Yada yada yada: the cold case of cold fusion - Letter from Lorna Salzman

via: Letter from Lorna Salzman

Despite p.r. noting the involvement of a "Princeton graduate" and physicists, a google search on the US Naval Research lab work on "cold fusion" comes up devoid of ANY peer reviewed publication on this topic.  Whatever is happening in this lab is being held close o the vest, private, secret....though this does not prevent cheerleaders like Brad Arnold from declaring definitively that a "cold" nuclear reaction has occurred, just like Roman Jews declared that Jesus' empty tomb proved that he had risen to heaven. 

One commenter refers to the experiment and resulting heat as a possible catalytic reaction of the metals involved. Nor is there any indication that the resulting heat in the experiment is either sufficient to ultimately boil water and produce electric power or that it involves a reaction at the atomic level, or, most important, that this laboratory-size heat can be scaled up to run a power plant to generate electricity for thousands of people.

The fact that just about everyone is puzzled about what this experiment actually IS indicates that it is premature, to say the least, to declare that it is a nuclear reaction. There's nothing wrong with this as long as it remains a garage experiment that doesn't involve taxpayer money. 

German Nuclear Power Plants

French Nuclear Power Plants

Of course, back in the real world, electricity is not part of our energy crisis. In a major technological misjudgement, many countries have over the past half century become over-reliant on electricity as a result of their misguided decision to invest in nuclear power reactors.  Consequently we have France which is 80% dependent on reactors for electricity and despite its over-electrification exports much of its electricity elsewhere,  Japan about 30%, and Germany about 23%.......with only Germany having the good sense to shut down nukes before its dependency increases.

The USA gets about 20% of its electricity from nuclear power, with electricity representing approximately 18% of ALL end uses of energy. Thus, if we were to stop throwing money down the nuclear rat hole, we might have a chance of becoming a global leader in renewable energy technologies. But it is now clear that Germany will pull far ahead of us because we have a bunch of dickheads running our government who talk a good talk about the need to remain competitive in technology but do nothing to actually promote or implement renewable energy technologies.

Given how tiny the nuclear electricity sector is, and how our electricity needs (along with efficiency and conservation) can easily be provided by wind turbines, photovoltaics and solar electric farms, one begins to realize the stubbornness and ego of the nuclear scientists and engineers who denigrate the proven, demonstrably effective and already off=the-shelf technologies of renewables in favor of mysterious black boxes in remote laboratories peopled by faithful claques.

Imagine where we might be on renewables if these true believers were, instead, thronging congress and the media with demands for terminating government support for nuclear reactors that will never get built much less operate and instead starting pushing hard for efficiency and renewables. Their failure to do this is in a real sense a kind of treason because it is allowing countries like Germany to move ahead and become dominant in technology and thus in the new economy that inevitably will be based on renewable energy.

These scientists are a drag, a brake, on progress in the renewable energy field. They are on the same level as the climate change deniers who are also committing a form of treason, sacrificing people and the natural environment out of a secular religious fervor based on no facts or evidence whatsoever. Nuclear scientists, the Tea Party, the right wing radicals: ignoramuses all who care nothing for either humans or science.

LS