U.S. Department of Energy Announces $10 Million in Funding to Projects Studying Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions

ARPA-E Selects 8 Projects to Apply Scientific and Rigorous Approach Focused on Specific Type of Nuclear Energy

02/17/2023

https://arpa-e.energy.gov/news-and-media/press-releases/us-department-energy-announces-10-million-funding-projects-studying

More details:

https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/documents/files/LENR%20Project%20Descriptions%20FINAL.pdf

Recipients include:

Amphionic (Dexter, MI
Energetics Technology Center (Indian Head, MD)
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley, CA)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA)
Stanford University (Redwood City, CA)
Texas Tech University (Lubbock, TX)
University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI)
University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI)

Some cold fusion researchers feel that these eight projects were poorly chosen. The goals are framed as if cold fusion is the same as plasma fusion. People made this mistake in 1989. For example, several projects focus on neutrons. The first one says, “University of Michigan will provide capability to measure hypothetical neutron, gamma, and ion emissions from LENR experiments.” Some cold fusion experiments have produced neutrons, but most do not. It seems likely that neutrons are a secondary effect with a prosaic cause such as fractofusion, rather than being a primary signature of the reaction. Excess heat correlated with helium, or tritium production, can occur without neutrons, so looking for neutrons is not a fruitful way to detect or analyze a cold fusion reaction.

 

Here is the DoE ARPA-E list of 39 Teeming Partners who are working on cold fusion. The heading on this list says:

“By enabling and publishing the Teaming Partner List, ARPA-E is not endorsing, sponsoring, or otherwise evaluating the qualifications of the individuals and organizations that are self-identifying themselves for placement on this Teaming Partner List.”

https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov/TeamingPartners.aspx?foaid=818bc746-84d3-4afc-bd17-bc7a7f05fb2f

This paper includes an extensive database of cold fusion literature, in an Excel spreadsheet: Freire, L.O. and D.A. de Andrade, Preliminary survey on cold fusion: It’s not pathological science and may require revision of nuclear theory. Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, 2021. 903: p. 115871.

The database is available at the publisher’s website. Click here to download it:

https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S1572665721008973-mmc1.xlsx

A copy is here at LENR-CANR.org. Click to download:

https://lenr-canr.org/Collections/FreireLOpreliminar.xlsx

In 1989 the Department of Energy decided not to fund cold fusion. The question was revised in 2004. A panel of experts recommended funding, but the Department did not follow the recommendation. There has been some low level research by DARPA, the Army and NASA over the years. This year, support for research has increased dramatically.

At the ICCF-24 conference in July 2022, ARPA-E announced that it will open funding opportunities for cold fusion starting in Augusts 2022. Researchers at NASA announced improved results. The Army and Navy both announced projects with 10 or 20 people, which is huge by the standards of cold fusion. The Navy program is being done in cooperation with other U.S. laboratories at NIST, industry and academia. Some of the slides from NASA, the Army and Navy presentations are shown below.

Here is Theresa Benyo of NASA:

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-gtj93-12c6da2

In this podcast interview with Dr. Al Scott, Dr. Edmund Storms describes his latest results, in these papers:

Storms, E. The Nature of Cold Fusion (Cold Fusion Made Simple). in ICCF24 Solid-state Energy Summit. 2022. Mountain View, CA.

Storms, E. The Nature of the D+D Fusion Reaction in Palladium and Nickel (preprint). in ICCF-23. 2021. Xiamen, China.

In the podcast and paper, he describes his model that he believes explains the reaction, and shows how to make better materials. His recent materials have produced heat more reliably in a higher power level than earlier materials, but they have still not reached useful levels of power or enough reliability for commercial applications.

Storms reminisces about the early history of cold fusion at Los Alamos, where hundreds of people were interested in the results. The Department of Energy later rejected cold fusion and closed down research at Los Alamos.

. . .Los Alamos became really excited. I mean, the entire laboratory got involved. Numerous people attempted to replicate what Pons and Fleischmann had done. Meetings held weekly, attended by hundreds of scientists. Great enthusiasm was shown. So, I naturally got interested because I have access to equipment and knowledge that made it possible for me to replicate what they were doing. . . . So I set up to measure tritium. The group I was in studied tritium for the hot fusion program. And so we had available to us the world’s experts on tritium measurement and tritium behavior. . . .So this was the ideal situation for me, because we had . . . We knew tritium; we knew how to deal with it. . . . And at that time, we did not really understand that it is entirely different, wholly unusual mechanism was operating in these materials, having no relationship whatsoever to hot fusion. But luckily for us, that mechanism also made tritium.

