Thanks to Gerard McEk for posting a link to this edition of the Tech Talks Daily Podcast in which Neil C. Hughes interviews Laurence Forsley, senior experimental physicist with NASA, research fellow at the University of Texas, and CTO of Global Energy Corporation. He is a long time cold fusion/LENR researcher who is one of members of the NASA-funded team who have recently published papers about a process they call ‘lattice confinement fusion’ in which excess heat production and elemental transmutation have been observed.
When asked about why cold fusion was considered not possible by the scientific establishment, Forsley explains that it has taken thirty years to understand how the so-called “cold fusion” reaction is possible, and that the reaction had it’s roots in the 1920s. He states:
“Those observations were themselves withdrawn because of incomplete knowledge. The view being quantum mechanics makes this impossible, therefore it didn’t happen. But we missed a few things.”
Forsley says that in terms of funding research in this field his group has been funded by NASA and that now governments are now “nibbling at the edges”:
“The need is great, the promise is phenomenal, but there’s also a lot of pushback, because as you noted, there’s a lot of concern that this can’t possibly be true.”
When asked to explain lattice confinement fusion he explained:
“What you’ve got is a metal lattice, the papers we’ve published happen to use titanium, and one used erbium. We have deuterium in there which is a heavy isotope of hydrogen – instead of one proton, it’s a proton plus a neutron – and we can pack those in there with a density that is basically denser than solid matter (if you had solid deuterium). What happens then is, these still don’t like each other, positive charges, so if you can imagine having two magnets with the plusses facing each other. When you squeeze them together they move apart. Because of the inherent electrons from the titanium or erbium present, or in palladium, there is a greater possibility that these two plusses get canceled by the local negative electrons.
In fact the way I look at this, it’s sort of like the difference between the hot fusion and the cold fusion, so to speak. Hot fusion is like karate. You have to force the atoms close enough, and the strong nuclear force pulls them together, despite those positive charges. Whereas what we’re doing in lattice confinement fusion (or the mis-named cold fusion) is more like aikido, we’re using the blending off the electron shielding to hide the nuclei’s charges from each other, and blend them together, and we get fusion out.”
Forsley says it is only question of money and time as to whether and when this technology can be developed into commercial products. He thinks that energy production technology based on these reactions could lead to decentralized power production and even integration of energy production into consumer products.
The full interview is here: