Newsroom
Current Press Releases
FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE: April 27, 2009
Blowing Smoke : the movie San Francisco
The story follows
protagonist Mick Maylor, a lobbyist for the
dreaded Old King Coal, through run-ins with kidnappers,
confrontations with Bono, and a barrage of extremely humorous
sexual exploits. Maylor is on a quest to prove to his boss, G.W.,
that he is worth the money they are paying him to lie and finesse the public
into thinking climate change and global warming are not
dangerous. Mick defends his amoral character in the
role of the mouth of the merchant of death by claiming he is doing all of this
to pay the mortgage and send his son through one of Washington's most elite
private schools (St. Organicus). As the plot twists and turns, we find room
in our sympathetic hearts for Mick, and he quickly turns from
antagonist to protagonist. We see a man, who like most Americans, is doing his
job and trying to make a living. In fact his only real obstacle is the moral
strain his position is imparting on him lately. As the plot elevates
and Maylor faces more and more heated public ignominy we actually
feel sorry for him. Nick associates himself with a spokesman for
the NRA, a spokeswoman for the Alcohol industry,
and "Deep Throat" a GOP hard liner, whose face is never quite revealed. They
are known cynically to each other
as the M.O.M. squad (Merchants of Masses - sort of like a Dead Poets
society whose motto is, "the masses are asses."). Together they comfort
and console each others wavering morals, battered and tired from tidal
waves of public scorn. Finally Mick is undone by a
journalist with "world class tits" who uncovers her way to an expose' on Mick,
his evil ways, and the M.O.M. squad. The movie partially
serves as a comic vehicle to follow the life of one of the country's most hated
professionals, and partially as a flashlight to shine clearly upon the public's
corruption by the Fossil Fuel Industry. There is a real message to
be learned here about what goes on behind the scenes in giant corporations
and political parties.
Working title - Blowing Smoke
This
movie needs to be made, so we are just going to do it. If you've
got
producer connections or production skills and want to help contact us.
Or if you've got connections to the Polo Club in Hollywood you could
just print the pitch onto a few napkins and slip one onto a table
setting for one of the movie moguls. Yeah we know the pitch is longer
than the proverbial Polo Pitch "someone stole Charles Bronson's
car and he wants it back" but maybe....
Contact: movie(a-t)planktos-science.com
FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE: April 22, 2009
Cold Fusion Future Calls
for Massive Funding of New Cold Fusion Research
Silicon Valley, California
A
flurry of news reports now confirm that the long maligned field of cold
fusion indeed represents a stunning energy breakthrough for scientists
working in the field over its life of now 20
years.Breakthroughs allows a few select research groups to
produce radiation-free and waste-free nuclear energy. One out of
every 5,000 atoms of hydrogen on Earth is the heavy form of hydrogen,
known as deuterium or D2, the fuel for solid-state fusion.” Comments
Russ George, scientist for Cold Fusion Future of California and one of
the most senior pioneers in the field.
Cold fusion, occurring in nano materials, (lattices of some tens of
nanometer dimension) shares common roots with
conventional solid-state electronics and high temperature
super-conductivity. All three phenomena adhere to now-established
quantum solid-state rules for coherent matter and energy. Similarly,
the discovery of solid-state electronics methods, materials, and
theory led to today’s electronic age and countless useful
technologies.
Russ George
noted, "Those same rules and theories now guide the
development of nano-technology methods and materials that deliver
nuclear fusion energy. These quantum
nano-fusion reactions produce energy from the fusion of hydrogen (deuterium), nuclei while suppressing radiation leaving,
only helium behind as the waste product." The hot fusion community with
its enormous multi-billion dollar machines with names like Tokamak
and Stellerator that seek to mimic conditions inside the sun and
stars now faces intense competition from the much more practical,
safe, and inexpensive applications that derive from nano-technology based solid-state fusion.
Amongst the
leading innovators in this field are the scientists and engineers
working with D2FUSION of California who have demonstrated their
ingenuity and prowess in this field in major laboratories around the
world including Los Alamos, Stanford Research International, and the
Electric Power Research Institute as well as Japanese labs.
D2FUSION is confident that practical solid-state fusion devices are a
mere few years away from store shelves. The first applications will
likely be similar to familiar and inexpensive 1-2 kilowatt space
heaters and heat sources. More information is available at www.coldfusionfuture.com.
COLD FUSION FUTURE is an R&D company based in the Silicon Valley of California
working to develop its own technology and delivering solid-state
fusion apparatus and technology to major research laboratories
around the world.
