New Energy News (September 2001), Special Symposium Issue Part I
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | New Energy News (September 2001), Special Symposium Issue Part I |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Patrick G Bailey |
| Keywords | New Energy |
| Published | 2001 |
| Journal | New Energy News |
| Volume | 8 |
| Number | 9 |
| No. of pages | 21 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Overview
Volume 8, Number 9 of the Institute for New Energy's newsletter is the first part of a double issue put out ahead of the INE/EEMF Symposium of October 2001; a Part II carrying "additional 24 pages" of articles and quotations is announced but not included here. Edited by Patrick G Bailey, the issue runs urgent notices to members, four literature abstracts, six articles, two letters, four meeting announcements and an advertisement.
Its distinguishing feature, and the reason it is worth reading alongside the March and November numbers, is the abstracts section. Where most of New Energy News consists of forwarded web items and conference logistics, this issue opens with three abstracts of papers published in Fusion Technology — a refereed journal — on nuclear anomalies in loaded metals. It is the clearest surviving snapshot of what the low-energy nuclear reaction community regarded as its best-supported work at that moment, and it sits alongside material of a very different evidential character in the same twenty-one pages.
Contents of the issue
Urgent messages
Bailey appeals for device data to complete the INE database before the October meeting, asking that submissions follow the tabular template on the INE site, and notes that contributors may use pseudonyms and withhold data "if deemed necessary" — the point being "to get the ideas and results into the database so that they can be seen and acted upon". A second notice restricts all INE and NEN email to short text: attachments and long messages will be deleted unread on the host server, and longer files should be posted on disk. Bailey adds that he wraps his own in tin foil "for EM protection". A third points readers to the Yahoo free-energy message group.
Abstracts
Four literature notices open the technical content.
Hideo Kozima and colleagues at Osaka, Yokohama National University and the Materials and Energy Research Institute Tokyo, writing in Fusion Technology 40(1), analyse E. Botta et al.'s observation of 4He generation from a palladium sheet in D2 gas using the trapped neutron catalyzed fusion (TNCF) model. Their proposed mechanism is explicitly not direct d–d fusion but reactions between a trapped neutron and a palladium isotope, with the supplemental assumption of reduced (n,α) threshold energies in solids. The model's single adjustable parameter, the trapped-neutron density nn, comes out at about 1012 cm−3, "consistent with values determined in analyses of data in various events in the cold fusion phenomenon".
J. Dufour, D. Murat, X. Dufour and J. Foos of the Laboratoire des Sciences Nucléaires in Paris report a highly exothermal reaction in uranium which they argue "can only be of nuclear origin", and stress that it cannot be deuterium fusion because only exceedingly small amounts of deuterium are present. They read this as evidence that hydrogen can trigger reactions involving lattice nuclei, yielding a fission-like product pattern, and propose that the fusion-like patterns of cold-fusion experiments and the fission-like patterns of LENR experiments are "two aspects of the same phenomenon", mediated by a hypothetical proton/electron resonance acting as a neutron sink. A programme of tests is proposed.
Lino Daddi of the Gruppo Fisica, Accademia Navale, Livorno, addresses experiments in which intense electron fluxes met high proton concentrations. Two anomalies were observed: electron energies often below threshold, and unexpectedly high cross-sections. He suggests a twofold mechanism of "hydrogen squeezed atom formation" and virtual neutron absorption, extended also to d + e reactions.
A fourth notice summarises Tom Valone's Future Energy newsletter on a DOE study forecasting that the gap between energy demand and production will double in twenty years.
Articles
The lead article is the preliminary programme for the October INE/EEMF conference at the Quality Inn City Center, Salt Lake City, listing eleven papers; the final programme and the conference report appear two issues later, in the November number.
"First Zero Point Patent" reports U.S. Patent 5,590,031, issued to Frank Mead of Edwards Air Force Base on 31 December 1996, for spherical receivers intended to access zero point electromagnetic radiation. The article notes the frequencies involved — Mead is said to grapple with values up to 1040 Hz, against 1010 Hz for gigahertz radar, 1014 Hz for visible light and 1020 Hz for gamma rays. It goes on to assert that Nikola Tesla "was the first human on planet earth to build a zero point energy-receiving device", used to power an electric Pierce-Arrow, and quotes Marc Millis of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics programme: "Electromagnetism is also suggested as a target phenomenon for space drive research because of ZPF."
A further item announces the Motion Sciences Organization, formed from the California Institute for Physics and Astrophysics and Joseph Firmage's International Space Sciences Organization, with Creon Levit as Director of Experimental Research and associates including the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin and Daniel Cole's group at Boston University. Others cover Blue Energy Canada's Davis Hydro Turbine, designed by Barry Davis and supported by six prototypes funded by the Canadian National Research Council; Japan's Rapid-L reactor, a 200-kilowatt sodium-cooled design conceived for lunar colonies that replaces control rods with reservoirs of molten lithium-6 expanding into a central tube as the core warms; and a satellite survey suggesting global deforestation is worse than reported.
