1) Association for the Study of Peak Oil has the answer to the need for an independent, expert assessment of Hubbert's Peak, which they predict for 2010 (see graph below). Expect more wars for oil as shortages start to take effect, unless future energy alternatives are given the fast track.
2) White House Fights Against Electric Cars ?! New York Times. Anti-future energy article.
3) Congressional Energy Bill may still fall apart due to electricity disagreements. Associated Press. Such problems may result in an "energy light" bill instead, with not much in it, according to my conversation with an energy staffer on Capitol Hill this week.
4) Feeling Antigravity's Pull. Slate. NASA doesn't like the term "antigravity" for their research.
5) Sci Fi Channel holds Press Conference in Washington, DC to protest government secrecy. This is an extraordinary development in the political process of disclosure. It is history making.
6) Radioactive battery provides decades of power. An energy development from Cornell University similar to Dr. Paul Brown's nuclear beta particle battery. Compare to Brown's patent #4,835,433 or #6,238,812.
7) Miscellaneous links

Thursday, October 10, 2002

By H. Josef Hebert, Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Lawmakers' inability to resolve a few issues important to the electric power industry - rather than a dispute over new oil drilling in the Arctic wild - is thwarting a deal in Congress to overhaul the nation's energy agenda.

With time running out, House and Senate negotiators were trying Wednesday to salvage an energy bill. The legislation repeatedly has been pronounced a top priority of the White House and essential to wean the country away from Mideast oil.

Over the past week, the sticking point has been disagreement over electricity policy. Lawmakers have been unable to resolve how much control they should give federal regulators over electricity transmission, how to protect consumers against market abuse, and how much utilities should rely on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.

Many Democratic senators and House members already believe the legislation has been weakened to a point where it will do little to spur new energy production or significantly curb energy use.

The dispute over oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is viewed by a growing number of Democrats and Republicans as so entrenched that it cannot be resolved quickly. They say it will be put off until they can agree on the other matters.

The energy legislation has taken almost the entire two years of the current Congress. Senate Republicans in early 2001 offered their proposals, focusing heavily on production incentives. They were quickly rejected by most Democrats.

The House pushed through an energy bill in early August 2001 that largely mirrored proposals by Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force a few months earlier. It tilted heavily toward boosting fossil fuel production, including drilling in the Arctic refuge.

The Senate rejected development of the Alaska refuge. Last April it passed its energy bill, giving more incentives to development of renewable energy sources, requiring wider use of corn-based ethanol, and banning MTBE, the gas additive blamed for polluting drinking water in many states.

The Senate version would scuttle a 1935 law limiting the activities of large electric power holding companies but would give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) additional consumer protection responsibilities over them. House Republicans have strongly objected to giving FERC this new authority. There also is sharp disagreement over proposals to expand FERC's authority over public power companies and a dispute over who should pay for certain expansions of transmission lines.

The Senate proposal to expand ethanol use, an issue close to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and other farm-state lawmakers, has riled some Texas lawmakers, including Rep. Joe Barton, one of the key GOP negotiators. Barton has also fought the proposed ban on MTBE, the additive ethanol would replace. If the ban is imposed, Barton has insisted, MTBE makers should be given a liability waiver against lawsuits arising from MTBE contamination of water supplies. So far, the Senate has balked on such a waiver.

At a meeting this week among Senate Democrats, some - including Daschle - suggested the entire electricity section might be scrapped to open the way for possible agreement on other issues, including a proposal on reporting emissions that contribute to global warming.

Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., the energy conference chairman, and Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., leader of the Senate negotiators, remained determined not to abandon the effort to forge the needed compromises. "It's like the seventh game of the World Series," said Ken Johnson, Tauzin's spokesman. "We're optimistic and hopeful, but we could still lose it."

Environmental and consumer groups made clear at a news conference Wednesday that they would just as soon see the energy bill go away. "Congress should abandon energy legislation and start again next year," said Adam Goldberg of the Consumers' Union.

Copyright 2002, Associated Press
All Rights Reserved

"Don't call it antigravity research," Ron Koczor pleads. He's a physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and he's talking about a project he's been working on for almost a decade. "Call it 'gravity modification.' 'Gravity anomalies.' Anything but antigravity. That's a red flag."

When people find out that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has researchers working on sci-fi stuff like antigravity-or rather, "gravity modification"-the red flags do indeed start waving. Reputable scientists like Koczor earn polite disdain from colleagues (or worse, from funders of research). But truth's truth: NASA has been studying the manipulation of gravity for at least 10 years, as have nongovernment researchers.

NASA began its work after a Russian physicist named Evgeny Podkletnov published an article in the peer-reviewed journal Physica C in 1992. Podkletnov claimed that a device built around a superconductor* and a magnet could shield an object from gravity. The trick, he said, was to make a superconducting disc about a foot in diameter, chill it, levitate it over magnets-a nifty property of superconductors is that they repel magnetic fields-and set it revolving like a compact disc. Podkletnov said an object placed above that contraption lost 0.3 percent of its weight. The object itself didn't change. Rather, gravity's effect on it lessened.

If that effect could be harnessed and strengthened, the aerospace industry would be upended. Vessels bound for space wouldn't have to ride atop massive, barely controlled explosions. All the energy human beings expend moving things around, from cargo to cars, could be reduced or eliminated. And post-Einsteinian physics would have to be rewritten to explain what the hell was going on. Podkletnov called the effect "gravitational force shielding," and even in the absence of a good theory to explain the phenomenon, other researchers took notice. "Because his experiment and results were published in a peer-reviewed, scientific journal, that gave it a level of credibility," Koczor says.

