New Energy News (October 2001)
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | New Energy News (October 2001) |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Patrick G Bailey |
| Keywords | New Energy |
| Published | 2001 |
| Journal | New Energy News |
| Volume | 8 |
| Number | 10 |
| No. of pages | 21 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
This item is an issue of a newsletter and carries no author's abstract.
Overview
New Energy News (NEN) was the monthly newsletter of the Institute for New Energy (INE), edited by Patrick G Bailey and distributed by email in plain ASCII and PDF from Salt Lake City. This October 2001 issue (Volume 8, Number 10; ISSN 1075-0045) runs to four departments — Articles, Letters, Meetings and Advertisements — and functions as the community's noticeboard rather than as a research paper. Its historical value on this wiki is as a snapshot of what the New Energy movement was working on, arguing about and reading in the autumn of 2001.
Editorially the issue is notable for its breadth and for its refusal to police the boundary between conventional and unconventional energy research. Within the same twenty-odd pages it carries a defence of commercial fission by a retired General Electric vice-president, a wire-service report on a mainstream free-electron laser at Argonne, a proposal to abolish exclusive patents, a long interview with a zero-point-energy theorist about remote viewing, and a claim that a self-sustaining vacuum-energy generator is months from market. Bailey is himself scheduled to give a conference paper titled "Dangers of Using Volt and Amp Meters to Measure Device Efficiency: Examples of Fraudulent Over-Unity Claims" — an in-house warning that sits alongside the over-unity announcements without comment.
Contents of the issue
The 2001 INE/EEMF conference programme
The lead item is the preliminary programme for the joint INE / Emerging Energy Marketing Firm conference held 26–27 October 2001 at the Quality Inn City Center, Salt Lake City, with proceedings to be published in the Journal of New Energy. Confirmed Friday speakers included Hal Fox on "A Summary of the Latest Developments of High-Density, Charge-Cluster Technology"; Bailey on the status of the INE devices database and its "Interest and Commercialization Criteria Rankings"; Dan Chicea of the University Lucian Blaga, Romania, on an experimental feature in electrolysis loading experiments; Nick Nelson on "Magnetic Vortex Domains and Structures – Insights from Research at the Oregon Vortex"; Moray B King on "Scalar Compression"; Kenneth Shoulders introducing and then running an evening workshop on EVs; Michael Maser of Blue Energy Canada on tidal power; and Philipp M Kanarev of the Kuban State Agrarian University on "Water is the main power carrier of future power engineering". Saturday added Xing-liu Jiang and colleagues from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics on "Vortex Dynamics and Exploiting Energy from the Vacuum", and Bruce Harvey on "Goodbye Einstein". A further block of papers was scheduled to be summarized in the authors' absence, among them Donald Reed's "A New Paradigm for Time – Evidence from Empirical and Esoteric Sources", H. Kozima and J. Warner on Cold Fusion in transition-metal hydrides and deuterides, Chiharu Sano on "Twisting & Untwisting of Spirals of Ether and Fractal Vortices", Lev Sapogin and colleagues on "New Sources of Energy from the Point of Unitary Quantum Theory", Mahmoud Melehy on "Energy Stored in a Gravitational Field", Dan A Davidson on "Shape Power Anti-Gravitation Breakthrough", and De Aquino on control of gravity in photoluminescent materials.
Nuclear energy items
Two long pieces defend fission. The first is a letter from Dr Bertram Wolfe — past president of the American Nuclear Society and a retired GE vice-president — to the California Assembly Committee on Natural Resources after it voted 7–3 against a nuclear plant for the Edmonston Pumping Plant. Wolfe argues that Germany's phase-out will not survive contact with replacement demand, that Sweden has shut only one of twelve plants in fifteen years, that Tokai-mura killed two people in a regulation violation against hundreds of annual fossil-fuel deaths, and that projected Yucca Mountain doses are "less than a twentieth of the radiation we get from nature." The second, reprinted from the New York Times via the Orange County Register, reports the collapse of university nuclear engineering: Cornell's trustees voting unanimously to close the Ivy League's last research reactor, campus reactors down from 40 in 1988 to 28, and nuclear engineering majors down from 1,500 to 570 between 1992 and 1997.
