It’s been a big year for low-energy nuclear reactions. LENRs, as they’re known, are a fringe research topic that some physicists think could explain the results of an infamous experiment nearly 30 years ago that formed the basis for the idea of cold fusion. That idea didn’t hold up, and only a handful of researchers around the world have continued trying to understand the mysterious nature of the inconsistent, heat-generating reactions that had spurred those claims.
Their determination may finally pay off, as researchers in Japan have recently managed to generate heat more consistently from these reactions, and the U.S. Navy is now paying close attention to the field.
In June, scientists at several Japanese research institutes published a paper in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy in which they recorded excess heat after exposing metal nanoparticles to hydrogen gas. The results are the strongest in a long line of LENR studies from Japanese institutions like Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
Michel Armand, a physical chemist at CIC Energigune, an energy research center in Spain, says those results are difficult to dispute. In the past, Armand participated in a panel of scientists that could not explain measurements of slight excess heat in a palladium and heavy-water electrolysis experiment—measurements that could potentially be explained by LENRs.
In September, Proceedings magazine of the U.S. Naval Institute published an article about LENRs titled, “This Is Not ‘Cold Fusion,’ ” which had won second place in Proceedings’ emerging technology essay contest. Earlier, in August, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory awarded MacAulay-Brown, a security consultant that serves federal agencies, US $12 million to explore, among other things, “low-energy nuclear reactions and advanced energetics.”
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