New Energy Times made some inquiries, and the inside story suggests a very different picture.

First, let’s review some background information, most of which appears on the main New Energy Times Web site.

For the last 23 years, researchers around the world have attempted to perform LENR experiments to either demonstrate nuclear-scale excess heat or obtain other more-direct nuclear signatures. Most of the researchers who started this inquiry in 1989 thought the underlying process was some kind of “cold fusion.”

But a careful study of the experiments and a comprehensive theory published in 2006 by Allan Widom, a condensed matter physicist with Northeastern University, and Lewis Larsen, chief executive officer of Lattice Energy LLC, showed that LENRs have almost nothing to do with fusion.

However, the cold fusion believers strongly resisted giving up their old paradigm. They knew that LENR heavy-element transmutations disproved the idea of “cold fusion,” and many of them explicitly avoided searching for these signatures.

In 2006, when Widom and Larsen published their theory, the pair became persona non grata among the older group of cold fusion believers. But people outside of the field, at NASA, IBM, CERN, and Johns Hopkins University, were very supportive. The Widom-Larsen theory proposes a novel method for enhancement of surface plasmon polaritons to initiate and sustain LENRs.

NASA, in particular, was attracted to LENRs because of their potential for an ideal energy source for aerospace: high fuel density, high power rate and lack of need for radiation shielding.

In September 2011, NASA held a LENR Innovation Forum workshop at its Glenn Research Center. In fact, NASA had explored LENRs many years earlier, as the Fralick slides from the workshop show.

Bring the clock forward to Jan. 12, 2012. NASA released a short promotional video titled “Method for Enhancement of Surface Plasmon Polaritons to Initiate and Sustain LENR” on NASA’s Technology Gateway Web site. Some of the statements made in the video were peculiar, and we ran a short news story on it on Jan. 13.

Here are some key points excerpted from our story:

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Two scientists at NASA’s Langley Research Center, Dennis Bushnell and Joseph Zawodny, saw the promise of the Widom-Larsen ultra-low-momentum neutron theory of LENRs.

For several years, Bushnell and Zawodny spoke favorably and enthusiastically about the Widom-Larsen theory as well as LENR in general.

[On Jan. 12], Larsen told New Energy Times that he spoke with both NASA employees by phone to help them learn about LENRs and his theory.

“I spent six months tutoring Zawodny so he had the basics of the theory,” Larsen said.

Larsen told New Energy Times that Bushnell and Zawodny also led [Larsen] to believe that NASA might provide some funding for his company [Lattice Energy LLC].

“In a series of telephone calls I had during the spring and summer of 2008 with Zawodny and Bushnell, they dangled a carrot ­- the possibly of significant funding from NASA,” Larsen said. “I told them that I was wiling to teach them the basic physics but I would not transfer Lattice’s proprietary knowledge about how to use nanotechnology to improve the reliability of LENRs without having a contract.

“I told them, ‘Under contract, I will show you how to make transmutations every time, but I will not show you how to reliably make large amounts of heat.’

“In January 2009, after an internal NASA meeting, Bushnell and Zawodny informed Lattice that they would not be funding us but they would welcome any free advice we wanted to offer NASA. We declined.”
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The core of the Widom-Larsen theory is that it describes a novel method for producing heavy electrons, which then are used to produce neutrons. Larsen filed a patent application based on the theory in 2005, and the application published in 2007. On Feb. 22, 2011, the U.S. Patent and Trademark office issued patent 7,893,414 to Lattice Energy.

But in March 2010, 14 months after NASA told Larsen it would not offer Lattice any funding, Zawodny, on behalf of the U.S. government, filed a provisional U.S. patent application for a “Method for Producing Heavy Electrons.” Zawodny cited the pending Lattice patent as well as the Widom-Larsen theory in his application. Remember that Lattice’s patent application went public in 2007, but Lattice’s patent had not yet been granted.

Now let’s come back to the Jan. 12, 2012, video produced and published by NASA. At the end of the video, the narrator restates the title as “NASA’s Method for Enhancement of Surface Plasmon Polaritons to Initiate and Sustain LENR in Metal Hydride Systems.”

Even though the NASA video states the essential aspect of the Widom-Larsen theory, when Zawodny appears in this video, he mentions nothing of the Widom-Larsen theory or Larsen’s concept of how surface plasmon polaritons are a primary key to initiate LENRs. In fact, NASA’s video states that the idea is theirs.

At the time, we sent Zawodny an e-mail and asked for an explanation of the omission. He responded and said that the intended audience was not interested in that level of detail.