Letters
The first letter, from B. Nurnberger in Yokohama, forwards material on David Hudson's "M-state" or ORMUS materials: monatomic and diatomic elements said to have all their electrons Cooper-paired and unavailable as valence electrons, and therefore to be room-temperature superconductors exhibiting "anomalous responses to gravity", superfluidity, "tunneling through solid objects" and "deformed nuclei in a high-spin state". Bailey appends a note that he was Hudson's personal science advisor for about a year.
The second is from Harold Aspden, responding to a report in Asahi Shimbun of a 400 km vortex in the Pacific south of Okinawa, rotating clockwise at 1.8 km/h, with water 2–3 degrees warmer and the surface 18 cm higher than normal, for which "scientists have no explanation". Aspden offers one: what he calls aether spin. A whirlpool in salt water sets up an electric field radial from the spin axis; the aether reacts by developing its own spin to cancel that field, "a special property akin to Maxwell charge displacement but effective only where the field action is radial from an axis of spin", and depending on the inclination between the whirlpool's spin vector and that of the cosmic background. Because the whirlpool's axis is not parallel to the background axis, that angle changes daily, and "the zero-point vacuum field imports an equal amount of energy for every cycle of this action", shed as heat. He states that his website treats the case quantitatively.
Meetings
The meetings section carries the INE Symposium 2001 details, the postponement of the SPG conference with a note that current measurements of Tewari's space power generator show "3,000 watts excess energy" against 9,000 watts DC in and 9,000 watts DC out, ICCF-9 at Tsinghua University in Beijing for May 2002, the 9th Russian Conference on Cold Nuclear Transmutation at Dagomys, and a St Petersburg congress on "Fundamental Problems of Natural Sciences and Engineering" whose planned sections include etherdynamics, electrodynamics and gravity, and "time and space in genuine universe".
Assessment
The abstracts section is the strongest material the newsletter carried in 2001, and it deserves to be separated from the rest. The Kozima and Dufour papers appeared in a refereed journal, state a mechanism, and — crucially — make claims that could fail. Kozima's TNCF model is unusual among cold-fusion accounts in fitting a single parameter across many experiments and reporting the value, so that inconsistency between datasets would show up as a spread in nn; Dufour's argument that the uranium result cannot be deuterium fusion because there is scarcely any deuterium present is a genuine elimination rather than an assertion, and his proposal to unify fusion-like and fission-like product patterns under one mechanism is at least a testable programme. Daddi's honesty about the two anomalies — sub-threshold energies and over-large cross-sections — is likewise the right way to report a result one cannot yet explain.
Whether the mechanisms survive is another matter. All three rest on entities not otherwise observed: a population of trapped neutrons in the lattice, a proton/electron resonance, a "hydrogen squeezed atom". The TNCF model's central difficulty is that a trapped-neutron density of 1012 cm−3 in a solid is not a small perturbation, and the abstract does not say how such a population is created, why it does not thermalise and leak out, or why neutron emission at the corresponding level is not measured directly. The supplemental assumption of "decrease of threshold energies for (n,α) reactions of Pd in solids" is precisely the step that would need independent justification, since nuclear reaction thresholds are set by nuclear binding energies of order MeV and chemical environments perturb them by fractions of an eV.
The rest of the issue is on much weaker ground, and the contrast is instructive rather than incidental. Aspden's aether-spin explanation is the clearest case: it is proposed for a phenomenon — a warm-core ocean eddy — that is not in fact unexplained, since mesoscale anticyclonic eddies shed from the Kuroshio are routinely observed, tracked by satellite altimetry, and account for both the sea-surface elevation and the temperature anomaly quoted, without any energy input beyond ordinary ocean dynamics. Aspden takes the newspaper's "scientists have no explanation" at face value and builds a vacuum-energy mechanism on it. The zero-point patent article is similarly untethered: the existence of a granted patent is not evidence that a device works, patent examination not being an experimental test, and the claim that Tesla powered a car from the zero-point field rests on an anecdote with no contemporary documentation. The M-state letter's assertion of room-temperature superconductivity is a claim that could be settled in an afternoon by a Meissner-effect or four-point resistance measurement, and no such measurement is offered.
What the issue lacks — and what its own November companion supplies — is any editorial marking of these differences. The Fusion Technology abstracts and the ORMUS letter are laid out with the same typographic weight and the same absence of comment. Bailey elsewhere shows he is capable of the distinction, and its absence here is a choice about presentation rather than a limitation of knowledge. As a primary source the issue remains valuable precisely because it preserves that flattening: it is a fair record of what a well-run dissident organisation was circulating to its members, and of how much of it was, and was not, measured.