Green Eggs and Dan

Green Eggs and Dan is a radio show on a local station in a town near where I live.  Dan Weis is a man trying like I am to make sense of this world.

We did an interview on 3/24/2022 at 8pm on KHEN radio (https://www.khen.org/) that lasted about 2 hours and mostly consisted of me talking about my interest in alternative energy sources outside of the usual ones of solar, wind, biomass, etc.

"ALL THIS IS A DREAM. Still examine it by a few experiments. Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature; and in such things as these, experiment is the best test of such consistency." - Michael Faraday

I quoted the third sentence of this famous Faraday quote near the end of the interview.  Einstein was most emphatic in stressing the need to maintain a sense of wonder when contemplating Nature.

The direction that I took in my life toward solving the energy problems faced by our species (and the whole world) started with an awareness of the problems of pollution, overpopulation and resource limitations that were part of the growing Environmental Movement of the 1960s.  My 9th grade biology teacher, Mr. Coffee (too bad he did not copyright his name), assigned the book, The Population Bomb by Dr. Paul Ehrlich.  I was too naive to understand that the warnings in the book were overblown, which they certainly were and I knew nothing yet of his predecessor in such predictions, Thomas Malthus.  Such predictions proved to be too severe, but not without a rational basis.  Resources of many kinds are limited.  However, they are limited by ingenuity as well as by physical circumstances.  

I tend to see Ehrlich as an alarmist, but despite his predictions being mostly wrong, the basic problems he indicated do exist and have gotten much worse in my lifetime.  He is quoted as saying, "In fact, giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. With cheap, abundant energy, the attempt clearly would be made to pave, develop, industrialize, and exploit every last bit of the planet—a trend that would inevitably lead to a collapse of the life-support systems upon which civilization depends."  There are collapses of many species of insects and marine life already.

The general situation we have is that in recent generations, our ability to be aware of threats that existed has grown because of the astonishing explosion in information gathering and dissemination capabilities.  The severity of the threats has also grown, generally.  However, there are hopeful signs.  It turns out that humans tend to produce fewer children voluntarily when their basic survival needs are comfortably met.  Children are the original form of social security, and societies with sufficient wealth and stability to protect people when they are too old and frail to work, have seen sharp declines in birth rates.  Maybe we are not as idiotic as Ehrlich assumed.  The general state of enlightenment is highly variable.

There are some existential risks that we can resolve in a short time, and some may never be resolved, unless we can colonize other planets.  If there is a particular discovery that may alleviate threats more than any other, it would be development of a source of energy that is abundant, does not pollute and does not allow monopolization.  Presently, no such commercially developed energy source exists.  The great hope of "cold fusion" was that it might fulfill this desire.  After 33 years, this has been a disappointment, not even being able to answer unequivocally the question, "Is the excess heat a real phenomenon?"

Is it reasonable to believe that humans can be responsible with a practically infinite source of clean energy?  What kind of controls might we tolerate to answer, yes?  We have learned to control our destructive impulses when we see ourselves as individuals, but when we form mobs, that identification with the group suppresses individual morality.

Some appear to believe that monopolization of energy is the solution because by tightly controlling the choices of people, stupid behavior can be alleviated.  History teaches that the more concentrated the power, the more corrupt become those who hold it.  Powerful people face great challenges in cooperating, resulting in the "international anarchy" we know.  Powerful people tend to quickly become immersed in a sycophant sea of well intentioned supporters who strive to inflate the powerful person's ego.  On top of that, the means of forming large masses of cooperating people tend to rely on "mass formation" techniques, which is to say, mobs.

The need for abundant and cheap energy becomes more critical as measured by the prices we are paying for it.

All this drives the imperative need for an answer to the question, "Is the excess heat real?"  I dare anyone to read the book by Charles Beaudette, Excess Heat and conclude that there is no substantial evidence to answer 'yes'.  Or, spend a few hours, days or weeks reading the material available on LENR.ORG.  The large number of lab reports, coming from various people worldwide, with credentials indicating competence, show so many examples of excess energy and nuclear effects.  Could these all be wrong?  Conceivably, yes, but how? 