The next day, on Jan. 14, 2012, Zawodny posted an article on his blog with a more detailed explanation about why NASA’s video failed to credit and recognize the Widom-Larsen theory.

“When I talk to my family, friends, or neighbors about some of my work,” Zawodny wrote, “I do not cite Widom-Larsen Theory or any of their papers. There would be little point in doing so.”

But NASA’s video is not directed at Zawodny’s family, friends, or neighbors.

In his blog article, Zawodny reiterated, as he had done in several public presentations in earlier years, his enthusiasm and optimism for the Widom-Larsen theory.

Zawodny’s article also contained an unusual disclaimer.

“While I do work for NASA, I do not speak for them,’ Zawodny wrote. “They employ me for my professional capabilities and on occasion my professional opinion. Nothing I say should ever be construed as anything other than my personal opinion.”

Oddly, the video was published on a NASA Web site, contained NASA’s logo, discussed NASA, and was produced by NASA.

In the new video, which prominently mentions the Widom-Larsen theory, Zawodny states that he “had been working with Larsen.”

New Energy Times sent an e-mail to Zawodny today and asked whether he would agree to a short phone interview.

“Nope,” Zawodny wrote.

Larsen, however, did agree to a phone interview.

Larsen told New Energy Times today that neither Larsen nor his company, Lattice Energy LLC, ever had a formal relationship with either NASA or Zawodny. Larsen went into more detail about his history with NASA.

“Around December 2008, after I had spent months tutoring Zawodny,” Larsen said, “Zawodny called me up and said, ‘I finally feel like I’ve got a grasp on all the basic physics. The physics are correct as far as I can tell. We’ve met with NASA management about all this and it went very well.  They have instructed me to get the lawyers involved to draw up a contract on this at best speed.’”

Around that time, Bushnell got more involved, Larsen said.

Larsen reiterated that NASA told him in 2008 that it would be in a position to fund Lattice and give his company credibility if Larsen gave NASA the basic physics.

“Bushnell said, ‘We can give Lattice the Good Housekeeping seal of approval,’” Larsen said.

He said NASA made multiple attempts to get him to divulge sensitive engineering details that he intends to use in the development of commercial LENR devices as heat sources. But Larsen refused.

“I told them that I would not give them engineering details about how to make a heat-producing device that was optimized for heat production,” he said, “but I would be happy to tell them how to make transmutations repeatedly.”

But NASA wasn’t interested in learning how to use LENR transmutation experiments as a way to test the theory, Larsen said.

In January 2009, Zawodny contacted Larsen and, to Larsen’s great surprise, told him that NASA was not, in fact, going to offer Lattice any funding.

Zawodny said that NASA was, however, going to do an experiment within three to six months that would attempt to confirm the theory and that NASA would attempt to publish the results in a peer-reviewed journal.

Zawodny told Larsen that Lattice could advise NASA for free if it wished but that Larsen would have no control over the design or execution of the experiments.

Two years later, Zawodny’s Sept. 22, 2011, workshop slides show that NASA designed and set up an experiment in August 2011. NASA has yet to report whether it ran such an experiment and, if so, what result it found.

In the May 23, 2012, video from NASA, Zawodny states that he and NASA are trying to perform a physics experiment to confirm the Widom-Larsen theory. He mentions nothing about the laboratory work that NASA may have performed in August 2011. Larsen told New Energy Times his opinion about this new video.

“NASA’s implication that their claimed experimental work or plans for such work might be in any way a definitive test of the Widom-Larsen theory is nonsense,” Larsen said.

“The moment NASA filed a competing patent, it disqualified itself as a credible independent evaluator of the Widom-Larsen theory,” he said. “Lattice Energy is a small, privately held company in Chicago funded by insiders and two angel investors, and we have proprietary knowledge.

“NASA offered us nothing, and now, backed by the nearly unlimited resources of the federal government, NASA is clearly eager to get into the LENR business any way it can.”

New Energy Times asked Larsen for his thoughts about the potential outcome of any NASA experiment to test the theory, assuming details are ever released.

“NASA is behaving no differently than a private-sector commercial competitor,” Larsen said. “If NASA were a private-sector company, why would anyone believe anything that it says about a competitor?”

Resources:

Link to NASA’s May 23, 2012, Video

NASA’s Description of the Video
At Langley, we’re not just working on innovative solutions for today. We’re also looking ahead at the technical challenges we’ll all face in the future. The purpose of the Center Innovation Fund is to stimulate and encourage creativity and innovation within the NASA Centers in addressing the technology needs of NASA and the nation. Funds are distributed to each NASA Center to support emerging technologies and creative initiatives that leverage Center talent and capabilities.

