New Energy News (Oct-Nov 2000)
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | New Energy News (Oct-Nov 2000) |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Patrick G Bailey |
| Keywords | New Energy |
| Published | 2000 |
| Journal | New Energy News |
| Volume | 7 |
| Number | 5-6 |
| No. of pages | 39 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
No abstract was published with this issue. It is a newsletter rather than a research paper; the summary below is drawn from the full text.
Overview
This is the October–November 2000 double issue of New Energy News (Volume 7, Numbers 5–6, ISSN 1075-0045), the newsletter of the Institute for New Energy, edited by Patrick G Bailey with substantial contributions from Hal Fox. It is not a scientific paper but a compilation: conference reports, letters, book reviews, abstracts of experimental work, press clippings and commercial announcements, distributed by email in plain ASCII and, from this issue onward, also as a PDF. The editor's note opening the issue announces exactly that change, and offers to mail an Adobe Acrobat CD-ROM to subscribers who cannot download one.
Its value as a document is archival rather than argumentative. It captures the cold fusion and free-energy community at a specific moment — eleven years after the Fleischmann–Pons announcement, at the point where several strands (hydrino chemistry, charge clusters, transmutation, over-unity generators) were being promoted simultaneously to investors and to a sceptical scientific establishment. What makes the issue unusually interesting is that it does not present a unified front: the most substantial contributions in it are internal criticism, and the sharpest sceptic of the claims reported is a cold fusion advocate.
Contents
The Mills controversy
The issue opens with a letter from Donald Kelly of Space Energy Journal arguing that Randell Mills' BlackLight Power results deserve credence — two laboratories reporting output at multiples of input, a utility investing a million dollars — and that the U.S. Patent Office may be "in violation of their own Rules of Practice" in stonewalling five Mills patents. It is answered at length by Gerald Lindley, who takes "a more nuanced view than the simple pro-con battle." Lindley accepts that BlackLight is producing excess energy but denies the hydrino explanation: "the mathematics of Mill's is inconsistent. Fractional quantum states are mathematically impossible." He attributes the excess instead to the potassium clusters in the potassium–hydrogen vapour apparatus, notes that this places a hard ceiling on the achievable power density, and observes acidly that sixteen months after he first said so, no commercial apparatus had appeared. He ends by describing the dispute as "two groups of idiots wasting large amounts of money and worst, wasting large amounts of time."
Jed Rothwell's conference report
The longest and most substantive item is Jed Rothwell's report on the American Nuclear Society cold fusion session and the LENREW workshop of November 2000. Rothwell is a partisan of the field but reports it as a working scientist would, naming what he thinks is weak. He records that Americans "cannot afford to do experiments, so they theorize instead," while the Japanese JCF2 meeting was dominated by experiment. On Hal Fox's survey of over-unity devices — hydrino claims, Ken Shoulders' high-density charge clusters, AquaFuel, MagneGas, the Motionless Electromagnetic Generator — he notes plainly: "As far as I know, none of these devices has ever been independently replicated or verified."
He is equally direct about work he thinks deserves attention. Oriani's water-stirring experiment produces heat bursts but was presented "with crude, hand-drawn graphs showing no indication of the units or values"; Oriani never mentioned absolute power, and his Seebeck calorimeter "did not work well ... not enough thermocouples per square cm in the wall." Rothwell's judgement is that people who do not know Oriani "may write this off as a crackpot experiment, which is a shame, because it probably deserves attention." Miley's thin-film cathodes, shipped to Edmund Storms for independent testing in a Seebeck envelope calorimeter, produced no excess heat, which Miley attributed to film delamination. Melvin Miles' palladium–boron work is reported together with the specific calorimetric dispute behind it: the NHE calibrated from a single 0.25 W heat pulse applied on day three, when — Miles and Fleischmann argue — the cell was already generating excess heat, shifting the whole subsequent baseline down by about half the excess and producing spurious negative excursions.
Rothwell closes with a genuine theoretical problem he raised in the closing discussion: there is a gap between theories explaining deuterium fusion-like reactions producing helium and those explaining transmutation as cold nuclear fission, and a matching gap in the experiments, since "McKubre has found helium, others find transmutations, but few people appear to be looking for both." He notes that McKubre's helium is "commensurate" — within about 5% of the d–d fusion expectation — and that when he asked theorists whether cold fission could produce helium at so nearly the same rate, "they hedged."
