is difficult even within the community. “People who are successful now are not broadcasting the results until they get their patents,” Storms says. “Whenever someone has information of any substance, they make you sign a nondisclosure agreement, and after that, you can’t talk about it.”
Has he been in that position himself?
“Oh, sure. I’ve signed half a dozen NDAs.”
Still, he remains fundamentally optimistic, and at the age of 74 he shows no signs of slowing down — because he feels he has no choice. “Once you realize that this is real,” he says, “you can’t go back, because your integrity and your conscience won’t allow you to go back. You know, Carol wants me to work on the house, and I kid her, I don’t have time, because I’m too busy saving the world. That’s how big this is.”
He pauses, perhaps wondering if he sounds a little over-dramatic. “When you retire, you have to do something to keep yourself occupied,” he says, retreating to his more usual laconic style. “And since I don’t play golf,” he gestures at the cluttered garage workshop, “I might as well be here.”
Learn how to make your own calorimeter and/or LENR cell. Find PDF files about the following at: lenr-canr.org/acrobat/
StormsEhowtomakea.pdf
StormsEcalorimetr
LonchamptGreproducti.pdf
Washington Post on LENR:
Weinbergerwarmingupt.pdf
Charles Platt has been a senior writer for Wired magazine and has written science fiction novels such as The Silicon Man.
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Nuclear fission splits atomic nuclei to produce energy, while nuclear fusion joins nuclei together to produce energy.
Nuclear power plants cause fission reactions by adding neutrons to plutonium or uranium atoms to make them unstable enough to split. When the atoms split, they release additional neutrons, which bombard additional radioactive atoms, causing them to split. Nuclear power reactors use control rods to absorb some of the neutrons to prevent a chain reaction that would lead to a meltdown.
Fusion is harder to achieve, at least by people. The sun and stars are giant fusion machines, but here on Earth, getting deuterium or tritium nuclei to collide with enough force to fuse them together requires very high temperatures. Researchers try to contain the reaction in powerful magnetic fields (solid containers would be vaporized) but progress in this field has been slow.
When Professor Martin Fleischmann of Southampton University and Professor Stanley Pons of the University of Utah announced the discovery of “cold fusion” in March 1989, the news tore through the scientific community like a nuclear explosion. Most scientists could not repeat Pons and Fleischmann’s results, and the consensus was that the scientists were careless and foolish at best and scam artists at worst.
But a small number of scientists said they were able to reapeat the results, and research has continued on a small scale. in 2004, the U.S. Department of Energy reviewed the current cold fusion research and concluded, “The experimental evidence for anomalies in metal deuterides, including excess heat and nuclear emissions, suggests the existence of new physical effects.” According to Storms, the Pons-Fleischmann experiment has been successfully repeated hundreds of times in the last 16 years.
Today’s experimental cold fusion setups are more elaborate than the original Pons-Fleischmann cell, but the general idea is the same. The theory is that the deuterium dissolves in the palladium in such a way that the deuterium nuclei (which normally repel one another with great force) come close enough to fuse.
— Mark Frauenfelder
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