Summary

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  • Caselist.RoundClass[7]
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Cites

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	1	+CP Text: Governments ought to ban nuclear power except cold fusion technology, and should significantly invest in research and development of cold fusion.
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	3	+Governmental agencies are developing cold fusion now – it’s the immediate future fo energy and is feasible. Anthony 13
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	5	+Sebastian Anthony, NASA’s cold fusion tech could put a nuclear reactor in every home, car, and plane, Extreme Tech, 2/22/13. NS
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	7	+The cold fusion dream lives on: NASA is developing cheap, clean, low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) technology that could eventually see cars, planes, and homes powered by small, safe nuclear reactors. When we think of nuclear power, there are usually just two options: fission and fusion. Fission, which creates huge amounts of heat by splitting larger atoms into smaller atoms, is what currently powers every nuclear reactor on Earth. Fusion is the opposite, creating vast amounts of energy by fusing atoms of hydrogen together, but we’re still many years away from large-scale, commercial fusion reactors. (See: 500MW from half a gram of hydrogen: The hunt for fusion power heats up.) LENR is absolutely nothing like either fission or fusion. Where fission and fusion are underpinned by strong nuclear force, LENR harnesses power from weak nuclear force — but capturing this energy is difficult. So far, NASA’s best effort involves a nickel lattice and hydrogen ions. The hydrogen ions are sucked into the nickel lattice, and then the lattice is oscillated at a very high frequency (between 5 and 30 terahertz). This oscillation excites the nickel’s electrons, which are forced into the hydrogen ions (protons), forming slow-moving neutrons. The nickel immediately absorbs these neutrons, making it unstable. To regain its stability, the nickel strips a neutron of its electron so that it becomes a proton — a reaction that turns the nickel into copper and creates a lot of energy in the process. The key to LENR’s cleanliness and safety seems to be the slow-moving neutrons. Whereas fission creates fast neutrons (neutrons with energies over 1 megaelectron volt), LENR utilizes neutrons with an energy below 1eV — less than a millionth of the energy of a fast neutron. Whereas fast neutrons create one hell of a mess when they collide with the nuclei of other atoms, LENR’s slow neutrons don’t generate ionizing radiation or radioactive waste. It is because of this sedate gentility that LENR lends itself very well to vehicular and at-home nuclear reactors that provide both heat and electricity. According to NASA, 1 of the world’s nickel production could meet the world’s energy needs, at a quarter of the cost of coal. NASA also mentions, almost as an aside, that the lattice could be formed of carbon instead of nickel, with the nuclear reaction turning carbon into nitrogen. “You’re not sequestering carbon, you’re totally removing carbon from the system,” says Joseph Zawodny, a NASA scientist involved with the work on LENR. So why don’t we have LENR reactors yet? Just like fusion, it is proving hard to build a LENR system that produces more energy than the energy required to begin the reaction. In this case, NASA says that the 5-30THz frequency required to oscillate the nickel lattice is hard to efficiently produce. As we’ve reported over the last couple of years, though, strong advances are being made in the generation and control of terahertz radiation. Other labs outside of NASA are working on cold fusion and LENR, too: “Several labs have blown up studying LENR and windows have melted,” says NASA scientist Dennis Bushnell, proving that “when the conditions are ‘right’ prodigious amounts of energy can be produced and released.” I think it’s still fairly safe to say that the immediate future of power generation, and meeting humanity’s burgeoning energy needs, lies in fission and fusion (See: Nuclear power is our only hope.) But who knows: With LENR, maybe there’s hope for cold fusion yet.
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	9	+Cold fusion tech is rapidly advancing and nearly ready for commercial use. Bailey 15
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	11	+Bailey and Borwein 15 David H. Bailey (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (retired) and University of California, Davis) and Jonathan Borwein (Laureate Professor of Mathematics, University of Newcastle, Australia) “Cold Fusion Heats Up: Fusion Energy and LENR Update” The Huffington Post August 28th 2015 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-h-bailey/post_10010_b_8052326.html. NS
