayed, the result of a lingering stigma created by science authorities tasked by the U.S. Department of Energy who, in March and April 1989, bet against confirmation of a new nuclear process, as explained in the 2016 book Hacking the Atom.

When confirmatory experimental results were reported in the summer of 1989, some people in the government science establishment went to great lengths to ignore and dismiss the data. The 2016 book Fusion Fiasco explains precisely and for the first time how this scientific cover-up happened and who was responsible.