Transcript (by New Energy Times) of NASA’s Video
I’m working on a form of nuclear power that’s apparently very clean and very scalable. In working here at NASA, you’re exposed to a lot of different things and I became aware of a new theory, the Widom-Larsen theory three years ago now, that appears to explain why you can use the weak force to get at nuclear power in a completely different way.

I had been working with Lewis Larsen, one of the authors of the paper, to understand the theory. The way that were looking at this is to take and add just a neutron to an element, increase its mass slightly. There’s binding energy that’s released in the form of nuclear energy. The key here is, how to produce the neutron? That’s the exciting thing that’s been becoming more and more evident in the work from the past 20 years that people have done worldwide.

What we are trying to do is a physics experiment, to understand whether the Widom-Larsen theory and its predictions, at least in part, correct. We made a little device, a centimeter and a half wide by 2 cm long comprised of these little tiles. Each tile is a separate test device and we have 48 different experiments that we can run simultaneously. We run an experiment on this entire thing and we see how this square compares to the one next to it, and so it becomes a differential measurement. The tolerances for making a good differential measurement are greatly reduced. The other thing is uniformity. We process this device the same and it accelerates the science that we do it makes it easier. The interpretation of the data is much more direct and the criticisms that have been levied against previous attempts aren’t valid in this case.

We got to work with a small company on a study to see whether we could do something that’s been desirable by NASA for a long time. It’s a single stage fully reusable space plane, a rocket, something that could take up a reasonable size payload to orbit and return without shedding any parts.

So when you think — when you fully grasp what this represents; a very inexpensive, clean form of power — if we were to have such a thing it would be the sort of technology that would fuel our future growth and expansion and have the ability to raise the standard of living in the entire world.

Princeton University has agreed to reimburse $1 million to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) following a report by the DOE inspector general (IG) on a program at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) under which employees were assigned to work for extended periods of time at other U.S. laboratories engaged in fusion energy research. The University manages PPPL under a contract with the DOE.

- Outlines a hypothetical Widom-Larsen Theory LENR neutron-catalyzed transmutation network that produces stable gold and platinum end-products from tungsten ‘seed’ scrap metal

- Presents published third-party data which strongly suggests that W–> Au precious metals production by WLT LENR transmutations has been observed in laboratory experiments dating back to the 1920s and is also operating on earth in nature.

-Hydrothermal vent systems appear to be one example of a natural environment in which LENR W –> Au networks have likely operated in the distant past as well as in the present era

- Based on published data, it appears that natural W –> Au LENR transmutations may occur in Nature both abiotically and/or perhaps even biologically with certain species of bacteria

- Speculative analysis of the potential economics of future W –> Au ‘transmutation factories’ for production of precious metals such as gold and platinum suggests that, if present relative price relationship of tungsten vs. gold and platinum were to continue into the future, ‘conversion’ of tungsten into precious metals has the potential to become a highly profitable business activity. If such processes can be scaled-up volume-wise and production costs reduced further by riding the “experience curve,” LENRs might compete with conventional mining within 10 – 15 years.

P.S. If you like rock and roll, be sure to see the last slide.

At the time I rejected book writing, I was watching my dad go through a grueling, angst-filled process as he wrote and self-published a book in 1974. Last year, I decided to electronically re-publish his book, The Ruling Minority 1974.

Cover of The Ruling Minority, 2nd Ed.

The inspiration for the re-publication of the book came from two significant and highly visible political protest movements that emerged in 2011. The first occurred in several nations in the Arab world. Social consciousness combined with social media gave rise to a rapid cultural awakening. Passionate activists took to the streets against oppressive regimes which abused power and treated them brutally. Some of these rebellions were successful; some were not. All were bloody.

The second movement took place in the United States. It was equally intense, but its target was less obvious. It did not hold accountable any specific person or institution. It addressed the broad inequities placed on its citizens by a specific class of people. The U.S. movement identified this class as the “1%.” The 1 percent is the small sector of the population which controls vast resources and industrial and political power in the U.S. The movement awakened the American public to the fact that it had allowed the creation of a structure, and a class, that the U.S. economic system seems to be favoring at the great expense of the rest of its citizens.

Political protests are nothing new, but this was the first time that American society had recognized and identified the 1 percent and its counterpart, the 99 percent, as well as acknowledging how the two classes developed. More precisely, it was the first time since 1974, when this book was written, slightly ahead of its time.

I am by no means an expert in economics and politics, but I am happy to share this book with any readers interested in these topics.