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	13	+Yet lately a few research teams at universities, national laboratories and private corporations are reporting notable progress, as we briefly reported in two earlier HuffPost articles (#1 and #2). Here is an update on these projects, plus another report that just appeared in the last few days. The U.S. aerospace firm Lockheed Martin plans to build a 100-megawatt nuclear fusion reactor only about 2 meters by 3 meters (seven feet by 10 feet) in size, i.e., small enough to fit on the back of a large truck. They claim that the first reactors of this design could be ready for commercial use in just ten years. Sadly, no technical details are yet available, and so the scientific community has no way of assessing the merits of their approach. The “new kid on the block” is Tri Alpha Energy, which has been pursuing a hot fusion reactor at a secretive facility in California. They have now reported constructing a prototype machine that can heat a plasma of hydrogen fuel to 10 million degrees Celsius, then confine it for 5 milliseconds. They employ what they call a “field-reversed configuration,” which has been known since the 1960s, but until now has never been able to confine the plasma more than a fraction of a millisecond. Another firm pursuing hot fusion is Energy/Matter Conversion Corporation in San Diego, California. Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) projects Most scientists believe that “cold fusion” died in 1989, when researchers were unable to reproduce the claims of Fleischmann and Pons of the University of Utah. At least one observer referred to cold fusion as the scientific fiasco of the 20th century. Yet in spite of this criticism, a few researchers have pressed forward, and in the past year or two have attracted significant positive attention, referring to their work as “Low Energy Nuclear Reaction” (LENR) technology. One private firm in the area is Brillouin Energy Corp. of Berkeley, California, where researchers are developing what they term a controlled electron capture reaction (CECR) process. In their experiments, ordinary hydrogen is loaded into a nickel lattice, and then an electronic pulse is passed through the system, using a proprietary control system. They claim that their device converts H-1 (ordinary hydrogen) to H-2 (deuterium), then to H-3 (tritium) and H-4 (quatrium), which then decays to He-4 and releases energy. They report that they have confirmed H-3 production in their process. Additional technical details are given at the Brillouin Energy website, and in a patent application. Their patent application reads, in part, “Embodiments generate thermal energy by neutron generation, neutron capture, and subsequent transport of excess binding energy as useful heat for any application.” Rossi and Industrial Heat, LLC Perhaps the most startling (and most controversial) report is by an Italian-American engineer-entrepreneur named Andrea Rossi. Rossi claims that he has developed a tabletop reactor that produces heat by an as-yet-not-fully-understood LENR process. Rossi has gone well beyond laboratory demonstration; he claims that he and the private firm Industrial Heat, LLC of Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, have actually installed a working system at an (undisclosed) commercial customer’s site. According to Rossi and a handful of others who have observed the system in operation, it is producing 1 MWatt continuous net output power, in the form of heat, from a few grams of “fuel” in each of a set of modest-sized reactors in a network. The system has now been operating for approximately six months, as part of a one-year acceptance test. Rossi and IH LLC are in talks with Chinese firms for large-scale commercial manufacture. Several “reliable sources” have visited Rossi’s commercial site, and have verified that the system is working as claimed, as evidenced, for example, by the customer’s significantly reduced electric bills. On the downside, from a scientific point view, Rossi’s work leaves much to be desired, to say the least. Rossi remains tight-lipped as to technical details, preferring to protect his company’s intellectual property through silence. However, a few details have now come to light. For example, Rossi was just granted a patent by the U.S. Patent Office. The patent includes some heretofore unknown details, such as the contents of the “fuel” in Rossi’s reactors: it is a powder of 50 nickel, 20 lithium and 30 lithium aluminum hydride. Replications of Rossi’s work Given that Rossi has been unwilling to divulge many details, several other research teams have been working largely independently with similar experimental designs. In October 2014, a team of Italian and Swedish researchers released a paper entitled Observation of abundant heat production from a reactor device and of isotopic changes in the fuel. This paper claimed substantial power output, with a “coefficient of performance” (ratio of output heat to input power) of up to 3.6. The