New Indian Express on Encouraging LENR Research

There continue to be repercussions from the publication of the special section on LENR in the Indian journal Current Science.

Today in the New Indian Express newspaper, V Sudarshan writes about the publication of this collection of papers in an article titled “Making a Nuclear Power Point”, and proposes that Indian scientist should examine the topic to see if it is a feasible technology for practical energy production. He seems impressed with the Current Science publication, calling it ‘remarkable’.

Sudarshan covers some background, reviewing the Pons and Fleischmann affair back in 1989, and their subsequent fall from grace in the eyes of the scientific community who relegated cold fusion to the status of junk science. Sudarshan pins the blame on nuclear scientists working on fission and hot fusion. He now thinks it is time to rethink cold fusion, pointing at the growing number of enthusiasts for the subject worldwide.

He writes:

“There have been as many as 18 international conferences devoted to this subject. In January 2011, Italian Andrea Rossi announced he had developed a working reactor (e-cat) . . . There are also home variants in the works. The preface to the special section in Current Science points out that analysts are terming LENR as “disruptive technology” with the potential to turn the world economic order topsy turvy.

“My suggestion is: we pride ourselves as a country that had cracked scientific research even before science became science as we now have come to know and understand it. Would it be too much to get a group of scientists together to determine if this is a technology that we could explore for our mind-boggling energy requirements?”

There are a few out-of-date ideas in his description of the E-Cat (e.g. transmutation of nickel to copper), and an inaccurate pricetag on the 1MW plant ($1.5 billion instead of million), but overall Sudarshan makes a good case for at least looking into this technology.