New Energy News (September 2000)
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | New Energy News (September 2000) |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Patrick G Bailey |
| Keywords | New Energy |
| Published | 2000 |
| Journal | New Energy News |
| Volume | 7 |
| Number | 4 |
| No. of pages | 12 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Overview
This is not a research paper but a complete issue of the newsletter of the Institute for New Energy — New Energy News, Volume 7, Number 4, ISSN 1075-0045, September 2000, edited by Patrick G Bailey. It opens with an editor's note announcing that from this issue onward NEN will be distributed by email in two forms, plain ASCII and PDF, with a mailed Adobe Acrobat CD-ROM offered to subscribers without internet access for $2 postage. The remainder is a compilation of forwarded news items, contributed reports and event announcements, each credited to whoever sent it in.
As a document its interest is documentary rather than scientific: it is a snapshot of what the new-energy community was reading and circulating in autumn 2000. The mix is characteristic — a patent-office employment case treated as a proxy for institutional suppression, a Russian over-unity claim posted to a mailing list, a trip report on a rotating machine in India, and, alongside these, straight wire-service coverage of hydrogen fuel cells and nuclear-waste encapsulation that has nothing unorthodox about it at all. Nothing in the issue is peer-reviewed and nothing carries error bars.
Contents of the issue
The EEOC ruling and the "Robert Park" list
The lead item, credited to Richard Shamp of Washington D.C. and drawn from a Washington Post story of 23 August 2000, reports that a patent examiner fired from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office appealed through the Commerce Department to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which "did not rule as to whether the technology of cold fusion was scientifically correct or not but did rule that the Commerce Department acted improperly."
The item then attributes the firing to complaints from Robert Park, described as "a self-proclaimed spokesman for the American Physical Society", and gives an eight-point list of things Park is said to have accomplished: DOE refusal to fund any cold fusion project; cancellation of a contract awarded to Professor George H Miley; withdrawal of a patent awarded to Dr Randell L Mills; the firing itself; a PTO policy against issuing cold fusion patents (with the comparison that "In Japan over 200 have issued"); the resignation of several APS members including a Nobel laureate; and "the denial of constitutional rights to hundreds of serious inventors to be allowed to protect their intellectual property." The eighth point is unusual for being conceded against interest: "Possibly, saving the government from investing in a non-viable technology, but we do not know of any such case." Park's tagline is quoted verbatim — "Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the APS, but they should be."
Reactor accidents, EKOR and Chernobyl
Two nuclear items follow. The first, from a Time Europe piece of 18 September 2000, cites a confidential report prepared for the Russian government stating that over the previous fifty years there had been 384 reactor accidents involving release of radiation, causing 58 deaths and 214 cases of acute radiation poisoning, not counting the loss of the submarine Kursk on 12 August.
The second, from Environment News Service, describes EKOR, a white silicone polymer developed at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow and applied by robots in March 2000 to the largest fuel-containing mass beneath Reactor 4 at Chernobyl. The report notes that previous coatings had disintegrated within three or four months under radiation, that EKOR was certified by the Ukrainian government in August, that the marketing rights were acquired by Eurotech of Washington D.C. at a stated total development cost of about $3 million, and that a more extensive application was planned for October. The item also surveys the wider disposal problem — WIPP in New Mexico as the world's only operating geological repository, taking transuranic but not high-level waste, and the finding that water might reach the containers even at Yucca Mountain.
The INE database appeal
Bailey's own contribution is a request for data. The INE database then listed "over 130 devices", each with its own generated web page following a fixed template, sorted into four ranked lists by device name, inventor name, scientific interest, and readiness for commercialisation. He asks readers to "ADOPT Your Favorite Device and Contribute Data", and notes a planned expansion of the data fields to distinguish "what results the inventor claims and what researchers have actually found" — a distinction the newsletter itself does not always draw. A companion item announces that a member has donated web space so that longer articles, PDFs and black-and-white images can be hosted.
Hydrogen and fuel cells
Two items cover conventional industry news. A PRNewswire release of 13 September 2000 reports Energy Conversion Devices (ticker ENER) and its chairman Robert C. Stempel, formerly chairman and CEO of General Motors, promoting metal-hydride solid hydrogen storage as "the auto industry's game changer"; the release traces the work to Stanford R. and Iris M. Ovshinsky's research from the 1960s, 350 U.S. and 800 foreign patents, their naming as American Chemical Society "Heroes of Chemistry 2000", and thirteen licensees selling nine hundred million NiMH cells in the previous year. Bailey adds his own note that the stock had risen from about $5 in late 1998 to the $35 range, with the warning "watch out — the stock price looks cyclic — over 4 years!" An Associated Press item of 29 September covers Honda's FCX-V3 fuel-cell prototype, tested under the California Fuel Cell Partnership, and reports its limitations candidly: poor cold-weather operation, a 110-mile range, a high-pressure hydrogen tank in the trunk that Honda acknowledged could be dangerous in a collision, and an undisclosed but "extremely expensive" cost, with commercial production targeted for 2003.