experiment was performed at an independent laboratory in Lugano, Switzerland. The most intriguing results in the 2014 Lugano paper are the before-and-after analyses of the “fuel,” which found an “isotopic shift” had occurred in this material. In particular, the team found that lithium-7 had changed into lithium-6, and that nickel-58 and nickel-60 had changed to nickel-62. This is based on two different types of mass spectrometry measurements, using state-of-the-art equipment. These changes can only be due to nuclear reactions of some sort — not conventional chemistry. The Lugano team is reportedly working on a new experiment, independent of Rossi, but as yet no details are known. Another research team performing Rossi-type experiments is headed by the Russian physicist Alexander Parkhomov. He and others working with him report observing excess heat with a Rossi-type reactor running at 1347 degrees Celsius, with a coefficient of performance of 3.0. They also report observing excess heat in at least ten other experiments of this type to date.
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	15	+Cold fusion is nuclear but doesn’t require uranium - solves waste dumping and mining. The AFF also leaves radioactive materials in marginalized communities, but cold fusion transmutes those to benign substances. CFN 11
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	17	+What is cold fusion?, Colfusionnow.org, 2011. NS
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	19	+Cold fusion describes a form of energy generated when hydrogen interacts with various metals like nickel and palladium. Cold fusion is a field of condensed matter nuclear science CMNS, and is also called low-energy nuclear reactions LENR, lattice-assisted nuclear reactions LANR, low energy nanoscale reactions LENR, among others. Cold fusion is also referred to as the Anomalous Heat Effect AHE, reflecting the fact that there is no definitive theory of the elusive reaction. The Fleischmann-Pons Effect of Excess Heat When hydrogen, the main element of water, is introduced to a small piece of the metal nickel or palladium, a reaction occurs that can create excess heat and transmutation products. Excess heat means more heat comes out of the system than went in to the system. The excess heat can make hot water and useful steam to turn a turbine and produce electricity. Cold fusion devices are typically small table-top laboratory experiments, ranging in size from tiny test-tubes to small refridgerator-sized generators. In spite of the relatively small size of the cells, the cold fusion reaction produces so much heat, it is more than can be accounted for by chemical means and therefore must be some type of new nuclear mechanism, for cold fusion is not like today’s dirty and dangerous nuclear power. No radioactive materials are used in cold fusion. LANR occurs as the tiny protons, neutrons and electrons of hydrogen interact, releasing energy slowly, through heat and photons, without the dangerous radiation associated with conventional nuclear reactions, and cold fusion makes no radioactive waste. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. On Earth, hydrogen is found in water. An energy source from hydrogen is clean, with no carbon-dioxide CO2 emissions. In LENR reactions, only tiny amounts of the hydrogen are consumed and the metal is recyclable when spent. Transmutation Effect Transmutation occurs when one element is transformed, or transmuted, to another element. The creation of elements by transmutation has been the dream of alchemists for millenia. Now, new energy scientists are able to create new elements in their labs using LENR techniques. Research has shown that radioactive materials can be transmuted to benign elements, promising a path to ridding the planet of thousands of tons of radioactive waste.
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	21	+Cold fusion solves meltdown and radiation – it’s even cleaner than alternative energy. Carat 11
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	23	+Ruby Carat, NO FEAR OF RADIATION FROM COLD FUSION, Colfusionnow.org, 4/3/11. NS
	24	+
	25	+3 No dangerous radiation in cold fusion. While no source of energy is 100 clean, cold fusion ranks cleaner over oil, gas, coal, today’s nuclear fission, hot fusion, solar and wind. Solar and wind are renewable sources, but the materials and manufacturing of solar panels and wind turbines given their energy density don’t compare to cold fusion. First of all, LENR is a process of that does not involve today’s nuclear fission power designs, so there is no chain-reaction. A cold fusion cell will not ”runaway” like critical masses and fission bombs. Cold fusion energy devices will turn on and off when you want them to. Edmund Storms, a nuclear scientist who has researched cold fusion for over two decades wrote a survey of the field called The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction. Published in 2007, it is a technical summary of results for a scientific reader. In it, there are clear statements about the lack of radiation from cold fusion cells. This table from Storms’ Science provides the general experimental results regarding radiation from LENR experiments. Table 14 Expected but missing behavior. 