GUEST EDITORIAL: AXIL ABOUT HOW LENR WILL PREVAIL

Now is the right time for LENR to emerge as a cutting edge nano-technology application that can be supported by an upcoming robust research and development nano-toolset.

Unfortunately, cold fusion has arrived decades too early when science and its practitioners were not ready or disposed to either explain or understand such a complex nano-process.

LENR has to dig itself out of a deep hole of public ridicule that this early discovery, ill-timed over-hyping, and underperformance as caused.

Furthermore, there is another unfortunate situation that also should be mentioned which has greatly retarded any progress in LENR research and its acceptance by the general public.

This inopportune happenstance is the ill-fated sense of competitive threat that LENR poses for the people who make their living from R&D and production of nuclear energy as well as the people who work to research the standard model of particle physics.

Their ultraconservative approach to their work lends them to apply to LENR the same sclerotic principles that block any progress in their own technology.

When the general public looks for an opinion from the nuclear or plasma physics community to help them formulate their judgment on the feasibility and the promise of LENR, this myopic public resource is ill-informed way beyond their expertise level to do so.

What LENR has lacked since it first emerged onto the scene in 1989 is the precise control required to make it understandable, reproducible, testable, reliable, powerful, and useful.

The emerging   first generation of LENR pioneering applications have revealed that fabrication and control of nickel nano-structures are basic to these rudimentary reactor systems to advance onto the threshold of industrial process heat applications.

LENR is recently proven to be more rightly a nano-technology rather than a nuclear one.

There has been an accelerating development of allied nano-technologies that can be applied to move LENR into the mainstream of robust industrial application.

Among these latest developments is the mastery of optical meta-surfaces that comprise a class of optical Meta-materials with a reduced dimensionality that is exhibiting exceptional abilities for controlling the flow and manipulation of heat and electrons at the nano-level. These new capabilities achieve the anomalously large photonic density of quantum mechanical states that underlie the industrial LENR process.

Illustrative of this point, I have just run across an article that explains some of the new nano-technologies that can be applied to advance process in LENR.

http://phys.org/news/2013-03-metasurfaces-usher-optical-technologies.html

This article explains how optical nanophotonic circuits might harness clouds of electrons called "surface plasmons" to manipulate and control the routing of heat and light in devices far too tiny for conventional lasers.

Such a planar photonics technology is expected to facilitate new physics and enhanced functionality for devices that are distinctly different from those observed in their three-dimensional Meta Material counterparts.

As a result, this technology will enable new applications in imaging, sensing, data storage, quantum information processing, and solar energy harvesting and energy LENR production/harvesting.

New optical technologies using "meta-surfaces" capable of the ultra-efficient control of electromagnetic radiation at the sub-wavelength levels are nearing commercialization, with potential applications including advanced solar cells, thermo-electric generation, quantum computers, telecommunications, sensors and microscopes.

The recent progress in optical meta-surfaces can address the major issues hampering the full-scale development of Meta-Material technology, a technology that is central to the advancement of LENR to the next level. This capability includes cost-effective fabrication, and facilitation of challenging system integration issues.

The studies of new, low-loss, tunable plasmonic materials—such as transparent conducting oxides, nano-fibers, and inter-metallics—that can be used as building blocks for meta-surfaces will complement the exploration of smart designs and advanced energy and charge collection and switching capabilities.

This progress in meta-surface design and realization will lead to novel functionalities and improved performance and may result in the development of new types of ultrathin meta-surface LENR designs with unparalleled nano-properties and efficiencies.

These new designs would also be compatible with planar, low-cost manufacturing. In turn, these advances will lead to ultrathin devices over a wide range of sizes and capacities with unprecedented functionalities.

The next generation of LENR devices will extract energy from the depths of the atom and directly convert it into electricity at high efficiency without the encumbrance and constraints of thermodynamics needed when producing power from steam.

More like a battery then a reactor, the size of a LENR power module will be scalable over a wide range to power devices as small as cellphones and tablets to building toward very large reactors that can power apartment blocks and sports stadiums.

The future of LENR is ever brightening as the new nano-technologies burst onto the scene.  All that is required to make this future possible is a rethinking of the old timeworn attitudes, prejudices and misapplications that have plagued LENR from the day of its birth.