Since my last update, all activity in and around LENR R&D has ramped up still further and added more support to my “Pivotal Year for LENR” prediction for this year.
A new patent application was published by the US Patent and Trademark office for “Devices and Methods for Heat Generation” with Andrea Rossi listed as the inventor and Industrial Heat LLC listed as the applicant. The assignee is Leonardo Corporation. It attracted much interest but retired Patent Attorney David French was unimpressed and explained why in an expert and detailed analysis . Basically, Rossi’s catalysts have still not been disclosed and, therefore, no-one “skilled in the art” can yet fully replicate his invention – an essential prerequisite for a patent.
A follow-up patent may yet detail Rossi’s “secret recipe” but, because it is the only piece in the puzzle that rival companies would really need, it is clearly something which Industrial Heat wants to protect at all costs and for as long as possible. However, time is not on their side. If only by the “shotgun” approach of exhaustively testing every remotely likely cocktail of chemicals that have been mentioned (H, Ni, Li, Al, Fe, etc), rival parties will inevitably discover the exact set of chemicals, percentages, preparations and procedures to match or even exceed the E-Cat’s performance. Nor would it be fair to say that the many other LENR workers do not deserve a share in the both the accolades and the riches. Some have been working on LENR for longer than Rossi and, most importantly, sharing their findings with the world. Edmund Storms book, mentioned in my previous report, reflects this enormous body of work as does a recent paper by David J Nagel. Both are “must reads” for serious students of LENR and we’ll look further into them in later posts.
In both the above works, the name of Vittorio Violante, leader of the ENEA Task Force for Energy from Metal Hydrogen research at ENEA-Frascati in Italy, appears often. Recently, Violante gave a lecture there on LENR to a very exclusive group, including entrepreneur and philanthropist, Bill Gates himself. Obviously, this will have dispelled any remaining doubts – that mainstream “movers and shakers” are not aware of the potential of LENR – in a single stroke!
In the same week, the Indian government was urged to revive its own cold fusion research program. As the article says: “One such LENR generator located in each village and powering a local village-level micro-grid can work wonders . . . It is hoped that the new government will take cognition of this breakthrough development and take necessary steps to foster this new technology in India”. This would obviously be a perfect fit for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s stated aim to “help the world’s poorest people lift themselves out of hunger and poverty”.
But an even more resourceful player in the LENR drama may soon take center stage. As I write these words, the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, is visiting my own country, New Zealand. Described as pragmatic, serious, cautious, hard-working, down to earth and low-key, Xi Jinping’s experience of the R&D world includes a four year stint at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University where he studied chemical engineering, which would, no doubt, make it easier for him to appreciate the potential of LENR than most other world leaders. So, given that he has recently called for an energy revolution, that LENR could provide it and that China is the strongest command economy in the world, it could be argued that Xi Jinping might only need to borrow Star Trek Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s most famous phrase and say: “Make it so!”
P. W. Power