1,176 1. Gamma emission is rare. 2. Neutron emission is rare. 3. Alpha emission rate is not consistent with accumulated helium. 4. X-rays expected when a significant alpha flux is absorbed are missing. 5. The second nuclear product resulting from transformation is frequently missing. A listing of the reported studies showing radiation detected in LENR experiments can be found in Table 11 of Storms’ Science1. Each entry is listed with radiation type and strength, along with the kind of cell that produced it. He writes: ”Fortunately none of this radiation is a health hazard nor is it easy to detect outside of the apparatus, which makes the process sate to study and safe as an eventual source of energy.” 1,105 Quite simply, the type and quantity of radiation seen in today’s nuclear power does not show up LENR. Cold fusion cells do not behave at all like conventional theories of nuclear reactions dictate. The fact that dangerous levels are missing from this reaction was in part responsible for many scientists dismissal of this as a nuclear effect. To quote Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger ”The circumstances of cold fusion are not those of hot fusion.” Infinite Energy magazine published an FAQ containing this question: Why doesn’t cold fusion produce dangerous ionizing radiation and neutrons? “Nobody knows for certain why the primary signature of cold fusion is excess heat, not deadly radiation. Nevertheless, many LENR theorists have put forth very intriguing proposals for the mechanism of these reactions. There are, in fact, many dozens of competing theories smaller number of which are very well fleshed out. The exact nature of the LENR reactions is one of the many unsolved scientific mysteries surrounding them. Some scientists think that because the effect does not produce intense radiation, it cannot be a nuclear process. Others say the energy is produced, but then somehow absorbed by the metal lattice either as high frequency vibrations, or through coherent processes in which many delocalized vibrations are involved.” 7 LENR devices do not have any appreciable radiation from alpha particles, beta particles, high- energy neutrons, and there is no danger of a runaway chain reaction. What about the x-rays and gamma radiation, those high-energy photons that could pose a risk to biological life? Storms writes: ”Most X-radiation will be absorbed by the apparatus, thereby making its detection unlikely.”1,153
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	27	+Net Benefits:
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	29	+A. Cold fusion is key to stop worldwide poverty that disproportionately affects people of color. Rothwell 07
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	31	+Jed Rothwell, Cold Fusion and the Future, http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusiona.pdf, 2007. NS
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	33	+Cold fusion has been successfully replicated in hundreds of university and national laboratories. These experiments prove that cold fusion does exist. In some instances it has produced temperatures and concentrated energy high enough for practical applications. If cold fusion can be commercialized it will eliminate most pollution and save billions of dollars a day now spent on fossil fuel. It will be a godsend to the billions of people living in abject poverty. In wealthy nations it will offer a renewed sense of wonder, and hope for the future. Unfortunately, this research has been suppressed in the United States. Papers cannot be published; experiments are not funded. The Department of Energy reviewed the subject 2004. The official summation was a farce, 1,2 but some of the reviewer’s comments were thoughtful, 3 so perhaps there is a ray of hope. Even so, the fight to allow a modicum of research is likely to continue for years. The purpose of this book, then, is to inspire the reader, and, perhaps, to enlist him in this political battle. Most cold fusion researchers are interested in the science, rather than potential benefits. They want to know what the phenomenon reveals about nature, and how it might be explained theoretically. The public, on the other hand, generally wants to know: What can cold fusion do for me? Can it really end the energy crisis? Or will it be another disappointment, the way conventional nuclear energy has turned out to be. This is not self-serving. The public is right to be worried about energy, and to put people’s needs first. The energy crisis grows worse year by year. Destructive global warming may finally be upon us: in 2004, unprecedented, out-of-season typhoons repeatedly struck Japan, and the water level in the Inland Sea has risen dramatically. Many of our worst political crises are mixed up with energy, especially oil. The Iraq war may not be “a war for oil” as some critics charge, but oil is surely a proximate cause. If the Middle East did not have oil, the U.S. would not be embroiled there. Energy is often the story behind the headlines. Energy production causes most air pollution. The lack of energy in the third world is the single largest preventable cause of disease, misery, and death.
