The FAA's top space official outlines progress — NASA does a deep dive on potential power sources for a moon base, including “cold fusion.”
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-space/2021/07/23/the-faas-top-space-official-outlines-progress-493703 Frontiers of Space Power and Energy Document ID: 20210016143 Document Type: Technical Memorandum (TM) https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20210016143 The part about cold fusion is on pages 15, 16 and 17. It begins: Farther Term LENR - Revived (after experiments earlier in the 1900s) in the late 1980s [ref. 28] and dubbed “Cold Fusion,” what is now usually termed LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions) was an experimental discovery with replication issues at the time and lacked an acceptable theory. Now, three decades of extant worldwide experiments [ref. 29] indicate “something nuclear” is real. However, there does not yet exist a cogent, verified theory and therefore LENR has been looked at with askance by the physics community. There are now extant recent weak force and other weak neutron-based theories (not “hot” fusion) involving surface plasmons, electroweak interactions explicable via QED on surfaces, collective effects, heavy electrons, ultraweak neutrons, and utilizing neutron generation to obviate coulomb barrier issues. There are now many patents and LENR is beginning to evolve into the marketplace. Given a validated theory to engineer, scale, and make safe, LENR would obviously be a major world energy revolution, especially with observed energy density levels surpassing those of chemical energy. In fact, LENR has been observed in the tens to hundreds and theoretical possibilities into the many thousands times chemical energy density levels. In the Widom-Larsen Theory [ref. 30], H2 is adsorbed or “loaded” onto a metal surface and the resulting surface plasmon initiates collective effects. Some energy is added and several types of energy appear to work. From the LENR experiments and a sizable body of applicable related research, nano cracks/asperities in the surface morphology concentrate energy over an area and produce high localized voltage gradients. Such voltage gradients excite collective electrons to combine with protons in the surface plasmon to form ultraweak neutrons. These neutrons readily interact, producing neutron rich isotopes which undergo beta decay and transmutations. The heavy electron cloud converts the beta decay to heat, sans worrisome radiation and coulomb barrier issues, in agreement with experiment(s). . . . etc.
