"Cold Fusion" & RadWaste
Remediation Overview
Concerning the US Patent office and new energy research
patents involving cold fusion:
FUSION INFORMATION CENTER, Inc. August 3, 1999
To: Special Agent Dear Ms. Kimberlee Taylor,
Dr. Mitchell Swartz has informed me that you are
interested in information regarding cold fusion and low-energy nuclear
reactions and the policy of the Office of Patents and Trademarks with
respect to patent applications. The following information may be of
some interest:
A. BACKGROUND
As the director of the first research laboratory at the
University of Utah Research Park, I was intensely interested in the
March 23, 1989 announcement called by the University of Utah
administration (not called by Pons and Fleischmann). The announcement
of a new source of energy was most exciting to me. That day I began
the plans for trying to be of some help (systems engineering
background, missile system specialist for several years). By mid
April 1989 we had organized the Fusion Information Center and obtained
offices at the University of Utah
Research Park.
By July 1989, we had decided that information gathering
and publishing such information would be our best role. Our first
edition of Fusion Facts was published in July 1989 and continued as a
monthly publication for several years before being incorporated as a
part of the Journal of New Energy, a peer-reviewed, quarterly,
scientific journal (abstracted from the first issue by Chemical
Abstracts -- the world's foremost scientific abstracting
organization).
B. THE ATTACKS ON COLD FUSION
By the fall of 1989 it was apparent that someone had
organized and was carrying out a campaign against the new technology
of cold fusion. Here are the facts, insofar, as we have been able to
gather and publish the facts. Please note that all of this was done
in secrecy (except for the ERAB sub committee).
A subcommittee of the Energy Research Advisory Board
traveled to various laboratories where successes in cold fusion had
been claimed. If the research was measuring neutrons, they were told
that it was background radiation. If the researcher was getting
tritium, they were told that it was contamination. If excess heat was
being produced, they were
told that they didn't have proper calorimetry. Except for one small
paragraph in the ERAB final report, demanded by one of the honest
members of the committee, the report was entirely negative of cold
fusion.
An arrangement was made for someone in the Office of
Patents (any type of coercion or reward is unknown) to ensure that no
cold fusion patent application was accepted for patenting. Each
person, as far as we have been able to determine, was sent the same
information: a copy of a newspaper article from the New York Times
saying that cold fusion doesn't work; a copy of the paper by 16 Ph.D.s
from MIT stating that they could not replicate cold fusion (this is
the paper where the authors removed the data showing that they did get
a small amount of excess heat).
A person (representing powers-that-be in Washington,
D.C.) called many of the physics and chemistry departments at major
universities in the United States. Here was his message as relayed to
me from one such department: "If you have so much as a graduate
student working on cold fusion, you will get no contracts out of
Washington."
All of the editors of the major scientific journals were
contacted and were instructed not to publish articles on cold fusion.
All editors but one then set up barriers against cold fusion
publications. The one editor who did not accept that type of
instruction was Professor George Miley, editor until this year of
Fusion Technology, the international journal of the American Nuclear
Society.
An amount of $30,000 (or $40,000 - different sources)
was given to Random House to have a "hatchet job" done against cold
fusion. The result was the widely acclaimed (by orchestration) book
by Gary Taubes, Bad Science, The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold
Fusion c 1993. For one knowledgeable on the cold fusion development,
it is obvious that this book was a deliberate hatchet job.
In addition to the above well-orchestrated activities,
some appointed, or self-appointed scientists have been very active in
traveling to conventions, etc. and doing their best to challenge any
positive cold fusion results. Two of these are (were) Dr. Douglas
R.O. Morrison (CERN, Switzerland) and Professor John R. Huizenga of
University of Rochester (chairman of the ERAB sub committee, if my
memory is correct).
One of the most active protagonists has been Robert
Parks, with some association with the American Physical Society. (The
current president of the American Physical Society, in a recent
conversation, denies that Robert Parks speaks for the society.) Parks
was instrumental in preventing a recent conference from being held in
a proffered auditorium in a government facility. Parks has an email
list of many people in
the DOE and about once a month or more often sends out statements that
ridicule any cold fusion or low-energy nuclear reaction experiments,
papers, books, etc.
