US Senate Candidate Wants Cold Fusion Research

A candidate for the United States Senate (the upper house of the US Congress) supports the idea of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Research. In an entry on his blog Randy Hekman stated his belief in Cold Fusion and compared it to the space race.

The US Capitol Building where the Senate Meets

Interestingly enough Hekman stated he spent three years doing laboratory research on LENR. He doesn’t mention Andrea Rossi or E-cat but he does state that he knows Lewis Larsen CEO of Lattice Energy LLC who developed a cold fusion theory called the Widom-Larsen Theory.

Randy Hekman Former Judge & US Senate Candidate

He also states that physicists from NASA whom he did not identify told him that cold fusion could grow into a trillion dollar industry. This sounds like Dennis Bushnell chief scientist of NASA’s Langley Research Laboratory who has been doing cold fusion research for years. Hekman includes a link to New Energy Times in his blog and mentions a “friend” that could be Steven Krivit.

Hekman is running for the Republican nomination for the US Senate from the State of Michigan. If he wins the Republican primary, Hekman would challenge incumbent Senator Debbie Stabenow in the general election in November. Hekman’s website stated he founded a company to conduct LENR research but does not identify it.

Interestingly enough Hekman favors abolition of the US Department of Energy or DOE which has a poor record on Cold Fusion matters. He believes that private industry can do a better job of developing new energy sources. Hopefully this does not turn LENR into a political issue in the US. In the US Democrats including President Obama strongly support the Department of Energy while many Republicans view it as a waste of money. The DOE was founded by Democratic President Jimmy Carter.

The little interest in Cold Fusion from US politicians has all come from Republicans including Republican Presidential Mitt Romney. Whether they are serious about LENR or are simply looking for a political issue to attack the DOE with remains to be still. Still it is good to see the issue being raised in US politics.

For a good example of the kind of scientific and academic politics that LENR gets tangled up in the US see this Pure Energy Systems Article and attached report. It alleges that hot fusion researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) went out of their way to successfully discredit Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann’s cold fusion claims in 1989 in order to protect the big money they were getting to fund their work. It makes a pretty good case and shows LENR supporters what they are up against.

I suppose it would be too much to hope that politics can be kept out of LENR. My guess is that issue is going to become a major political contention particularly if private industry develops working fusors.

Continue reading here: US Venture Capitalists Interested in Cold Fusion

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