Marianne Marcy of Infinite Energy Magazine has conducted an interview with Tom Darden of Cherokee/Industial Heat at the ICCF-19 conference in Padua. It’s a long interview that covers quite a lot of ground, and Darden talks a lot about his background and environmental philosophy, and there are interesting areas concerning LENR. Here are few excerpts I found interesting.
The full article can be found here: http://infinite-energy.com/images/pdfs/DardenInterview.pdf
About getting into LENR and the risks involved:
“I talked to some really smart people who are involved in it. I was thinking, “You’ve got to be kidding!” and I came away and said, “There’s enough reality there that I’m willing to take a technical risk . . .
“The good thing is there has been so little in the way of resources in LENR that people have figured out how to do things very cheaply. If people are able to build successful replicable multiple devices that can operate for a while, and don’t appear to cost much, that was enough in my mind. They weren’t made of Unobtanium, or some hyper expensive material that was impossible to deal with”
Regarding funding, Marianne asks if he’s invested his own money in IH:
“Oh, yeah. I’ve been the primary funder. I think there probably are a lot of people out there like me. Clearly
there are. You read in the newspaper about Bill Gates, people with massive wealth and the Giving Pledge or whatnot. Look at what they are doing with their resources.”
About whether he saw compelling evidence before making the decision to invest in the E-Cat:
“Yes. We saw stuff that was compelling . . . We’ve seen a number of tests and we’ve had a lot of people looking at tests. Of course outsiders have looked at tests. I think particularly the transmutation data is very compelling.
I felt very good about that, better than any outlet of test data I’d seen . . . We’ve seen some really good stuff. We want to support Andrea in his research however we best can.”
About working with Rossi:
“Rossi is a smart guy. The thing I’ve always been interested in Andrea is how intensely theoretical he is. I’m not smart enough to know what theories are right. People have a visualization of things they can’t see. I have no earthy idea if what they are seeing is correct. I had assumed he was more of an experimenter, a tinkerer, trying this and this and this, in more of a random fashion. But not at all. He is laser like in his attention He is very theoretical, very knowledgeable. He’s hard working and driven and we’re pleased with the investment.”
About media attention, and coming forward publicly at this time:
“No! I don’t ever want to see that. The idea of just having to work on things in a fishbowl; I don’t see it. People who do that sort of thing either want to do that because they are trying to sell their product, so you can see why consumer facing companies want to do that. Or they’re going public. Or they’re raising money so they need a presence in the public markets. Or they want it, ego or whatever. That’s the way they are. None of those apply. I don’t want it and we don’t want to raise investor interest or look as if we’re trolling and we don’t have something to sell.”
There’s a lot more. My overall impression from reading the interview is that Tom Darden is a very deliberative person and is thinking carefully and patiently as he plans ahead for how to implement the technology under his control. He mentions that he thinks patience is a virtue and that it is important to take the time needed to get things ready, and as far as his vision of how the ecosystem he mentioned in his talk would work, where people could contribute and collaborate, and get justly rewarded — Darden states that they do not have that worked out yet — this is something they are exploring and something they want to consult with scientists about.