two years with his wife to build a beautiful home only solving the energy problem but the nuclear among the pines and junipers, and then resumed waste disposal problem, too. his research on his own. Today, he is a central We enter the other half of his house and walk figure in a loose-knit international network of down a red steel spiral staircase into a garage LENR researchers who work mostly outside of recessed into the hillside. Carpentry tools such mainstream science and publish their results as a radial-arm saw and a band saw remain here on a website ( lenr-canr.org) for which Storms since he used this space for his home construc-is the science editor. Piece by piece, they have tion work, but most of the garage has been accumulated a formidable body of evidence sug- remade as a laboratory. A chemical workbench gesting that nuclear fusion can and does occur stands against one of the cinderblock walls, at moderate temperatures, and can be demon- while an impressive array of vacuum equipment strated using equipment that is small enough, is mounted on an improvised bench opposite. cheap enough, and safe enough to assemble on Computers are hooked up to calorimeters, doing a kitchen table. data acquisition.
Storms picks up a wafer of palladium less than Storms shows me a hand-fabricated elec-an inch long and places it in the chamber of his trolytic cell, which would look familiar to any electron microscope. As a pump evacuates air high school student who has seen oxygen and from the chamber, a picture of the palladium hydrogen liberated by an electric current pass-appears on a video monitor. It looks like a lunar ing between two electrodes immersed in water. landscape, pitted and scarred. Martin Fleischmann’s idea was to substitute an
“We know now that the nuclear reactions oc- electrode made from the precious metal pal-cur in micro domains,” he says, pointing to little ladium, which he immersed in deuterium oxide, blips in the image. “The amount of heat that we commonly known as “heavy water.” Although it measure has to do with how many of those micro sounds exotic, heavy water is all around us as a domains you create on the surface. The energy trace isotope in everyday water. It yields deuterium, density is one million watts per cubic centimeter.
Most of the sample is completely dead, but if
you concentrate on the part that you know to AN ELECTRON MICROSCOPE AT HOME:
be alive, a couple of microns below the surface, Edmund Storms, a former Los Alamos
you’re up to 100,000 watts per cubic centimeter.” scientist, is spearheading the effort to
He speaks in his habitually dry, academic style, develop a reliable way to enable cold fusion
but allows himself a wry smile. “This is a higher reactions.
energy density than anything outside of nuclear
weapons.” If he’s right, the only thing that makes 1. Wafers of palladium, used as cathodes in
LENRs safe to play with is that they occur on a Storms’ experiments, ready for analysis.
microscopic scale, without creating any neutron
radiation to trigger a chain reaction. 2. A palladium wafer is placed in the vacuum
He shuts down the $175,000 electron micro- chamber of Ed Storms’ scanning tunneling
scope and we walk outside, across a decked electron microscope.
area where hummingbirds drink from feeders
overlooking a spectacular view of Santa Fe. In the 3. The microscope resolves an image of
far distance, beyond the town, Storms points to micro-domains on the palladium surface.
a thin white line which he identifies as tents that
have been erected to cover a temporary stash 4. Storms sits with his STM where the
of nuclear waste on a hillside near Los Alamos. ping-pong table used to be in his mountain
While activists and politicians squabble over retreat.
disposal plans, the “temporary” stash keeps getting bigger. Since LENRs create virtually no radioactive byproducts, Storms sees them not >>
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