After Podkletnov published his article, it took NASA until 1999 to figure out how to make a large, thin superconducting disc. Ceramic high-temperature superconductors are brittle as cheap china, and the discs kept shattering. Once they solved that problem, NASA paid Columbus, Ohio-based SCI Engineered Materials $650,000 to build the entire apparatus. But Podkletnov had called for a disc with two layers, one superconducting and one not, and SCI didn't solve that engineering challenge until last year. Then they hit another roadblock. The disc wouldn't spin. SCI engineers stuck a rotor through the disc's center to turn it mechanically, but Podkletnov specified 5,000 revolutions per minute. SCI's device barely pulls 30 rpm.

Why not just ask Podkletnov how to build the thing? SCI brought him over to consult a couple of years ago, to little avail. "His excuse basically was that he was a ceramics physicist, not an electrical or mechanical engineer, and other people built the device for him," Koczor says. "Draw your own conclusions. All I know is, if I were a principal investigator on something like this, I would know the size and thread-depth of every screw in the damn thing. But you know, the Europeans and the Russians, they're different. They're much more, 'this is your job and this is my job.' So it's plausible that he didn't know the details." It might not matter. SCI's contract is ending, and Koczor's budget to explore "way-out physics" is spent. He hasn't got the money to actually test the device even if it did meet Podkletnov's specs.

But researchers outside NASA are working on the problem, too. This summer Nick Cook, a writer for Jane's Defence Weekly, reported that aerospace giant Boeing was pursuing antigravity research. Boeing denied it. "We are aware of Podkletnov's work on 'anti-gravity' devices and would be interested in seeing further development work being done," said a company statement. "However, Boeing is not funding any activities in this area at this time." Note Boeing's use of the Clintonian present tense. They never contacted Jane's to ask for a correction, Cook says. Meanwhile, British aerospace company BAE Systems says it's keeping an eye on the research, and that it had once funded its own antigravity project, Greenglow.

Unfortunately, Cook strains his own credibility somewhat. A couple of weeks after his Jane's piece appeared, Cook's book on antigravity research, The Hunt for Zero Point, came out. In it, he claims that the Nazis built an antigravity device during World War II. Its absence from present-day science, Cook says, implies a vast "black" world of secret antigravity aircraft that might explain the UFOs people see over Area 51. He's a careful investigative reporter, but once you start talking about UFOs and Nazi antigravity you're not far from hidden tunnels under the White House full of lizard-men disguised as Freemasons.

Even without Nazis, there are plenty of reasons to doubt Podkletnov. My e-mails to the account listed on his recent articles (not peer-reviewed) went unanswered. Even more problematic, I can't find the institution he lists as his affiliation in Moscow. "Eugene always expressed his worries that others could copy his work, although as far as I know he never applied for a patent," Giovanni Modanese, a collaborator of Podkletnov's at the University of Bolzano in Italy, wrote in an e-mail (using a Western version of Podkletnov's first name). "Nonetheless, at the scientific level if one wants a confirmation by others and a successful replication, one must give all the necessary elements." Well, yeah. Modanese says that the current version of the device, now called an "impulse gravity generator," is simpler and could be built "by a big-science team of people expert in superconductivity." A Boeing spokesperson didn't respond to follow-up questions. So, either there's nothing going on here, or it's an X-File.

And the science? Ten years is a long time to go without replication. Combine that with Podkletnov's cagey behavior and it's enough to make even sci-fi geeks like me lose hope. But like the core of any good conspiracy, antigravity research has the ring of plausibility. One of the outstanding problems in physics and cosmology today involves the existence of so-called dark matter and dark energy. They're by far the main constituents of matter in the universe, and nobody knows what they're made of-researchers have only inferred their existence from gravitational effects. Coming up with a new theory of how gravity works might explain that, though it'd be a scientific revolution on a par with relativity. "Changing gravity is in the cards," says Paul Schechter, an astronomer at MIT. "But so far no one's been able to do better than Einstein." Still, Einstein worked in a lowly patent office. Ron Koczor works for NASA.

------------

*Superconductors are already pretty miraculous. Every material conducts electricity to a greater or lesser extent-think copper versus rubber. Supercooled to below 20 degrees Kelvin, materials lose all resistance. But getting there is energy-intensive and expensive. (At 0 degrees K-absolute zero-all molecular motion ceases.) In 1987, a researcher at the University of Houston discovered a ceramic that was, superconductively speaking, a cheaper date, losing resistance at a more easily attainable 94 degrees K. That's about -290 degrees Fahrenheit, still not convenient for the dream applications of superconductivity like loss-free transmission of electricity, but good enough to experiment on.

October 17, 2002
PRESS ADVISORY

SCI FI Channel Challenges Government Secrecy
Supports New FOIA Effort on UFO Records and
Release of Report on Failure to Conduct Scientific Research

WHAT:
The SCI FI Channel will announce its support of a
new effort to gain release of secret government records
on unidentified aerial phenomena, commonly referred to
as UFOs and release a new report by an independent
journalist on the federal government's failure to carry
out systematic scientific research into this widespread
phenomenon (5% to 10% of which scientists say cannot
be explained by natural or human causes).

Citing the importance to the public of declassifying
government records, John Podesta, former Clinton White
House Chief of Staff, will speak in support of the effort to
gain release of still secret government records.
A new FOIA initiative will also be announced.

To generate public support for more disclosure and a
scientific investigation the formation of the Coalition for
Freedom of Information (CFI) will also be announced.

WHO:
Bonnie Hammer, SCI FI Channel President
John Podesta, former White House Chief of Staff
Leslie Kean, journalist
Lee Helfrich, attorney, Lobel, Novins & Lamont
Ed Rothschild, executive director, Coalition for Freedom of Information

WHEN: Tuesday, October 22, 2002
WHERE: National Press Club, Washington, DC
PRESS ONLY