An alternative to the alternative of renewable energy – probably…

CBS news last night did a "60 Minutes" programme including a 12 minute feature on Cold Fusion research 20 years on - it's now called LENR (low energy nuclear reactions) or CANR (chemically assisted nuclear reactions). There’s a 15 second advert first before the video (that I’ve embedded below) starts.

I've been following the almost underground pariah science that has been done in this area since 1989 and, as I've mentioned before, I've contributed to a couple of publications about the subject. Cold Fusion is going to get hot again soon. If you want to follow developments, here are links to probably the two best web resources around for a general overview and also detailed scientific papers.

New Energy Times

LENR-CANR.org

CBS’s piece left out probably the “hottest”, most convincing (to sceptics), piece of recent research which was done by the US Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California.The video below is a relatively non technical explanation of  what the SPAWAR centre found – that there is hard evidence of nuclear reactions taking place in the cells beyond the well-established fact that more heat is generated than can be accounted for by the conventional calculations of chemistry. Briefly,they see tracks in a plastic radiation detector (CR39) that are hard to explain without taking them as strong evidence that energetic nuclear particles are formed in the test cells, which should not be there according to conventional nuclear physics.

Cold fusion resurfaces

One of my long term interests apart from environmentalism is the so-called discredited field of cold fusion. Back in 1989, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons at the University of Utah announced the tantalising prospect of abundant, almost-free energy, but their claims of fusion reactions in a tabletop experiment were dismissed by nuclear physicists. Most people forgot about it but a never-say-die contingent of experimental scientists continued to investigate.

There have been thousands of papers published (check out LENR-CANR.ORG for links to 500+) and a number of people have been reporting on progress in the field and being "cold fusion advocates" since 1989. I am one of them and I occasionally do a bit of work for an online e-magazine that follows the topic (NEW ENERGY TIMES) - for a sample issue click here

Anyway, some very reliable experiments have been done over the last few years and a particularly good example has just hit the media which will be hard for mainstream science to ignore. The guardians of scientific orthodoxy have been rubbishing the topic for 20 years. Here's a link to the New Scientist report
Cold fusion resurfaces