Please recognize that this was a very-well thought-out
and orchestrated scheme to destroy cold fusion. These were clever and
well-done operations. We have been told that were it not for Fusion
Facts and its rapid exchange of information of successes in various
parts of the world, cold fusion would have been dead. That is more
credit than we deserve.
C. THE COLLECTION OF PROFESSIONAL PAPERS
The Fusion Information Center, Inc. is believed to have
accumulated the world's largest collection of papers on cold nuclear
fusion, new-hydrogen energy (the Japanese label), low-energy nuclear
reactions, and other enhanced energy papers. We have collected and
reviewed over 3,000 papers on cold fusion and low-energy nuclear
reactions, read the papers, written reviews, and published the
reviews. Over 600 papers from over 200 laboratories in 30 countries
report some successes in replicating or extending the original work of
Pons and Fleischmann. Dr. Mitchell Swartz and I have presented papers
on this extensive review of the literature.
In addition, this office has published New Energy News,
for the past six years. All members of the Institute of New Energy
receive this newsletter. In addition, beginning in January 1996, this
office began publishing the Journal of New Energy, a quarterly,
peer-reviewed, scientific journal. The reason was the lack of
professional journals that would publish some of the new-energy and
new-science papers. For example, we have published six papers about
torsion field fluctuations which report on formerly highly-secret work
done by over 25 laboratories in the former USSR. This journal has
published two issues providing the proceedings of two International
Conferences on Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions.
All of this published information (Fusion Facts, New
Energy News, & Journal of New Energy), covering a ten-year period,
have now been published on a CD-ROM. If a copy of this CD-ROM would
be of interest to you, we would be pleased to send you a copy.
D. THE ROLE OF THE DOE
As is well-known, political appointees to government
agencies come and go but the real work of the agency is accomplished
by the network of civil servants who bear the burden of continuing and
exercising the Congressional mandates for their offices.
Here is a summary of the current situation in DOE:
The DOE is required by law to handle the disposition of
all high-level nuclear wastes including weapons-related liquid wastes
(such as at the Hanford Site, Washington state) and the spent-fuel
pellets from nuclear power plants and from nuclear submarines. In
about 1993 or 1994 a
contact was given to the National Research Council to prepare a study
on the best methods for separation and/or transmutation of nuclear
wastes. The result was the following large publication printed and
distributed in 1996: Nuclear Wastes: Technologies for Separations and
Transmutation, Committee on Separations Technology and Transmutation
Systems, Board on Radioactive Waste Management, Commission on
Geosciences, Environment, and Resources, National Research Council,
published by National
Academy Press, Washington, D.C. c1996 by the National Academy of
Sciences.
It is not known if the contract was awarded with counsel
and advice on the expected outcome. However, the end result was a
statement to the effect that there is no known method of handling
radioactive wastes that is more cost-effective than geologic storage.
That has been and still is the major objective of the DOE - geologic
storage. Any proposals that claim to have new technology that will
stabilize high-level radioactive wastes are rejected. In one DOE
document asking for
proposals, it was explicitly stated that no cold fusion proposals
would be accepted.
Several laboratories, included our own, has demonstrated
that there is technology that appears to be effective in transmuting
radioactive wastes. None of this work, to our knowledge, is
government funded. Apparently, the network of those opposing cold
fusion and other low-energy nuclear reactions is most effective
throughout the DOE as well as in the appropriate division of the
Office of Patents. It is believed that this opposition group is
mainly related to the hot-fusion
community of scholars and lobbyists and that the activities are being
largely supported by federal funds provided to the hot fusion
community.
If you have any questions or would like to have more
information, I would be pleased to help in any way that I can,
including my personal testimony in any hearings.
Best personal regards,
Hal Fox, President
3084 East 3300 So.
SALT LAKE CITY, UT 84109
Voice: 801-466-8680 Fax: 801-466-8668
Office of the Inspector General
Commerce Department
Room 7614
14th and Constitution, NW
Washington, DC 20230
Voice 202 482-0909 Fax 202-501-0710
Fusion Information Center,
Editor, FF, NEN, and JONE
http://www.padrak.com/ine