From: Bob Higgins
I worked with Marc Chason for many years at Motorola. He is a former Argonne Nat'l Labs researcher before coming to Motorola and has a strong material science background. We worked together on HTC superconductor applications at Motorola. Marc is now a consultant (his own company) and is closely associated with Widom & Larsen. I have a great deal of respect for his creativity and ingenuity. Jones Beene wrote: This patent [application] is a huge surprise. Not only is the technique obvious, many other filings which relate to LENR have been denied for even mentioning the subject…. There are numerous “equal protection” issues here. The USPTO is in disarray on this subject. Chason’s filing is an application, as Terry sez - so I made the correction above - and it will be interesting to see how it fares at USPTO in the end. Given Chason’s creativity, one wonders if there is more to the application than meets the eye. Speaking of which – Chason mentions Larsen’s granted patent, which is “not exactly” a patent for LENR, but instead is ostensibly worded to be used for gamma shielding. Larsen’s is a back-door or “sneaky” patent since it tries to sneak in more coverage than is apparent in the abstract. That was probably the only way to get anything through USPTO for a LENR reactor. Chason may be trying to do the same. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1 <http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,893,414.PN.&OS=PN/7,893,414&RS=PN/7,893,414> &Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,893,414.PN.&OS=PN/7,893,414&RS=PN/7,893,414 However, 7,893,414 appears to be so compromised and poorly conceived (insofar as the basic claim of functional gamma shielding, which they cannot show in practice) as to be essentially unenforceable. To be minimally enforceable, the inventor would need to show the actual ability to completely shield high energy fusion gammas (in the range of 24 MeV) - which they, nor anyone else, can do without a heavy metal. For instance, they cite 5,887,042 (Akamatsu) from 1999 which uses titanium hydride along with lead - to give a lighter weight shielding, but in practice this is no better than lead in terms of volume required, and only manages to make the shielding slightly lower weight (and far more costly). In fact, almost nothing in nature has been shown to shield fusion level gammas better than lead.
