New Energy News (January 2001)
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | New Energy News (January 2001) |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Patrick G Bailey |
| Keywords | New Energy, cold fusion, California power crisis, hydrogen economy, over-unity devices |
| Published | 2001 |
| Journal | New Energy News |
| Volume | 8 |
| Number | 1 |
| No. of pages | 43 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
No abstract accompanies this archive entry. The item is a complete issue of a newsletter rather than a single paper. Masthead: New Energy News, Volume 8, Number 1, ISSN 1075-0045, January 2001; editor Patrick Bailey; published from www.padrak.com/ine/ for the Institute for New Energy.
Overview
This is the January 2001 issue of New Energy News, the monthly newsletter of the Institute for New Energy, edited by Patrick G Bailey with material contributed by Hal Fox, Toby Grotz, Gary Vesperman, Win Lambertson, Eugene Mallove and others. It is not a research paper but a compilation: abstracts of recently published work, a book review, feature articles, reader correspondence, and conference announcements. Its organising sections are SHORT SUBJECTS, BOOK REVIEW, ARTICLES, LETTERS and MEETINGS.
The issue is dominated by one event — the California electricity crisis of the winter of 2000–2001 — and by the community's reading of it. Where the mainstream account attributed the rolling blackouts to deregulation, market manipulation and a decade without new generating capacity, the newsletter treats them as vindication: proof that conventional energy policy has failed and that the "new energy" devices its contributors have long advocated should be funded and commercialised immediately. That framing runs through the technical items, the letters and the editorial asides alike. A second, subsidiary theme is the community's running conflict with Robert Park of the American Physical Society, whose January 2001 Playboy article attacking Cold Fusion draws two separate rebuttals here.
Contents of the issue
Short subjects
The issue opens with two research abstracts. Dan Chicea and Dan Lupu (Romania), writing in Fusion Technology 39(1), report loading titanium samples with deuterium from the gas phase, cycling the temperature over a wide range, and monitoring neutron emission: they record "neutron emissions in very low intensity bursts, still significantly above the background," and conclude that low-energy nuclear reactions in condensed matter occur "at a very low rate, which occasionally can be high enough to become detectable." The second summarises Jonathan Tennenbaum's 21st Century Science and Technology account of Russian replications of Alexander Gurwitsch's 1920s mitogenetic radiation — ultraviolet emission from living cells said to accelerate the growth of nearby younger fish eggs, or to retard and kill them when the developmental gap is larger, with an effect varying over the 11-year solar cycle and passing quartz but not ordinary glass. The newsletter's own gloss is notably cautious about the metaphysical reading: "few scientists are likely to endow this field with the aspects of a 'spirit'."
Shorter notes cover a psychic's prediction of a microwave-oven-sized chemical-cartridge home generator (to which the editor adds the dry aside "[We were hoping for a device that taps the energy of space rather than a chemical cartridge]"), Southern California Edison's projection that residential rates could rise 76% in two years, and a US Treasury relaxation of R&D tax-credit record-keeping.
Book review: William Day, A New Physics
Marvin Solit of the Foundation For New Directions reviews William Day's A New Physics, a 208-page volume with an appendix reprinting original papers by Sagnac, Ives and Gerber. Day dismisses the relativistic resolution of the Michelson–Morley result and takes "the alternate view that light and matter have unrelated motions," from which he builds a physics in which motion is an integral part of structure rather than something bodies possess. His hierarchy runs particles → atoms → gravitational systems, and yields a model of subatomic particles said to account for mass, charge and mass–energy interconversion structurally. The reviewer's summary of the world-view shift is the clearest statement of the book's ambition: the Galilean and Newtonian picture of "discrete bodies move in a space void is replaced by a universe in which space, motion and matter are intermeshed and fully integrated." The review is frankly promotional, addressed "Dear Colleague and Fellow Dissident," and is followed by an order form.
Articles
The hydrogen economy. A compilation of quotations from Ford, Royal Dutch Shell, Texaco, DaimlerChrysler and members of Congress on fuel cells and hydrogen, assembled from the California Hydrogen Business Council's October 2000 meeting. The editorial comment is dismissive of the whole programme: "none of the above persons being quoted have heard of any of the new-energy devices that can provide the technology for an on-board battery charger for electric vehicles."
760 gigawatts in 2007. Grotz reports NERC projections that US demand will rise from 349 GW in 1998 to 760 GW in 2007, that 150 GW of new capacity is needed but only 70 GW planned, and that each kilowatt of fossil capacity emits roughly a ton of CO2 a year — so that added capacity and reduced emissions cannot both be met conventionally.
California power crisis. A reprinted Wall Street Journal report on the crisis reaching the fuel distribution system: four days of interruption to the Kinder Morgan refined-products pipeline, airlines ferrying extra fuel into Las Vegas and San Francisco, and San Francisco International down to a "scary" two-day reserve instead of the usual six.
The Park controversy. Eugene Mallove of Infinite Energy and Thomas Valone of the Integrity Research Institute reply separately to Robert Park's Playboy article, which had called cold fusion "pathological science, the distortion in which scientists manage to fool themselves." Mallove's rejoinder is that refined experiments yielding helium-4 commensurate with excess heat have been replicated and are simply not acknowledged; Valone itemises five specific factual claims he says are false, including the assertion that the Patent Office has a one-year running rule for perpetual-motion machines. Both discuss Paul LaViolette's dismissal from the Patent Office and his EEOC case. The tone is combative — Park is called an "ignoramus-propagandist" — and readers are urged to write to Playboy and the APS.