Beaudette's book is very readable.  His understanding of technological development is very strong and he has no doubt that the excess heat is real.

As I mentioned, in the lab that belonged to Eugene Mallove, we were unable during the two years that I was there to get an experiment to produce excess heat, although successful construction of calorimeters became routine, with good repeatable calibration and accuracy that would have measured the excess heat that was expected.  We tried many experiments and had help from numerous scientists who were making the claims of finding excess heat in their experiments.  I mentioned the name of the magazine that Dr. Mallove started after resigning from MIT, Infinite Energy Magazine.

I was well aware of the possibility of pathological science.   However, the characteristics of pathological science, as described by Langmuir, were not at all evident in what was happening with the published research as time progressed.  The signals were not getting weaker as the methods improved.  On the contrary, the consistency of results from some researchers was getting better and better as their methods refined.  One researcher, Melvin Miles, a professor who taught physical chemistry and had a lot of lab experience, investigated.  His early work shows null effects.  He submitted a paper describing these results that got published in Physics Letters (if memory serves).  I spoke with him about this at a Meeting of the International Conference for Cold Fusion in 1998 in Italy.  He confirmed the story I had heard, which was that the paper that refuted cold fusion claims was easily accepted for publication, but when he returned to the lab and discovered that changing his method resulted in consistently positive results, he submitted another paper to correct the first one.  They refused to publish the positive results.  He told me that he was not even allowed to have a letter to the editor published.  This clearly indicated a strong bias against confirming the claims of Fleischmann and Pons.  The overall pattern is summarized well by physicist Scott Chubb.  

There was a much more annoying episode of this type that involved an article written by famous science author Gary Taubes, published in Science Magazine.  Taubes is a good writer and sharp critic, but it appears that he pushed too hard to create sensational pieces that lack penetrating research.  Professor John O'M Bockris, who was then the chemistry chair at Texas A&M University, was conducting experiments that sought to find the nuclear product tritium in his cold fusion experiments.  He was publishing positive results.  The way Bockris described Taubes visit was simply shameful behavior, exhibiting no benefit of the doubt and revealing an assumption that it was fraud.  Taubes invented a story about Bockris' graduate student doping the cells with tritium that was stolen from a biology lab so that he would be famous and impress his girlfriend.  There was no evidence of such a scheme and if the tritium had been simply dumped into the cell, it would not have been detected in the manner that it was.  Around the same time, Edmund Storms and Carol Talcott, both scientists at Los Alamos, were finding evidence of tritium in some of their experimental runs, but the real zinger was the work being done by Thomas Claytor, also of Los Alamos.  Claytor's apparatus had two methods of tritium detection in series.  With the reaction off, no detection was in either.  With reaction on, tritium found in both detectors, very reliably.

Quite independently, at the Bhabba Research Institute in India, there was massive interest in tritium found in electrolytic experiments.  I talked to Dr. Srinivasan about these experiments.  He told me of the great excitement that captured the whole place because at one time, they had 50 different labs running the same experiment, all reporting tritium detection.  Tritium is particularly valuable as a sign of an anomaly because it is radioactive and has a half-life of 12.3 years, which means that it is extremely rarely found in Nature.  It almost certainly cannot be a contaminant in an experiment.  It is almost always seen as a result of a nuclear reaction when detected, unless some "journalist" dreams up some story about a horny graduate student.

Bockris appealed to Science Magazine, because what Taubes published was a smear job.  Bockris was allowed no rebuttal.

To develop a reliable experiment, let alone a commercial device, required an understanding of what was happening to cause reactions to occur when they did.  They needed at least a working hypothesis, that is, a set of ideas that explained, however crudely, why some experiments worked and some did not.  It would have helped if there was a lot more replication work, but the work that received the scarce funding was not for replication, but for trying new methods that the experimenter hoped would prove more robust.  

I mentioned the Defense Intelligence Agency Defense Analysis Report which was circulating in social media in 2009.  It was said to be a fraudulent document by skeptics, so I submitted a request to the DIA for confirmation that this document was valid.  They replied with this FOIA response.  This strongly implies that at least a portion of the military intelligence community was taking the possibility of technology emerging from anomalous energy research.  The authors of that document were all active cold fusion researchers.

