What would you think if one America's finest Universities quashed research which offers at least the near-term possibility of a source of energy for space flight, if not for solving the world�s energy problems� and did it to retain their status as an abnormally high recipient of federal funding? If you are an admirer of Gene Mallove, you can probably guess where this is going�
In 1989, months after the P&F announcement, a puzzling experiment was performed at Brookhaven National Laboratory which is little known today, but is sure to be brought up in any thorough revue of CF. Fortunately, a few overseas Labs did not give up on what is know as the CIF technique (Cluster Impact Fusion), after MIT successfully quashed the early enthusiasm, just as it did with electrolytic CF. In '89, intrigued by the recent P&F results and the building controversy, BNL scientists Beuhler, Friedlander and others, pounced on the warm LENR idea early-on. They accelerated clusters of heavy water molecules (containing about 1300 D2O molecules) to a modest kinetic energy, about 220 eV per molecule, and observed what happens when the D2O collided with a metal target. The idea was to test whether fusion occurs in a compressed cluster at higher energy than electrolysis, but far lower than a hot plasma. The name of the phenomenon, cluster impact fusion (CIF) was given to the process after an incredible number of hot-fusion events were identified. Like the later work of Claytor, substantial tritium was found, as well as 3MeV protons. Ref: R.J. Beuhler et al., "Cluster Impact Fusion." Physical Review Letters, vol. 63, no 12 (18 September 1989): 1292-1295 Mysteriously, the BNL researchers were denied funding to expand this interesting work and some moved on to other Labs but never were able to push the envelope to useful levels. What would have happened, for instance, as early as 1990 if spherical convergence had been utilized with the CIF technique? Spherical convergence effectively squares the kinetic energy of a head-on collision by restricting the open degree of freedom, as the Farnsworth Fusor has so aptly demonstrated. We would never know back then, because of 'interference' which could turn out to be nothing less than a high-level conspiracy. Shortly after the BNL hoopla, MIT came out with a press release stating why the Brookhaven results were in error. NOTE: they did not try to reproduce the experiment - just to find a plausible way it could have been erroneous. This was in keeping with their egregious falsification of positive excess heat findings in electrolytic CF, which was later duly reported by Gene Mallove. But unfortunately not before the Hot Fusion establishment used the MIT disinformation to humiliate P&F and cause the entire subject field to be labeled as pathological science. In the same issue of Physical Review Letters where the MIT letter appeared, the one claiming error in the BNL results due to 'contaminants' (HAH) the same BNL scientists who did the original study retracted their findings and published an erratum saying that their original conclusion was wrong. BNL, it should be noted, gets hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for hot fusion and MIT has received funding in the billions of dollars over the years. Is it any wonder that this could be viewed as MIT forcing the retraction from reluctant BNL scientist, just as it had previously falsified its own CF data? Here is their press release: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/1992/may13/26045.html Jones Oh BTW, the original study found about 10,000,000,000 times more hot protons than expected. Some kind of contaminant error, huh? But fortunately, the Russians were never deterred by what can be characterized as a high-level US-only conspiracy. Here is a year old result from Russia (did they miss the BNL retraction, or just know something that we didn't) : Cluster-Impact Fusion of Light Nuclei �High Temperature� May 2003, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 295-299 Velikodnyi and Bityurin, Institute of High Temperature, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 125412 Russia Abstract: Charged clusters of heavy water were accelerated to a combined energy of 300 keV into a deuterated Titanium target and revealed an anomalously high yield of fusion products. Based on the results of analysis of experimental results, they suggest methods of realizing a close-to-maximal rate of fusion at a relatively low average energy per nucleon of as low as 0.005 up to 0.8 keV. In principle, no novel breakthrough technologies are required to realize the suggested methods (standard commercially available equipment is adequate for the purpose). A characteristic feature of the suggested devices is in its small dimensions, light weight and a relatively low initial energy input, which offers possibilities for utilization as a source of energy in flights to outer planets of the solar system.