CONTACT
INFORMATION:
Old Press Releases
Oldies but Goodies
US Review Rekindles Cold Fusion Debate - Nature on-line news Dec. 02, 2004
"Claims
of cold fusion are intriguing ..." states cold fusion panel. The
findings, which were released on 1 December by the US Department of
Energy, rekindle a 15-year-old debate over whether nuclear fusion can
occur at room temperature.
The review is a positive step for
the field of cold fusion, according to David Nagel at George Washington
University in Washington DC, who co-authored the summary of cold-fusion
work that the panel reviewed.
Researchers finally caught the
ear of the US energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, who commissioned the
review in August 2003 from the department's science directorate.
Although
the reviewers remained skeptical, they were nearly unanimous in their
opinion that the energy department should fund well-thought-out
proposals for cold fusion. Nagel says that he expects many in the long
neglected field to submit research plans in the coming months. "I will
be among them," he adds.
The New Scientist 11 Dec 2004 DOE WARMS TO COLD FUSION
"Grab
a beaker of heavy water and a pair of palladium electrodes: it's time
to start experimenting with cold fusion again, without any need for
embarrassment. A review of cold fusion research for the US Department
of Energy has recommended that the DOE remain open to the idea". ...
Read more.at The New Scientist.....
Warming Up to Cold Fusion
Washington Post By Sharon Weinberger, Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page W22
On
a quiet Monday in late August -- a time of year when much of the
Washington bureaucracy has gone to the beach -- a panel of scientists
gathered at a Doubletree Hotel set between the Congressional Plaza
strip mall and a drab concrete office building on Rockville Pike. They
sat around a U-shaped table decked with laptops, with three government
officials at the front, ready to hear about an idea that, if it worked,
could change the world.
The panel's charge was simple: to determine whether that idea had even a prayer of a chance at working.
The
Department of Energy went to great lengths to cloak the meeting from
public view. No announcement, no reporters. None of the names of the
people attending that day was disclosed. The DOE made sure to inform
the panel's members that they were to provide their conclusions
individually rather than as a group, which under a loophole in federal
law allowed the agency to close the meeting to the public....
Read the rest of the story at this Washington Post Link
DOE warms to Cold Fusion, Physics Today April 2004
"I
have committed to doing a review" of cold fusion, says James Decker,
deputy director of DOE's Office of Science. Late last year, he says,
"some scientists came and talked to me and asked if we would do some
kind of review on the research that has been done" since DOE's energy
research advisory board (ERAB) looked at cold fusion nearly 15 years
ago. "There may be some interesting science here," Decker says.
"Whether or not it has applications to the energy business is clearly
unknown at this point, but you need to sort out the science before you
think about applications.
To read the full story visit this Physics Today Link
Energy Department accepts scientists' request to revisit cold fusion
By Kenneth Chang, The New York Times April 2002
Cold
fusion, briefly hailed as the silver-bullet solution to the world's
energy problems and since discarded to the same bin of quackery as
paranormal phenomena and perpetual motion machines, will soon get a new
hearing from Washington.
Despite being pushed to the
fringes of physics, a small group of scientists has continued work on
cold fusion, and they say their figures unambiguously verify the
results of the original experiment in 1989, showing that energy can be
generated simply by running an electrical current through a jar of
water.
Last fall, cold fusion scientists asked the Energy
Department to take a second look at the process, and last week the
department agreed.
A British magazine, New Scientist, first
reported the news this week, and James Decker, deputy director of the
science office in the Energy Department, confirmed it in an e-mail
interview.
"It was my personal judgment that their request for a review was reasonable," Decker said.
The
research is too preliminary to determine whether cold fusion, even if
real, will live up to its initial billing as a cheap, bountiful source
of energy, said Peter Hagelstein, a professor of electrical engineering
and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who
has been working on a theory to explain how the process works.
Experiments have generated small amounts of energy, from a fraction of
a watt to a few watts. Still, Hagelstein added, "I definitely think it
has potential for commercial energy production."
Read the full story at this link NYTIMES DOE
Power to the People, The Return of Cold Fusion
San Francisco Chronicle News March 16th 1999, Technology Reporter Hal Plotkin's Column
"On
Friday, March 26, 1999, the director of Menlo Park-based SRI
International's Energy Research Center, Dr. Michael McKubre, will
present the results of SRI's 10-year, $6 million-dollar effort to
replicate the cold-fusion experiments of chemists Stanley Pons and
Martin Fleischmann.
McKubre's startling conclusion: Pons and Fleischmann were on to something.
