NASA: A Nuclear Reactor in Your Basement
| February 25, 2013 | Posted by admin under Dennis Bushnell, NASA, NASA - Zawodny, Widom-Larsen |
NASA’s LENR research efforts are in the news once again. Steven Krivit reports that the recent attention was triggered by a story published on PhysOrg. He notes that the story was commissioned by the media relations department at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There is not much new in this story other than NASA Langley Researcher Joseph Zawodny noting that he feels terahertz frequency stimulation is needed to trigger the reaction.
So what’s the hitch? It’s creating the right oscillation. “It turns out that the frequencies that we have to work at are in what I call a valley of inaccessibility,” Zawodny said. “Between, say, 5 or 7 THz and 30 THz, we don’t have any really good sources to make our own controlled frequency.”
But solving that problem can wait until the theory is better understood. “From my perspective, this is still a physics experiment,” Zawodny said. “I’m interested in understanding whether the phenomenon is real, what it’s all about. Then the next step is to develop the rules for engineering. Once you have that, I’m going to let the engineers have all the fun.”
Joseph Zawodny and Dennis Bushnell have previously discussed their specially designed chip that will allow multiple simultaneous experiments to test aspects of the Widom-Larsen theory of LENR. We don’t learn anything about the status of any ongoing experiments in this article. It does appear that they want to keep their LENR work in the news, which has happened with several news outlets picking up the story (The Guardian Express, Forbes, ExtremeTech). It is understandable that Zawodny and Bushnell would want to embrace the Widom-Larsen theory of LENR that purportedly removes the “fusion” from cold fusion; however, they run the risk of tunnel blindness and running into a dead end if their effort fails. It would be preferable if more care was taken in noting that the W-L theory is just one of many theories.
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