The first half of 2017 had not seen very many major developments in either the hot or the cold versions of controlled nuclear fusion R&D but all that changed with an unexpected announcement from the Rossi versus Industrial Heat court case. This had barely started when both parties made a joint statement to the effect that a mutually satisfactory agreement had been reached.

Rossi, at least, has declared that he is very happy and has already resumed work on his latest version of the E-Cat – the Quark-X. A recent interview on his progress is here. All these developments have been welcome news to all Rossi watchers and this branch of LENR, at least, is obviously back up to speed.

All the while, the tireless work of Bob Greenyer, George Egeley and others from the Martin Fleischman Memorial Project, an open science version of LENR R&D, has continued unabated. Some recent replication attempts have been inconclusive but, the latest ideas they are testing centre around the use of ultrasonic phonon stimulation to induce the LENR effect and, together with Suhas Ralkar from India, are working on a promising prototype.

When we last visited the Brilliant Light Power project, Randall Mills and his team were developing a Photo Voltaic receptor capable of surviving the high temperatures and the photo radiation his device is said to produce. Dr Mills recently announced that, meanwhile, he may market a simpler device in which a high-melting-point receptor absorbs all that energy and converts it directly to heat, when conventional heat engines could convert it to electricity, albeit with a loss of efficiency. More simply again, the heat could be used directly in a wide range of industrial or domestic applications. I must say that, to me, this was always the obvious interim step and would, in one stroke, both produce a widely marketable device in its own right and, equally importantly at this still formative stage, silence the many sceptics of Dr Mills, his device and his own Quantum Theory. We shall see.

P W Power

July 2017