Brett Holverstott's book is Randell Mills and the Search for Hydrino Energy.  Thomas Stolper's book is America's Newton:  The Reception of the Work of Randell Mills, in Historical and Contemporary Context. 

This is a poignant blog entry of Holverstott. We really do need to adjust to the fact that Schrodinger's ideas did not pan out very well.

The reactors that Dr. Mills has produced have drawn a lot of attention, going back to the early electrolytic work.  He always got others involved and his papers were co-authored by scientists directly working on it, but his work was almost totally ignored by the scientific community.  They imagine that he is able to seduce highly prestigious individuals into supporting his fraud, which I find patently absurd.  Take for instance Dr. Hannes Conrads, at one time a director of a German National Laboratory, a very prestigious position, who voiced acceptance of the ideas of Mills as worthy for explaining the results that he observed in experiments replicating the glow-discharge experiments of Mills.  Or, Dr. Jonathan Phillips, a senior scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who strongly supports the theory and evidence of Mills.  Here he is discussing the advantages of Mills theory over the Standard Theory of Quantum Mechanics.

As I said to Dr. Mallove while we were eating Chinese food in Bow, NH, the biggest problem we have is not energy, it is how we treat each other.  But, the more we can relieve the stresses of resource scarcity, the less stressful our material concerns could be.  The relationship between technological development and humane behavior is complex.  Some groups, like the Amish, refuse to have their lifestyles dictated by technological innovation.  I have hired a number of Amish construction workers and I can attest to the pleasures of getting to know people who were not socialized by mass media.

Dr. Mallove loved MIT, loved people and loved science.  He did not like keeping secrets.  He did not like criticizing MIT, his alma mater, but he did.  This is from issue #24 of his magazine, Infinite Energy, a lengthy article that chronicles the attempts to bring to light why he believed that MIT deserved much scrutiny for failing their duty to perform an honest replication of the Fleischmann-Pons experiment and treat the discovery as important.  I recall his zeal when he mailed a copy of this ten year memorial issue to every faculty and staff member at MIT.  He expected a firestorm of criticism against himself, including lawsuits. Nothing happened for quite a while.  Finally, he got a letter from one of the recipients lamenting how awful it was that humanity might not be extinguished in its own accumulation of waste (the affluent society becoming the effluent society, one might quip) and dying in the cold and dark, having exhausted available fuel supplies.  I remember locking our gazes in astonishment.  To my knowledge, he never publicized this response to his attempt to rectify the situation.

I mentioned during the interview that my father, electrical engineering Professor Edward Wall, worked at the University of Colorado and was funded by the National Science Foundation to investigate the extraction of fuel from oil shale by means of microwave energy.  I described how he would come home excited late at night with samples of shale and containers of oil that resembled 30W motor oil, it was so pure.  He eventually was awarded a patent for this.  The university released patent rights to him and he started a company.  The price of oil had been making record highs, but soon crashed, taking the company with it.  I witnessed this with great excitement and was particularly disappointed that a new technology that at least the investors believed could be economically feasible was totally discarded.  Did not our government realize that easily pumped oil is a limited resource and shale would be tapped sooner or later?  I had a lot to learn.

I wanted to bring up during the interview the Precautionary Principle (PP) in the context of  anthropogenic global climate change and the investigation of anomalous energy claims.  Younger people may not be aware of the role played by the PP in the decision to assume that the chance that climate change was being caused by human activity (anthropogenic) was enough reason to reconstruct human society around the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as a precaution.  Whether or not this was a wise choice is not my point.  It was a policy implemented at a vast and ever growing expense, with a fear campaign impressed on the young that is religious in scope (your grandchildren will burn in hell if you do not stop committing climate sin), and the future expense is beyond comprehension.