He describes the difference between plasma fusion and cold fusion:

We know that Pons and Fleischmann were absolutely right. Their discovery was in fact valid, and it demonstrated a new mechanism for causing a nuclear reaction. In this case it only happens with a material having certain characteristics. . . . The problem is that in order for fusion to happen the two nuclei have to get close enough together that their energy states can interact. . . . The hot fusion program does this by applying kinetic energy to the nuclei, so they come together, smack into each other, by brute force. And that high kinetic energy overcomes the Coulomb barrier. . . . The problem is getting the rate high enough that it makes useful power. . . . Cold fusion, on the other hand, has a different problem. It has to also overcome the Coulomb barrier, but it does that by neutralizing the barrier as a result of electron charge. And in order to accumulate electrons in a state, in a relationship to the nucleus, that is nonchemical — ordinary electrons have a relationship to the nucleus in the chemical context; we understand that relationship very, very well — they have to acquire a different relationship now, to the nucleus, that is not understood and has not been seen before in nature. But, apparently, nature has a way of causing this structure to occur under certain conditions. When it occurs, the Coulomb barrier is neutralized, the two nuclei come together, and they result in fusion. That fusion produces various nuclear products. Those nuclear products now are slowly being identified. But because this is so unusual, and happens within a material rather than a plasma, it is very difficult to study, and it is also very difficult to understand.

A press release from the DoE ARPA-E announces $10 million to study low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR, or cold fusion) See:

https://arpa-e.energy.gov/news-and-media/press-releases/us-department-energy-announces-10-million-study-low-energy-nuclear

U.S. Department of Energy Announces Up to $10 Million to Study Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions

ARPA-E Will Apply Scientific and Rigorous Approach to New Exploratory Topic Focused on Specific Type of Nuclear Energy

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced up to $10 million in funding to establish clear practices to determine whether low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) could be the basis for a potentially transformative carbon-free energy source. The funding is part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) LENR Exploratory Topic, which aims to break the stalemate of research in this space.

“ARPA-E is all about risk and exploring where others cannot go, which is why we’ve set out with this LENR Exploratory Topic to conclusively answer the question ‘should this field move forward, or does it not show promise?’” said ARPA-E Acting Director and Deputy Director for Technology Dr. Jenny Gerbi. “We look forward to seeing the intrepid teams that come forward to approach this field of study with new perspectives and state-of-the-art scientific and technical capabilities.”

LENR Exploratory Topic awardees will pursue hypotheses-driven approaches toward producing publishable evidence of LENR in top-tier scientific journals by testing/confirming specific hypotheses (rather than focusing only on replication), identifying and verifying control of experimental variables and triggers, supporting more comprehensive diagnostics and analysis, and improving access to broader expertise and capabilities on research teams.

You can access more information on ARPA-E eXCHANGE.

The ICCF24 organizing committee has begun uploading videos of presentations here:

ICCF-24 x Solid-State Energy Summit videos

https://www.youtube.com/c/ICCF24xSolidStateEnergySummit/playlists

Most presentations will be uploaded. A complete list of presentations is here:

https://www.iccf24.org/program

The European Union (EU) has funded cold fusion research under grant agreement no 951974, project duration August 2020 – July 2024. This is called the Clean HME (Hydrogen Metal Energy) project, which is the latest alternative name for cold fusion. See:

CleanHME project

Researchers funded by this project presented 10 papers at ICCF-24. They had an initial meeting at the University of Szczecin in September 2020. Here are videos from the meeting.

 

The 15th International Workshop on Anomalies in Hydrogen Loaded Metals and CleanHME General Assembly was held 25 September – 29 September 2022

Location: Hotel Domus Pacis Assisi, Piazza Porziuncola, 1 I-06081, Santa Maria degli Angeli (PG), Italy

http://www.iscmns.org/work15/

The ICCF24 Solid State Energy Summit was held July 25 – 28, 2022.

https://www.iccf24.org/

ABOUT

“The Summit will be a chance to reinvigorate interest and support for the next-generation of investment and research in the area of cold fusion and low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) through augmenting and empowering the ICCF community who have been the pioneers of the field.

Through this summit we want to aim to inspire young STEM talent to see this field as a valid career path, researchers and technologists to consider the value of pursuing on-demand, repeatable experimental evidence, and the investment community to see economic opportunity and societal benefit in supporting this field.”

The program is here:

https://www.iccf24.org/program

Videos of the presentations are here:

https://www.youtube.com/c/ICCF24xSolidStateEnergySummit/playlists

This was probably the largest ICCF conference since ICCF3, in 1992.