Gritskevitch's hydro-magnetic dynamo. Vesperman's reconstruction of Oleg Gritskevitch's claimed toroidal generator, offered with unusual candour about its own reliability: the author "is not convinced of the total accuracy of this presentation," Gritskevitch "has on occasion provided misleading information," and the report should be treated "as providing clues, which may not all be necessarily accurate themselves." The claims relayed are that the dynamo scales from 100 kW to 1,000 MW, that a 1,000 MW unit occupies about a two-car garage, that it runs 25 years without fuel or maintenance, and that 10 kW of input yields 1 MW of output — an efficiency of "100-to-1, or 10,000%." The mechanism is said to involve deuterium fusion to alpha particles and high-density charge clusters, with the missing electrons providing a "sink" of electricity.
Advanced self-powered electric vehicle concept. The expanded text of Vesperman's September 2000 lecture to the Institute for New Energy symposium, describing a design assembled from Ukrainian capacitor-like batteries, over-unity magnetic motors or a bladeless Tesla-type closed-cycle steam turbine, an on-board battery charger, basalt/carbon-fibre foam body, computer-controlled suspension, and compressed-air climate control. Its marketing list ends with the decisive claim: "Never requires refueling nor electricity recharging." The floor discussion that follows records Scottish inventor David Burns showing plans for a self-powered car and video of a four-foot remote-controlled model flying saucer said to be lifted by an antigravity field.
Q's and A's regarding Don Smith. The most striking item in the issue is a negative one. Asked to evaluate Don Smith's devices, two respondents report failure: Paul LaViolette found "his claims to be entirely bogus" and his design specifications endlessly shifting, while a second, anonymised respondent who examined the apparatus at a Tesla conference states flatly "there was definitely NO free energy."
The very serious energy crisis. Harvey Fiala reprints roughly half the Los Angeles Times energy headlines of the preceding months as evidence, and argues that "if only 2% of the amount of money spent on hot fusion alone had been spent on alternative energy sources, the current energy crises would not exist."
Solar cells are made from oil. Grotz's short note is the issue's most reflective passage. He judges photovoltaics to be near energy break-even over their lifetime, prefers solar for hot water and heating, and then turns against his own movement's premise: "if humans had access to F/E and it did not cost any money to run chain saws and bull dozers, that the rain forest would be gone by the end of the year… I have come to believe that the consciousness of mankind is not yet ready for free energy."
Letters and meetings
Two letters from Wayne Powell in Montana describe Columbia Falls Aluminum cutting to 50% production and Montana Resources shutting down under deregulated electricity prices, and press the community hard: "So, NEN folks, it's put up or shut up time. Either get it OUT of the lab and pumping out electricity or get out of the way for those that can." A form letter from Bill Clinton acknowledging Mallove's memorandum "The Strange Birth of the Water Fuel Age" is reprinted. The meetings section announces ENERGEX '2002 in Cracow and, at greater length, the Space Physics Conference organised by Paramahamsa Tewari at Karwar, India, defining space physics as the demonstration "that matter is formed from the essence of space itself" and listing Harold Aspden, Stefan Marinov, Bruce DePalma and Shuiji Inomata among the participants.
Assessment
As a document, the issue is valuable precisely because it is not a paper. It is a snapshot of what the New Energy community was reading, arguing about and hoping for in a single month, and it preserves material — conference floor discussions, unpublished device reports, private correspondence — that exists nowhere else. Historians of dissident science will find the January 2001 issue useful for the same reason: the California crisis gave the movement its best rhetorical opening in a decade, and the issue captures in real time how that opening was used.
The newsletter is also, in places, more self-critical than its reputation would suggest, and this is its chief virtue. The Don Smith item publishes two flat negative evaluations of a claimed free-energy device by named and unnamed insiders, which is exactly the internal quality control such a field is usually accused of lacking. Vesperman's dynamo report states its own unreliability in its opening paragraph. Grotz's solar note argues against the desirability of free energy on environmental grounds. An editor willing to print all three in one issue is not running a pure promotional sheet.
Against that, the standards of evidence vary wildly from item to item, and the newsletter does not signal the difference. A peer-reviewed Fusion Technology paper with figures, tables and fifteen references sits a few paragraphs from a psychic's prediction of a future power supply, and both are presented in the same format. The Gritskevitch claims are the clearest case: a 100-to-1 power ratio, sustained for 25 years with no fuel, is a violation of energy conservation of the most direct kind, and the report supplies no measurement, no instrumentation description, and no independent test — only three prototypes said to exist and a fourth that "needs to be built." That the author flags his own uncertainty does not repair this; a claim that would overturn thermodynamics needs calorimetry, not clues. The same applies to the "over-unity magnetic motors" listed as drop-in options for the vehicle concept, and to Burns's antigravity model aircraft, whose behaviour as described — belly landings, hand launching, an inability to fly inverted — is equally consistent with an ordinary lightweight radio-controlled flying wing.
The Park exchange shows the field at its least effective. Valone's five specific corrections are the strongest part of it, because they are checkable claims about matters of record rather than about physics. But the surrounding invective works against them: calling an opponent an "ignoramus-propagandist" concedes the rhetorical framing that the dispute is tribal rather than evidential, which is the accusation being answered. The substantive point Mallove raises — helium-4 production commensurate with excess heat, the Storms review of 190 experiments — is the one that deserved the space, and it is buried.
Finally, the issue's central inference does not follow. The California blackouts were a failure of grid capacity, market design and regulatory price caps; they say nothing whatever about whether over-unity devices exist. Fiala's counterfactual — that 2% of hot-fusion funding redirected would have prevented the crisis — assumes the conclusion, since the technologies in question have never demonstrated net output under controlled measurement. Powell's "put up or shut up" letter puts the community's real problem more sharply than any critic in the issue does, and it is telling that the newsletter printed it without an answer.