More on LENR at NASA: Bushnell and Zawodny Speak

Two interesting publications have just come out from NASA, one an article, and the other a video showing that NASA recognizes the promise of LENR and is getting involved in understanding what is going on in this field, and how to develop LENR technologies for real world applications.

Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist and NASA’s Langney Research Center has written an article entitled “Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, the Realism and the Outlook” in which he discusses the current state of research in the field of LENR. First, he contends that there is indeed something real going on in the multitudes of experiments that show excess energy being produced.

By any rational measure, this evidence indicates something real is occurring. So, is LENR “Real?” Evidently, from the now long standing and diverse experimental evidence. And, yes – with effects occurring from using diverse materials, methods of energy addition etc. This is far from a “Narrow Band” set of physical phenomena.

He then goes on to ask what is happening in these reactions, and indicates that NASA is attracted to the Widom-Larsen theory as an explanation of what is going on. He summarizes the theory as follows:

The theory states that once some energy is added to load surfaces with hydrogen/protons, if the surface morphology enables high localized voltage gradients, then heavy electrons leading to ultra low energy neutrons will form– neutrons that never leave the surface. The neutrons set up isotope cascades which result in beta decay, heat and transmutations with the heavy electrons converting the beta decay gamma into heat.

Bushnell is careful to say that there is still much research to be done in order to understand LENR phenomena, but says that NASA has begun studies to test the validity of the Widom Larsen theory.

Simultaneous to the release of Bushnell’s article is a video featuring NASA’s Dr. Joseph Zawodny, Senior Research Scientist at Langney Research Center entitled Abundant Clean/Green Energy. Zawodny’s focus in the video is also on the Widom-Larsen theory, and explains how they are trying to test its correctness.

The ultimate goal, according to Zawodny is to find a way to create an inexpensive, clean form of energy which could be used not only by NASA in its space operations, but also something that could provide cheap, abundant energy for the whole world.

With NASA once again coming out with an endorsement of LENR as a potential solution to energy needs, we see that there is some kind of momentum building in the field — perhaps before too long a critical mass will be reached, and there will be a much more widespread acceptance of LENR as an important technological innovation.