It
might not be nuclear fusion, McKubre says. But a new, clean source of
power may, in fact, be on the horizon. The SRI findings will be
delivered at the centennial meeting of the American Physical Society in
Atlanta..... "
Read the full story on the SF Chronicle Web Site
Tempest In A Test Tube: 10 Years Later, New York Times 23 March 1999
Excerpt
- "Ten years ago, on March 23, 1989, Dr. Pons, then chairman of the
chemistry department at the University of Utah, and Dr. Fleischmann, a
top British chemist at the University of Southampton, set the world of
science on its head by announcing in Salt Lake City that they had
achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature in a jar of water.
They claimed, in effect, to have tamed the sun, unleashing its might on the earth without destructive side effects.
Hailed
in headlines as the greatest discovery since fire, cold fusion was seen
as promising to provide a safe, cheap and virtually inexhaustible form
of power, ending human dependence on oil and redrawing the geopolitical
map to make Salt Lake City the energy capital of the world.
Best of all, it was outrageously simple. ....
Surprisingly,
despite a decade long cold bath of criticism, cold fusion is still
alive today and apparently doing well in the scientific underground.
Researchers around the globe quietly claim success at getting
tantalizing results, if not blistering heats ready to topple the status
quo. This hum of low-level work confounds skeptics and delights
believers.
"It's as alive as it's always been," Dr.
Fleischmann, 72, said in a telephone interview from his home in
Britain. Successful tests, he added, continue to show that whatever is
happening has to be nuclear in nature. "It can't be chemical," he said.
"The energy quantities are too large, orders of magnitude larger."
Read the full story at the NY Times Web site
BBC.ONLINE Tuesday, March 23, 1999 Sci/Tech: Should the cold fusion dream die?
Excerpted from the story:
"For
a while, it seemed that the world was about to change for ever. One
scientist said: "By the year 2000, every household will have a cold
fusion power source."
But it never happened.
Exactly
10 years ago on Tuesday, the world was introduced to the concept of
cold fusion at a press conference at the University of Utah.
Dr
Stanley Pons and Professor Martin Fleischman from Southampton
University in the UK said they had achieved fusion in a test tube.
Now,
a decade later, many scientists and commentators have dismissed it
entirely. There are cold fusion conferences, but they attract only
enthusiasts and rarely the media.
Impoverished science
This
is a pity. Cold fusion researchers feel outsiders in the scientific
effort. Mainstream scientists ignore them. The result is that neither
camp talks to each other and science is the poorer because of it.
Millions
of dollars are still being spent on it and large labs still hope to
explain and develop the technology. Cold fusion has had only a tiny
fraction of the effort and resources that have been lavished on "hot"
fusion research. And we have had virtually no return on that investment.
We should give the cold fusion camp time and encouragement."
Read the full BBC story on-line at http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_301000/301893.stm
"Star in a Jar." Popular Science Magazine
December 1998, Cover story
The
article leads in with the statement, "Bubbles blasted by sound produce
a mysterious blue light and temperatures hotter that the sun's surface,
in a simple jar of water. Why that is happening is giving physicists
fits." This report describes the work at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory and the Applied Physics Laboratory at the
University of Washington in Seattle who are working to generate
controlled fusion using ultrasonically driven bubbles. The work
described leaves out the work of Scientist Russ George who has reported
for more than five years in seminars at Lawrence Livermore and other
national laboratories on his direct observations of nuclear fusion
using ultrasonically driven bubble collapse. The difference in our
version of "SONOFUSION" and that described is the article is
about the expectation versus the reality of being able to initiate and
control these reactions. While Lawrence Livermore hasn't
yet seen the reaction and doesn't expect to achieve significant energy
production we have repeatedly shown reactions producing over 100 watts
of power in demonstration experiments conducted several years ago for
the Electric Power Research Institute.
"WHAT IF COLD FUSION WERE REAL." - Wired Magazine November 1998
By Charles Platt
In
the lengthy 18 page story the author describes various work in this
field starting with the original discoveries of Pons and Fleischmann in
1989 and culminating with the work by Scientist Russ George at SRI
International confirming that indeed cold fusion is real.
Excerpts from the article: What If Cold Fusion Is Real?
It
was the most notorious scientific experiment in recent memory - in
1989, the two men who claimed to have discovered the energy of the
future were condemned as imposters and exiled by their peers. Can it
possibly make sense to reopen the cold fusion investigation? A
surprising number of researchers already have.
By Charles Platt October 98 Wired Magazine
"...in
the hills overlooking Santa Fe, New Mexico, a retired scientist named
Edmund Storms has built a different kind of fusion reactor. It consists
of laboratory glassware, off-the-shelf chemical supplies, two aging
Macintosh computers for data acquisition, and an insulated wooden box
the size of a kitchen cabinet. While JET's 15 European sponsor-nations
have paid about US$1 billion for their hardware, and the US government
has spent $14.7 billion on fusion research since 1951 (all figures in
1997 dollars), Storms's apparatus and ancillary gear have cost less
than $50,000. Moreover, he claims that his equipment works, generating
surplus heat for days at a time.