Experimental abstracts and reports
Hideo Kozima reports on his "super-nuclear interaction" calculations for palladium hydrides and deuterides, the second JCF meeting in Sapporo (28 papers), and the 8th Russian Conference on Cold Nuclear Transmutation of Chemical Elements at Sochi (38 papers). A full abstract is reproduced from Yamada and colleagues at Iwate University on light-water electrolysis: three quartz cells, nickel and gold cathodes, 0.5 M sodium carbonate and sodium sulphate electrolytes, runs of 7–30 days and 3 months. No excess power was measured for plain nickel cathodes, but up to 10 (units unstated in the text) for scraped and nickel-plated cathodes; TOF-SIMS and EPMA showed increased zinc on the gold cathode, with the mass-67 isotopic fraction rising from 4 to 15 percent of natural abundance.
Reviews, technology items and press digest
Fox reviews Vladimir B. Ginzburg's Unified Spiral Field and Matter, a history of science built around a fictional "Archimedes File" passed from Copernicus through Brahe, Kepler and Galileo, developing the electron and proton as spiral field structures. Moray King's Infinite Energy article proposing that charge clusters are the common mechanism behind Shoulders, Papp, Gray, Brown's gas, Sweet and Graneau's water arc explosions is recommended for "close reading." Eugene Mallove's ICCF-8 report is summarised, with Fox conceding that cold fusion "does not appear to have the ease of replication, the production of large amounts of excess thermal energy, nor be sufficiently robust to be a commercial success (this reporter's judgement)."
Technology and business items include the world's first commercial wave power station feeding the Scottish grid from Islay under a 15-year purchase agreement; NASA-funded mini-magnetosphere propulsion; the Power Technology battery; the Burns Energy Pack, claimed at more than ten times output over input and offered to investors through a private placement memorandum; and a report of a Department of Energy draft "Breakthrough Energy Physics Research Program Plan" listing physical anomalies for investigation. A long climate section reprints Reuters and Rutgers coverage of the IPCC third assessment draft, with Bailey noting he does "not necessarily agree" with the attribution of warming to human activity. The programme of the September 2000 Zurich "New Energy Technologies on the Millennium Transition" congress is reproduced in full — a list running from Coler converters and electrostatic motors to crop-circle decoding and psychic energy fields. The issue ends with an announcement of Wladimir Guglinski's Paradoxes of Physics and Their Solutions and a UFO congress date.
Assessment
The issue's real strength is that it preserves both the claims and the objections, side by side and unedited. Anyone wanting to know what the new-energy field actually looked like in late 2000 — who was working on what, which results were being independently checked, and which were not — will find more of it here than in any single research paper. Rothwell's report in particular is a model of engaged criticism: he names the calorimetric weaknesses in work he supports, notes when an independent test came back negative, and identifies a real inconsistency between the helium and transmutation branches of the field rather than papering over it. Lindley's letter does the same for the hydrino claims from the inside. The Yamada abstract is a properly specified experiment with instrument names, run times and isotopic numbers.
The weaknesses are structural rather than incidental. Editorial standards vary wildly between items: careful experimental abstracts sit next to investment solicitations for devices claimed at ten times over-unity, and next to a crop-circle lecture listing and a note on what Neil Armstrong "really said." No editorial line separates the three, and the effect is to lend the same authority to all of them. The recurring appeal to patents as evidence — "six patents issued in the U.S.," "the Mills device has raised over $20 million" — confuses commercial and legal milestones with replication; a granted patent certifies novelty as claimed, not that a device works, and Rothwell's own report in the same issue says flatly that none of the devices concerned had been independently verified. The two positions are printed a few pages apart without comment.
The forecasts have not aged well. Fox predicts that "the advent of new-energy devices, beginning in 2001, will dramatically change the way the world produces and distributes energy." Twenty-five years on, none of the devices named in this issue — the Motionless Electromagnetic Generator, the Burns Energy Pack, AquaFuel, MagneGas, the BlackLight hydrino reactor — has entered commercial service or been independently replicated under controlled calorimetry. Mills' fractional-state hydrogen remains unrecognised, and Lindley's objection in this very issue, that fractional quantum states are mathematically inconsistent with the Schrödinger eigenvalue problem, has not been answered. It is fair to note that the issue's own most careful contributors — Rothwell, Lindley, Fox on ICCF-8 — were considerably closer to the mark than its promotional material.