Over-unity claims
Two items are over-unity claims. The first is a letter from Balash Ahmadov of Baku, Azerbaijan, forwarded via Jerry Decker of KeelyNet, announcing a "new power amplifier" based on an "Effect Ahmadov" in which "current increase occurs in the circuits", demonstrated on SpaceTV in Azerbaijan on 6 August using "the 'black box' principle". Ahmadov states that he cannot publish a description because of a pending patent — "Therefore no one in the world is able to reproduce my results" — invites doubters to Azerbaijan, and writes that "I have already solved the energy problems of mankind."
The second is a trip report from Toby Grotz on Paramahamsa Tewari's space power generator in India: "9 KW electrical energy in and 9 KW electrical energy out plus 3 - 4 KW heat out. (I squared R loss across the brushes)." Grotz reports that the unit had been funded for three years by Crompton Greaves Ltd., that a manager in their Industrial Systems group had conceded over-unity by email, and that the company was not pursuing it "because they do not see a market for a low voltage high current machine." He also announces a conference Tewari was organising for October 2001, with free lodging at the Nuclear Power Corporation guest house on the Kali river, and closes with an account of visiting Sai Baba's ashram and discussing "God, chakras, the aether, and how the material universe is formed" with security staff at Bangalore airport.
Methane ice, and the announcements
A forwarded email argues that methane hydrate on continental shelves below 600 feet holds more energy than all known oil, coal and natural gas combined, "perhaps even twice as much", and that this explains the absence of energy-shortage talk. It complains that environmentalists ignore methane while "hollering about carbon dioxide", asserts that released methane "quickly decomposes into carbon dioxide", and links to a global-warming sceptic site. A short notice covers the Japan Psychotronics Institute, founded 1977 to study "metal-bending and remote-viewing", contributed by Dr Shiuji Inomata. The issue closes with an announcement of a Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Workshop at College Park, Maryland on 17 November 2000, sponsored by the Integrity Research Institute, with Robert W Bass and George H Miley among the listed speakers. Bass is also credited earlier in the issue with a joke about a management consultant and a shepherd, reprinted in full.
Assessment
Read as what it is — a curated mailing list, not a journal — the issue does some things well. Bailey is explicit that the INE database needs to separate inventor claims from independent findings, which is exactly the right instinct, and the fact that he prints Honda's admissions about range, cold-weather performance and tank placement alongside the promotional PRNewswire copy shows a willingness to run material that cuts against the enthusiasm. The eighth item on the Park list, allowing that suppression might once have saved public money, is a small piece of honesty most polemics would omit. And the Chernobyl and reactor-accident items are ordinary reporting, accurately relayed.
The weaknesses are concentrated in the parts the newsletter is most excited about, and several are checkable from the text itself. The lead item cannot keep its subject straight: the headline announces a ruling in favour of one man, the first sentence names him as the fired examiner, and the third sentence refers instead to "the firing of Thomas Valone" as the action Park procured — two different people in four sentences, with the Post reporter's name also garbled. A reader cannot tell from this item whose case the EEOC actually decided.
Ahmadov's letter contains an outright physical error that needs no outside information to spot. He writes: "if the current begins to increase by 5 times, then the magnetic field in the motor coils also increases by 25 times. These are not theoretical conclusions, this is experimental fact." The magnetic field of a coil is linear in its current — five times the current gives five times the field, not twenty-five. What scales as the square of current is the stored magnetic energy, or the resistive power dissipated; the letter has substituted one for the other, and the squaring is precisely where the apparent gain comes from. Coupled with the refusal to describe the device and the boast that "no one in the world is able to reproduce my results", there is nothing here that could be tested.
The Tewari figures are self-defeating in the same way. Grotz reports 9 kW in, 9 kW electrical out, "plus 3 - 4 KW heat out", and then identifies that heat in his own parenthesis as "(I squared R loss across the brushes)". Brush I2R heating is a dissipative loss: it is energy drawn from the input and thrown away, not a second output stream to be added to the first. Counting it as extra output is what converts a machine that is at best breaking even into an apparent 130–150 per cent efficiency. The one substantive external check offered — that a Crompton Greaves engineer "admitted in an email" the machine was over-unity — is second-hand, unquoted, and immediately undercut by the explanation given for the company walking away, which is a marketing reason rather than a technical one.
Elsewhere the issue passes on claims it has not examined. The remark that "the 300 times light speed experiment was accomplished in ionized cesium" refers to the anomalous-dispersion work in caesium vapour published in Nature in 2000, in which a pulse peak emerged with a negative group velocity; no signal and no energy travelled faster than the speed of light, and the experimenters said so. The methane item asserts that atmospheric methane "quickly decomposes into carbon dioxide", when its atmospheric lifetime is roughly a decade and, over a hundred-year horizon, methane is some tens of times more effective per unit mass as a greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide it eventually becomes — which makes the item's rhetorical point backwards. The claim that hydrate deposits hold perhaps twice the energy of all conventional fossil fuels is in the range of published estimates, but those estimates carry order-of-magnitude uncertainty and say nothing about recoverability, which the item does not mention.
The value of the issue for a reader today is therefore historical. It records who was talking to whom in the field in 2000, what the Institute for New Energy was trying to build, and — in the juxtaposition of the fuel-cell reports with the over-unity reports — how little the newsletter distinguished between engineering that had cost figures and delivery dates attached and claims whose authors declined to say what their device was.