Puthoff on zero-point energy and remote viewing
The longest single article is a Fortean Times interview with Harold E Puthoff, reprinted with permission. Puthoff describes Zero Point Energy as the residual field energy that "would still remain" if the universe were cooled to absolute zero — "sort of the electromagnetic equivalent of froth at the base of a waterfall" — and states the research question as whether it can be mined, and whether it is responsible for inertia and gravity. He is markedly cautious about timescales ("one hopes that within a decade or two some significant progress will be made, even if only incrementally") and names water desalination, not space travel, as the first application he would expect. He also reports briefing the presidents and research directors of several major oil companies, who told him they would welcome a breakthrough because fossil fuel for cars and heating is low-margin compared with feedstock use — likening it to "heating your house by burning Picassos and van Goghs." On his earlier SRI work he says the findings indicated psi abilities are "widely distributed, more or less like musical ability," denies the claim that the CIA deliberately botched the Uri Geller tests ("Pure urban myth. We did our best, found evidence for remote viewing but not psychokinesis"), and notes James Spottiswoode's reported correlation of performance with sidereal time.
Other articles and letters
Josef Hasslberger contributes "The Inventor and Society", arguing that patent examination should be abolished: patent offices would merely file inventions chronologically, publish them, and adjudicate priority, while a collecting society modelled on musical performing-rights organisations would take a small percentage of sale price as an untaxed inventor's royalty. His stated aim is to end both the exhaustion of inventors in litigation and the practice of buying a patent in order to shelve it. Remy Chevalier supplies two news items: a report from New Scientist on Senator Harry Reid's demand for Navy records linking the fuel JP-8 to a childhood leukaemia cluster near Fallon, Nevada, and a Science Daily report of Argonne's mirrorless free-electron laser reaching 385 nm, described as a thousand times more energetic than the previous free-electron-laser record. Harold Aspden reports on Geoffrey Spence's talk to a Green Party fringe meeting in Salisbury, describing a 20 cm evacuated cylindrical device with an axial magnetic field into which electrons are injected, said to be self-sustaining and "80% efficient" — Aspden records his own puzzlement at what efficiency can mean for an over-unity generator, and Spence's answer that four units of electrical output come with one unit of waste heat. The Letters section carries Oliver Kelly of Dublin urging research before conventional fuels run out, Tom Bearden congratulating Jean-Louis Naudin on replicating the Chung negative-resistance experiment, and a reader's pointer to S. E. Shnoll's Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk paper claiming that fluctuation histograms in radioactive decay and biochemical reaction rates track astronomical cycles.
Assessment
As a primary source the issue is valuable precisely because it is undigested. It records what the INE community believed, planned and circulated in one month, including the international reach the movement had acquired by 2001 (Romania, Russia, China, Brazil, Canada, the UK) and the fact that its conference proceedings were being formally published. Bailey's editorial practice is also more self-critical than the field's reputation suggests: scheduling a talk on fraudulent over-unity claims and the misuse of meters, and printing a pro-fission advocacy letter in a new-energy newsletter, are both editorial choices that cut against the movement's own enthusiasms.
The weaknesses are those of the format. Nothing in the issue is refereed, and claims of very different evidential standing are laid side by side with the same typography — Argonne's free-electron laser, a peer-reviewed accelerator result, sits a few pages from a claim that a closed-loop vacuum-energy generator will reach the market "within a matter of a few months." That prediction, made in September 2001, was not realised, and no such product appeared; the same is true of the other device announcements here. Aspden's own report contains the tell: he could not obtain a coherent statement of what "80% efficient" means for a self-sustaining generator, and the answer he was given — four units out for one unit of dissipated heat — is a statement about heat rejection, not about the energy balance that the over-unity claim actually requires. The physics content is thin by design; readers looking for the derivations behind the charge-cluster, scalar-compression and vacuum-vortex talks will find only titles. Finally, the Puthoff interview is the issue's most substantial item and also the one that best illustrates the movement's internal tension: Puthoff's own statements about zero-point energy are hedged and modest, and are surrounded by material considerably less so.