Ritter also discussed LENR excess heat research, but little progress has been made in this LENR discipline for nearly a decade. Much more progress has been made in particle detection, transmutations and theory. Readers wishing to learn more about the state of the field may want to read the interview I provided for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity or go back to my 2010 Issue #35.

I am working on several very interesting low-energy nuclear reaction news stories and science investigations and can’t wait to share them with you. But first, a major update to the New Energy Times Web site is under way. Thanks for your patience.

We are looking for a new banner image (background, no text) for our site. If you are graphically inclined and want to offer a design that captures the spirit of this energy research, please contact me.

LENR going back one century:

The Transmutation of Hydrogen to Helium & Neon
Sir William Ramsay, J.J. Thomson, John N. Collie, Hubert S. Patterson and Irvine Masson.

The Decomposition of Tungsten to Helium
Gerald L. Wendt and Clarence E. Irion

"I am puzzled about why you didn’t mention the Widom-Larsen theory," Marshall wrote. "If the theory is correct, then there is a clear path to technology."

I did not mention WLT because I was asked questions about the field in general, so my answers were about the field in general.

I have been writing favorably about WLT for half a decade now, and Larsen, in particular, seems to have a very clear understanding of how LENR works.

In 2007, as well as in 2012, I made extensive efforts to survey LENR theories. Larsen is the only one I found who can clearly and coherently explain what appears to be going on. WLT is also the only LENR theory that has favorable independent reviews.

LENR heavyweight Michael McKubre, an electrochemist at SRI International, said last year that his friend and colleague Peter Hagelstein, an MIT associate professor of electrical engineering, had the best LENR theory. From what I can tell, Hagelstein has hundreds of ideas but no theory. Despite his efforts, he has yet to come up with a simple explanation of the mechanics to explain LENR from start to finish.

On the other hand, if you look at the volume and depth of what Larsen has written and published through his Slideshare site, his grasp of LENR is obvious. He is probably the most likely person to be able to bring the science into a technology.

However, most of the the people in the field have done everything they can to impede the progress that Larsen has offered not only for his personal benefit but also for the field. Larsen’s idea was as disruptive as they come: "Cold fusion" is certainly nuclear, but it has almost nothing to do with fusion. At first, other people in the field tried to ignore his idea. Then they mocked it. Then they tried to discredit it. Then they tried to copy it.

John Fisher, an independent theorist who has proposed a non-fusion, neutron-based LENR explanation, wrote something profound four years ago. Although I do not have nearly as much confidence in Fisher’s theory as I do in WLT, I do think he had the integrity and wisdom to pinpoint the problem.

In 2008, Fisher wrote to New Energy Times.

“In my opinion, [LENR] has been crippled by wide acceptance of the belief that deuterium fusion of some sort is responsible for energy generation, and by rejection of alternative [proposed] mechanisms,” Fisher wrote. “Progress is stunted when we reject a mechanism, because we then fail to undertake the experiments it suggests.”

“What is your current overall opinion of the reality of low-energy nuclear reactions and their prospects for commercially useful applications?”

My opinion of the reality of LENR has not wavered since 2003: It is important, it is real science and it could be a world-changing energy technology. But LENR has a long way to go before it is a practical technology. The science must be understood first, and, in general, it is not.

For 23 years, a variety of companies, most of them no longer in existence, have claimed to be very close to a practical technology.

If people are promoting a working technology, great. They should sell products. Otherwise, they are only attempting to lure investors or government bureaucrats to fund a technology they might develop into a practical reality. An example in the private sector: Blacklight Power. An example in the public sector: the entire thermonuclear fusion industry.

When I worked in the computer industry, we called perennially promised but undelivered products vaporware. We could use a similar term for that in the energy business.

Someone sent me another related question today:

“I have some contacts with a university that is investigating the possibility of being able to make experimental tests of various technologies in the context of low-energy nuclear reactions. They asked me to propose two or three technologies to work on. Do you have any other proposal in this regard?”

Until researchers learn how to control the LENR materials on an atomic level, using nanotechnology, and obtain access to the tools required to do so, spending time on poorly reproducible experiments in a search for excess heat will be ineffective.

Reproducible experiments include the co-deposition experiment developed by the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego and the transmutation experiments developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.  A well- equipped university laboratory can get started with the SPAWAR experiment for less than $1,000. The Mitsubishi experiment costs a few million.

Effective searches to gain scientific knowledge and understanding of LENR include searches for elemental transmutations, isotopic anomalies, surface anomalies and particle detection.