If the possibility that humans might be endangering future generations by our way of living (which is true in many ways) is enough reason to take such drastic action specifically for greenhouse emissions, and this course correction is to be taken because the risk is so extreme (winding up like Venus) if we do not take the actions required to curb emissions, then every possible measure should be on the table for consideration.  The hydrino producing reactions that Mills and others have been studying and demonstrating for decades have the property of producing no greenhouse gas, and they would consume no carbon fuels.  The reactors that cold fusioneers have been developing have not come close to the kind of power output and economic viability that Mills has claimed (to my knowledge).  Why would the PP not extend to demand an investigation into the claims of Randell Mills, for instance?  It certainly appears that he is at a stage of development where official investigation is demanded, out of precaution.

The present state of development of the Mills reactor, the SunCell, is quite impressive, due to recent advancements.  I can only go by reports that Brilliant Light Power is releasing.  The recent statements concerning the implementation of a window into the cell that as capable of withstanding the intense conditions of the highly power dense plasma, have really changed the plans.  They are no longer planning on developing thermal-based power generation because direct high power light to electricity generation is now demonstrated.  If the window (made from fused silica) works as well as it appears, the conversion of the optical power generated within the plasma into electrical power can be done with concentrator photovoltaic cells directly.  This is a much more efficient process than using thermal energy to drive a heat engine (limited by Carnot efficiency) and Mills is predicting an efficiency exceeding 50%.  He has recently measured the optical power from the reactor, outside of the window, and (extrapolating the spectrum analyzer measured power, a reliably accurate, if not so precise measurement) found plasma optical power to be 34.1 times as great as the power needed to run the reactor, which is extremely good news, although this 1.14 megaWatt output power could only be produced for a short time to prevent destructively melting the reactor.  He is balancing the window size (which controls how much optical power escapes the reactor), the power driving the reaction, hydrogen and catalyst feed and possibly other parameters to create a power source that can run indefinitely.

To put it into perspective, 1.14 MW output power is the optical power produced by the plasma that is created with 33.5 kW (0.2% of the output optical power).  If half of this optical power is captured as commercial electrical power, that is equivalent to 764 hp of power, which is much greater than required by a semi truck.  33.5 kW equals 45 hp, which is about 6% of the reactor driving power, leaving 719 hp of power for commercial use.

Now, this is not the product that Mills is promising at this point.  He cannot currently run the reactor at a 1.14 MW optical output power for very long without meltdown, but it demonstrates the potential that exists.  The gain of 34.1 is way beyond what is required in order for the device to make enough power to drive itself.  A gain of 3 is plenty if he can convert half of the optical energy to electricity.  This generous amount of possible gain means that a device that runs indefinitely and does not self-destruct is well within reach.  Mills expresses strong confidence that this goal will be reached soon.  The gain can be reduced making the reactor cooler, which would make the heat problems quite manageable.  

There are heat management techniques that are not being utilized because this is still an early windowed reactor prototype.  Consider the plasma of a rocket engine.  The heat that the bell housing must tolerate may require sponge metal in which the fuel circulates at very high flow rate to remove the heat.  Mills approaches problems to find elegant solutions that are very economical, but technology exists to handle the kind of extremely high temperatures his reactor can produce if all else fails.  The windowed reactor is remarkably cheap, and there are no fuel costs.  The light intensity is so extreme, roughly a thousand time what sunlight on the Earth surface is, so ordinary photovoltaic cells would not survive.  The spectrum of the light coming out of the window is very similar to sunlight, so currently available concentrator thermophotovoltaic cells (cTPV) would work very well.  The cost of the cTPV is the bulk of the cost of the system, but because these specialized cells are not produced in massive numbers yet, their price may drop a lot.  The implementation of light recycling is a new technique, and this may allow for extremely high conversion efficiency.  He said in a recent stockholder conference that the IPO is scheduled for 2/1/2023.

How long will such a power dense energy source run before maintenance is required?  There are no moving parts and the cTPV is probably going to be the limiting component, and it might run for 20 years, depending on the cTPV cooling employed.  The technology developed for today's photovoltaic systems will drive costs for the cTPV down.

Are we like young children who have been covering our eyes and imagining that not seeing the world in front of us means that the world no longer exists?  Are we about to discover that this is not a realistic way to adapt to what is happening?  Ironically, this is how some people have thought about the Standard Theory of Quantum Mechanics.  If you cannot see the cat, its health status is not defined.

Remember, I am just the messenger.  It would be a maladaptation to shoot me.