Storms is not an
antiestablishment pseudo scientist pursuing a crackpot theory. For 34
years he was part of the establishment himself, employed at Los Alamos
on projects such as a nuclear motor for space vehicles. Subsequently he
testified before a congressional subcommittee considering the future of
fusion. He believes you don't need millions of degrees or billions of
dollars to fuse atomic nuclei and yield energy. "You can stimulate
nuclear reactions at room temperature," he says, in his genial,
matter-of-fact style. "I am absolutely certain that the phenomenon is
real. It is quite extraordinary, and if it can be developed, it will
have profound effects on society."
"...We walk down an
echoing hallway (ed.- at Stanford Research International SRI, Menlo
Park ,CA), into a smaller room crammed with equipment. Amid the steady
hum and whine of cooling fans, a large, Russ George a bearded guy
wearing khaki shorts and a short-sleeved shirt is sitting in front of a
video screen."
"... George and SRI put the same ingredients
(palladium catalysts and deuterium - ed.) into a sealed 50-cc
stainless-steel flask and wrapped it in a heating element. A tube from
this flask is connected, now, to a mass-spectrometer - an enigmatic
steel cabinet standing behind the video screen. "This mass-spec is
sensitive enough to detect the difference between helium and
deuterium," says Russ George. "And the video display, here, will tell
us how much helium is generated."
Any production of helium
would be stunning proof that fusion is occurring, because helium only
results from nuclear reactions. No known chemical interaction can
create it."
"Within another few days," says Russ George, "if the helium level continues to rise, then we'll have the proof."
"Epilogue
It's
10 days since I visited SRI International. I call Russ George and find
him bubbling with enthusiasm, because the mix of carbon, palladium, and
deuterium is now generating 10 parts per million of helium - twice the
level in ambient air. The only conceivable source of this helium is a
nuclear reaction, and George feels that it's the best-ever proof of
cold fusion. "It makes all the sacrifices worthwhile," he says."
Read the complete story at Wired On-line!
"What If Cold Fusion Were Real" - Arthur C. Clarke in Science Magazine
ESSAYS ON SCIENCE AND SOCIETY:
Presidents, Experts, and Asteroids - Excerpted from Science
"For
more than a century science and its occasionally ugly sister technology
have been the chief driving forces shaping our world. They decide the
kinds of futures that are possible. Human wisdom must decide which are
desirable.
...Even more controversial than the threat of
asteroid impacts is what I would call perhaps one of the greatest
scandals in the history of science, the cold fusion caper. Like almost
everyone else, I was surprised when Pons and Fleischmann announced that
they had achieved fusion in the laboratory; and surprise changed to
disappointment when I learned that most of those who had rushed to
confirm these results were unable to replicate them. Wondering first
how two world-class scientists could have fooled themselves, I then
forgot the whole matter for a year or so, until more and more reports
surfaced, from many countries, of anomalous energy production in
various devices (some of them apparently having nothing to do with
fusion). Agreeing with Carl Sagan's principle that "extraordinary
claims require extraordinary proofs" (spoken in connection with UFOs
and alien visitors), I remained interested, but skeptical...
...The
literature on the subject is now enormous, and my confidence that "new
energy" is real slowly climbed to the 90th percentile and has now
reached the 99% level. A Fellow of the Royal Society, also originally a
skeptic, writes: "There is now strong evidence for nuclear reactions in
condensed matter at low temperature." The problem, he adds, is that
"there is no theoretical basis for these claims, or rather there are
too many conflicting theories."
Yet recall that the steam
engine had been around for quite a while before Carnot explained
exactly how it worked. The challenge now is to see which of the various
competing devices is most reliable. My guess is that large-scale
industrial application will begin around the turn of the century--at
which point one can imagine the end of the fossil-fuel-nuclear age,
making concerns about global warming irrelevant, as
oil-and-coal-burning systems are phased out.
Finally,
another of my dubious predictions: Pons and Fleischmann will be the
only scientists ever to win both the Nobel and the Ig Noble Prizes."
Read the entire piece at Science's archive site
***************************
From my own Arthur archives!
Date sent: Mon, 20 Apr 1999 21:40:12 +0600
To: rgeorge@
From: Sir Arthur Clarke
Subject: Re: Cold Fusion
Dear Russ,
Just to acknowledge - please keep me informed of progress. I'm
beating the drum for you! All good wishes.
Arthur