The Long Perspective on Energy

May 3rd, 2006 | By Penny Sleuth Contributor | Category: Energy, Technology

Probably no technology is more important to the human condition than the technology relating to energy. Were our sources of energy to disappear tomorrow, within a few short years we’d lose every vestige of civilization.

Some fear that this kind of scenario is approaching. The recent book Powerdown by Richard Heinberg looks to this grim reality as a foregone conclusion. Fortunately, as has often been the case through history, the cynics are wrong when it comes to technology. (Regrettably, it’s often the optimists who are wrong when it comes to political engineering — but that’s a different essay.)

I sometimes speak about “future energy.” This isn’t the same old “alternative energy” we’ve been hearing about for so long — basically just new ways to draw power from sunlight, both directly and indirectly.

Those are valuable, and getting better. (I have written about some of these elsewhere.) However, they’re inherently limited in what they can do.

Instead, future energy taps subtler sources of power. It will ultimately free us from the fossil fuel trap.

What do I mean by, “fossil fuel trap?” With the exception of nuclear power, every energy source significantly tapped to date by man relies upon the storage of solar energy.

Hydrogen is often touted as a fuel of the future, but it’s really more of a “brush the problem under the carpet” approach than a true solution. Why?

To produce the hydrogen, another fuel must be consumed. In Iceland and other places blessed with substantial geothermal power, hydrogen production is a natural and wonderful alternative fuel.

In places not so blessed — including most of North America — all a hydrogen economy will do is shift the burning of fuels such as coal to remote regions. While such “out of sight, out of mind” burning has the potential to reduce noxious fumes in urban areas, ultimately it’s no solution to dwindling supplies and global warming.

For this reason and others, the discussion is shifting heavily to ethanol, a fuel produced by processing the residue of agriculture. It burns cleanly, and the carbon dioxide byproduct should be recaptured in the growing process.

I have nothing against ethanol. In fact, I am principal in a revolutionary technology that should quadruple the yields of sugarcane fields, thereby radically cutting the cost of producing this superior ethanol feedstock.

However, ultimately a burgeoning population will need energy sources with greater density than ethanol. Fortunately, these exist. Today I’ll explore one of them.

Cold fusion is the idea that a room-temperature reactor operating at everyday atmospheric pressure can be “tickled” to produce energy via special palladium-based lattices.

It has been panned by much of the scientific community ever since its original announcement proved to be an exaggeration. However, a small cadre of very credible scientists has patiently continued the research for years.

While the dispute rages on, a few facts have been well established. First, excess energy can and does come out of some of the laboratory experiments.

Second, the process is notoriously hard to control, and can easily rage into a literal meltdown of laboratory equipment.

Third, even seemingly identical laboratory conditions often produce different results. This is maddening to scientists, and is responsible for some of the claims of fraud that have been associated with the research.

US Naval Research scientists have published dozens of papers on cold fusion. Several years ago, I became aware of a U.S. Naval Research Laboratories (NRL) report that documented more than nine studies of cold fusion suggestive that something extraordinary was happening.

Co-author Dr. Scott Chubb (Ph.D, physics) used this report to call for multimillion-dollar funding to determine once and for all the truth about cold fusion. Despite its impressive pedigree, the NRL report seemed to fall on deaf ears. But recently, something truly remarkable happened.

In August 2005, the U.S. Department of Energy held an extraordinary meeting. It was extraordinary both in the topic (a review of cold fusion) and in the fact that it was conducted as a stealth exercise. Using a special loophole, it was closed to the public. There has been almost no media coverage.

In attendance were six of the most prominent “kooks” (so-called by many of their professional colleagues) who have been diligently researching this subject. Two of those reported participants were Stanford Research Institute chemist Michael McKubre and Dr. Peter Hagelstein, who teaches at MIT.

It is important to understand that the U.S. Patent Office will no longer issue patents on cold fusion because, “it doesn’t work.” This is the direct result of a 1989 DOE review of cold fusion research that concluded the field was without any merit or value whatsoever.

That’s a heavy verdict indeed, and one that’s perhaps unprecedented. (Even a so-called “perpetual motion machine” could in theory be patented based on submission of a real working model.)

Therefore, in traversing the road from quackery to mainstream acceptance, cold fusion has one of the steepest climbs imaginable. This explains the DOE’s secrecy, but not its decision to grant a new review. The review was reportedly granted because of Dr. Hagelstein’s sterling reputation as a researcher and the lab results he claimed.

The August meeting reportedly started with tough, even harsh interrogation. But at the end of the day, the invited scientists shook hands with the reviewers. Perhaps this was a mere formality, except that the reviewers then stayed after 5 p.m. to discuss what they had seen. At minimum, this strongly suggests that something more than quackery was on display.

The sole purpose of the review was to answer one question: Is the work surrounding cold fusion legitimate science? The 18 reviewers split right down the middle. This was, of course, a sea change from the previous 1989 DOE panel.

Even among those accepting that cold fusion is meritorious of research, the consensus was that it’s not fusion. (Some researchers argue that it is something even more exotic, the tapping of zero point energy — that elusive, ultradense energy that inhabits all empty space.)

According to Wikipedia, “The nearly unanimous opinion of the reviewers was that funding agencies should entertain individual, well-designed proposal for experiments in this field.”

Further, in March 2006, the prestigious American Physical Society (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Physical_Society) held a session on cold fusion in Baltimore.

These are huge positive developments for cold “fusion” (or whatever it is).

Energetics Technologies, an Israeli cold fusion startup, has received millions of dollars in funding and has realized very significant levels of power and heat, according to SRI international chemist Dr. Michael McKubre. The late Dr. Eugene Mallove of MIT and Infinite Energy magazine also hailed the Energetics Technologies results.

The simple truth is that some serious scientists are seeing significant results that are repeatable, but not repeatable enough to be universally accepted. This implies that something is happening, but that one or more variables have not been properly controlled.

Perhaps the variable is something scientists do not usually think to control in such an experiment. For example, a researcher I know has discovered that the emissions of plutonium correlate to lunar cycles, a completely nonsensical result according to conventional scientific theory.

From a practical standpoint, all that matters is that cold “fusion” or another new energy source be made to work reliably. When that happens, it will augur the dawn of a new world.

To your profitable future,

Jonathan Kolber
May 3, 2006

Penny Sleuth Contributor

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