LENR: A Primer on Carbon-Free Heat Tech

This is a presentation I made on April 27 at the 2019 Minnebar14 technology conference in Minneapolis, MN.  This year's conference was held at the headquarters of Best Buy and had over 1,400 attendees and 157 sessions! My presentation was not recorded live, so this recording was made with "scratch audio" recordings from rehearsals.

LINK TO VIDEO

The conference was held a month before the recent publication “Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments” published in the science journal Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01683-9. 

Despite Google’s failure to find any anomalous heat produced by cold fusion (also known as LENR), you need only look at the comments from researchers in the field, such as here: https://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/thread/5990-nature-google-funded-research-fails-to-find-excess-heat-nuclear-signature-reache/?pageNo=1 to see that the researchers intentionally did not follow the protocols of other successful experiments in producing anomalous heat.

Google made a point of not following previous protocols and not engaging with past experimenters since they wanted their experiments to be free of any unintentional bias. The publication Nature has rarely published results from LENR research, but Google broke through that barrier by giving the research a fresh start and now invites other, more established researchers, to joint with them in the pursuit of “low energy nuclear reactions”, aka “cold fusion”.

Here is my session description from the conference:

With firms like Toyota, Nissan, Boeing and Mitsubishi engaged in research, and patents filed as recently as February by Google, it is worth finding out how this carbon-free sustainable technology is positioned to fill the gap between renewables and traditional nuclear. 

LENR is an acronym for Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, but is also known as LANR (Lattice Assisted ...), CANR (Chemically Assisted ...) and describes a category of carbon-free generators of heat energy that have been researched for 30 years. This year one company has said they will introduce IoT-controlled LENR products into the marketplace that could dramatically reduce our reliance upon fuels that emit greenhouse gases. So shouldn’t we learn more about it?

One potential manufacturer states, “Think of it as an energy amplifier, that turns one unit of energy into many units without any toxic waste or dangerous radioactivity.”

Controversial? You betcha! Despite over 1,000 peer reviewed papers from research universities and labs showing the generation of heat, financial backing by the Gates Foundation and Google Alphabet and confirmation of heat production by research heavyweights like SRI International, LENR has come a long way since its beginnings when it was called “cold fusion”. 

This will be a primer on the topic, including some of the science, how the field has progressed and how it might be poised to be the biggest provider of heat energy in industry, the home and even in vehicles.

The session will provide links to researchers, organizations, commercial ventures and patents filed by those trying to be first to market with a device that may generate thousands of kilowatts of heat from a core the size of a cigarette that can run for six months on a single charge using the same materials you find in today’s laptop batteries.

[NOTE: in my presentation I misspelled the name of technology writer Mats Lewan. Sorry Mats!]