Another year, another name change: Cold Fusion to CECR

Each year about this time I present what's new in the field of, well,….

Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann called it "cold fusion". Fleischmann, who died in 2009, said he regretted the name. Cold fusion was more than discredited. It was the most ridiculed scientific announcement since Columbus declared he discovered the East Indies. But that didn't deter some from pursuing the research.

As mentioned last year, there now are a lot of countries, companies, universities, and individuals working on what formerly was known as cold fusion. The most notably has been Andrea Rossi's Leonardo Corporation which developed the 'reactor' called the E-Cat. The description of their technology is LENR or Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions.

Second is the Greek company, Defkalion, which started as a partnership with Rossi, but since has separated. They call their process HENI, Heat Energy from Nuclei Interactions.

The third major player is Brillouin Energy Corporation, an American company in California. Their invention is CECR, or Controlled Electron Capture Reaction. Here is a video on their web site explaining the physics of CECR.

So take your pick on what the future will call the new technology, Cold Fusion, LENR, HENI, CECR or snake oil.

There's too much going on in the field to summarize quickly, but the internet is for the interested. One major problem in discovering what is happening is the tendency for individuals to take strong positions on one side or the other. It has become controversial, as science often is. The best I can make out (I don't know) is that thousands of experiments have recorded excess heat from supposedly nuclear interactions. (Wikipedia claims "cold fusion articles are rarely published in peer reviewed scientific journals" while another article, rejected by Wikipedia, claims "There are about a thousand peer-reviewed papers published in recognized journals.")

But much of the controversy could be changing soon.

1. ECAT, Rossi's device, is now taking pre-orders on a 1MW plant. 
2. Defkalion left Greece for Vancouver, Canada and demoed its new Hyperion reactor at National Instruments NiWeek in August. It says it will be shipping in 2014.
3. Brillouin entered into a formal agreement with SRI International (Stanford Research Institute) to further develop their technology towards commercialization. They also agreed with Sunset Securities for $20 million in capitalization when certain conditions are met.

I do know this: for such possibly breakthrough technology, events are progressing rapidly. Hopefully we will soon see if this is a false positive or not.