With Fukushima confirming the extreme dangers of using nuclear fission as a base load energy source in the future - where do we go from here? One place is to the latest developments in nuclear fusion now called Low Energy Nuclear reactions. The past 23 years has produced some 1400 papers and peer reviewed articles on the Pons Fleishmann effect. Dr. Peter Hagelstein of MIT, Dr. Rob Duncan of University Missouri, three divisions of NASA including Langley Research under Dr. Dennis Bushnell all confirm the viability of this new source of energy to relieve the burden on fission.
But there are problems. In particular the resistance of old school nuclear science to anything new or disruptive. That arrives in the form of interference in the scientific method - recently explained by Dr. Hagelstein as follows:
"I recently had the experience of working with a large company in the U.S. who’s interested in pursuing experiments in this area and helping out. So we put in, we discussed with the technical people at this company of the possibility that they might put in some money for the support of the replication of the Piantelli experiment. So they got the agreement, they got the money, they got it to MIT, and we thought: good, now we can make some progress.
However, a very famous physicist at MIT who is involved in the energy program found out what we were trying to do, and he cancelled the program and he called up the vice president of the company and said some things that weren’t very polite about the research. And not only did the funding not come and the experiments didn’t happen, but my colleagues at the company were very worried about where the’re going to work next. As you know, there’re unemployment issues currently in our bad economy, so there’s a fundamental difficulty with respect to getting support for the experiments, and what that means is that the science can be expected to go very slowly for these reasons, until a solution is found to this problem.” May 4, 2012 Dr. Peter Hagelstein Prof. MIT Engineering speaking to Atom Unexplored Conference in Torino, Italy
In effect Dr. Hagelstein has blown the whistle on blatant, potentially illegal, intervention in the scientific method at MIT. As Pekka noted – in his country this would cause an immediate investigation and action in court. The United States cannot expect to excel in this critical technology unless political corruption of this caliber is apprehended and prosecuted.
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