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	35	+Outweighs - poverty is the strongest and most widespread form of structural violence. Pogge
	36	+Thomas Pogge, Poverty and Human Rights, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/poverty/expert/docs/Thomas_Pogge_Summary.pdf . NS
	37	+Human rights would be fully realized, if all human beings had secure access to the objects of these rights. Our world is today very far from this ideal. Piecing together the current global record, we find that most of the current massive underfulfillment of human rights is more or less directly connected to poverty. The connection is direct in the case of basic social and economic human rights, such as the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself and one’s family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care. The connection is more indirect in the case of civil and political human rights associated with democratic government and the rule of law. Desperately poor people, often stunted, illiterate, and heavily preoccupied with the struggle to survive, typically lack effective means for resisting or rewarding their rulers, who are therefore likely to rule them oppressively while catering to the interests of other, often foreign, agents (governments and corporations, for instance) who are more capable of reciprocation. The statistics are appalling. Out of a total of 6575 million human beings, 830 million are reportedly chronically undernourished, 1100 million lack access to safe water and 2600 million lack access to basic sanitation (UNDP 2006: 174, 33). About 2000 million lack access to essential drugs (www.fic.nih.gov/about/summary.html). Some 1000 million have no adequate shelter and 2000 million lack electricity (UNDP 1998: 49). Some 799 million adults are illiterate (www.uis.unesco.org). Some 250 million children between 5 and 14 do wage work outside their household with 170.5 million of them involved in hazardous work and 8.4 million in the “unconditionally worst” forms of child labor, which involve slavery, forced or bonded labor, forced recruitment for use in armed conflict, forced prostitution or pornography, or the production or trafficking of illegal drugs (ILO 2002: 9, 11, 17, 18). People of colour and females (UNDP 2003: 310-330; UNRISD 2005; Social Watch 2005) bear greatly disproportionate shares of these deprivations. Roughly one third of all human deaths, some 18 million annually, are due to poverty-related causes, easily preventable through better nutrition, safe drinking water, mosquito nets, re-hydration packs, vaccines and other medicines. This sums up to 300 million deaths in 17 years since the end of the cold war - many more than were caused by all the wars, civil wars, and government repression of the entire 20th century.
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	39	+B. Environment - Cold fusion is the unique solution to a laundry list of problems and creates indigenous energy sovereignty – size and portability mean they can solve in a short timeframe. CFN 11
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	41	+What is cold fusion?, Colfusionnow.org, 2011. NS
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	43	+Ultra-clean and Energy Dense Cold fusion energy generators will not need to be connected to an electrical grid. Small and portable power units will provide energy on-demand in any location. When access to water means access to fuel, local communities will find new-found independence with control over their own energy choices. Hot, clean water provides a health revolution around the globe. Cold fusion offers a new energy economy based on green power from energy-dense LENR. Cold fusion means it is economically-viable to recycle all waste, restore wilderness and waterways to pristine conditions, and keep a planetary biosphere from extinction.

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	1	+2016-10-15 12:35:49.505

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	1	+panal

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	1	+Prosper EH

ParentRound

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	1	+7

Round

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	1	+Octas

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	1	+Harvard Westlake Paul Neg

Title

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	1	+SeptOct - CP Cold Fussion

Tournament

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	1	+Holy Cross