Bill Gates Looks at LENRs

Nov. 14, 2014 – By Steven B. Krivit –

Bill Gates, pioneer in the digital world, is exploring low-energy nuclear reactions (LENRs), the frontier of energy research.

On Wednesday, he visited a small laboratory on the sprawling campus of a government lab in Frascati, just outside of Rome, Italy. The lab is one of several large ones under the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment.

While at ENEA-Frascati, Gates listened to a lecture by ENEA scientist Vittorio Violante and observed LENR experiments in his lab. Gates was there with Lowell Wood, a physicist who once worked with Edward Teller at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Wood is now a professor of physics at the University of Houston.

ENEA-Frascati has been working on thermonuclear fusion research for many years. Gates, too, has had an interest in energy research and has been funding Terrapower, a commercial effort to make a practical traveling-wave nuclear fission reactor.

New Energy Times visited the Frascati LENR laboratory in 2007. Click here for our feature story on their research.

New Energy Times describes LENRs as “laboratory experiments which have the potential to produce nuclear-scale energy and nuclear products but without the harmful effects of conventional nuclear energy. LENRs are weak interactions and neutron-capture processes that occur in nanometer-to-micron-scale regions on surfaces in condensed matter at room temperature. Although nuclear, LENRs are not based on fission or any kind of fusion, both of which primarily involve the strong interaction.”

Aldo Pizzuto (ENEA Director of Fusion Technical Unit), Federico Testa (ENEA Commissioner), Lowell Wood, Bill Gates and Vittorio Violante (seated)

Bill Gates discussing LENRs.

ENEA Press Release

Sept. 14, 2014 – By Steven B. Krivit –

Chase Peterson, a former University of Utah president, died on Sunday. He was 84.

He died of complications from pneumonia, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

Peterson, who served as president from from 1983 to 1991, played a key role in the March 23, 1989, public announcement of room-temperature “fusion” by University of Utah chemist Stanley Pons and University of Southampton visiting professor Martin Fleischmann.

Peterson, along with a team of intellectual property attorneys, coordinated patent applications, a press release, and a press conference to ensure that the university would retain rights to Fleischmann and Pons’ research.

The University of Utah team had been worried that physicist Steven Earl Jones, at nearby Brigham Young University, was trying to pirate the Fleischmann-Pons discovery and steal not only their thunder but also their claim of priority.

Peterson and his staff pre-empted Jones with a press release and news conference that triggered one of the most chaotic and controversial science stories the world has ever seen.

In March 1990, in his eagerness to promote “cold fusion” research in Utah, Peterson arranged for an anonymous donation to the University of Utah’s newly established National Cold Fusion Institute, in the hopes of attracting outside investment. When faculty members later learned that the donation did not, in fact, come from external funding but from the university itself, they protested.

On June 4, 1990, the Deseret News, wrote that the “academic senate called into question Peterson’s ability to lead the university.”

“In an overwhelming vote,” the News wrote, “the senate passed a resolution asking the state Board of Regents and the University Institutional Council whether it was in the best interest of the university for Peterson to continue at the helm.”

A week later, Petersen announced that he would retire during the following academic year.

Fleischmann died in 2012. Pons, who has declined all media requests since 2004, is believed to be living in southern France.

The idea of “cold fusion” — positively charged atomic nuclei joining together at room temperature — has long been discredited. However, new insight in the last decade reveals that there was, and still is, a valid underlying nuclear process to Pons and Fleischmann’s discovery, though it has nothing to do with fusion.*

* Krivit, Steven B., “ENERGY: Review of Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions,” Reference Module in Chemistry, Molecular Sciences and Chemical Engineering, Reedijk, Jan (Ed.), Elsevier, Waltham, Mass, ISBN: 978-0-12-409547-2

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May 7, 2014 – By Steven B. Krivit –

On May 6, the U.S. Global Change Research Program released its Third National Climate Assessment, a comprehensive report on climate change and its impact in the United States. The news is not good.

But the good news is that interest in the potential of greenhouse-gas-free low-energy nuclear reaction-based energy alternatives will grow.

All indicators suggest that LENRs may offer a radiation- and emission-free nuclear energy source, pending further development and effective scale-up. As the price for pollution caused by carbon-based energy sources goes up, and as social awareness rises, so too will investment in LENRs. Click here to learn more about LENRs.

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