Dr. Edmund Storms: Making the LENR Map

The scientific spirit came naturally for Storms, who experimented from a young age. In high school, he had a chemical lab in his basement where he taught himself glassblowing and made everything from pumps to rockets to explosives to amateur Geiger counters. He ran around the neighborhood hunting for radioactivity with his homemade Geiger counter.

Storms’ fascination with science continued during his time in university, where he majored in chemistry and eventually got into a new field of radiochemistry. Eventually, he landed at Los Alamos, where he worked on building a nuclear rocket.

While at Los Alamos, Storms was tasked with studying materials that could survive a nuclear rocket's very high temperatures and radioactive environment. Even though the nuclear rocket program got scrapped under the Nixon administration, he continued his investigations, this time in service of an effort to build a nuclear power source in space. This program also eventually ended, but Storms’ work to use nuclear power for space exploration continues to the present day, where he consults with NASA in their efforts. He considers nuclear power crucial to exploring the final frontier. “This would be the ideal energy source for use in space,” he told me, “I don’t think that it’s possible without this energy…We can send robots to Mars, but we won’t send humans to Mars until we have a source of energy.”

His work on nuclear rockets set the stage for his long low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) career. In 1989, when Fleishmann and Pons publicized their cold fusion findings, Los Alamos was buzzing with excitement. As Storms told me, “Los Alamos recognized that this was very, very important, and the whole laboratory was involved.” Storms recognized the potential implications of such a discovery, but he wasn’t alone. He remarks that weapons development was tabled for some time as teams of scientists started working on cold fusion. When they shared updates in the laboratory’s main auditorium, there was “standing room only.”

Despite this intense interest, many efforts to replicate the phenomenon failed. But Storms’ own attempt succeeded. Among others, Storms worked with Carol Talcott, an expert in palladium hydrides who he would eventually marry. Storms built a sophisticated calorimeter and was able to replicate the excess heat effect. “Seeing this happen,” he recalled, “you know that this is real. You know that this is not an error.”

Despite his conviction that he was observing a real effect, Storms was puzzled and intrigued by it, because, he added, “You know, that that should not happen and it is in fact happening.” As he describes it, Storms got addicted to this idea and spent decades trying to solve the puzzle. But over time, it became less viable for him to solve that puzzle at Los Alamos, where interest in cold fusion had gradually waned as political priorities shifted. Around that time, Storms retired. With his wife, he designed and built a laboratory in their home in Santa Fe, which was still in view of Los Alamos. There, his cold fusion investigations continued.

... many efforts to replicate the phenomenon failed. But Storms’ own attempt succeeded. Storms built a sophisticated calorimeter and was able to replicate the excess heat effect. “Seeing this happen,” he recalled, “you know that this is real. You know that this is not an error.”

In speaking with Storms, it’s evident that an ardent devotion to understanding nature also anchors his scientific curiosity. He is passionate about “describ[ing] nature more accurately,” and this commitment has motivated his experimental work for decades.

This commitment stems from Storms’ careful experimental style, which focuses on the chemical environments and the experimental conditions. With his background in material science, Storms has developed increasingly sophisticated and precise experiments and tools to hone in on the cold fusion phenomenon, building one of the best calorimeters in the field. He argues that this approach is our best shot at uncovering what’s happening in these mysterious reactions. Unlike ordinary fields with more defined rules, he told me, “In this field, we have rules that we don't understand at this point, and therefore we don't have a good way of evaluating what's real and what isn't. I start with the assumption that because this is happening in a chemical environment, whatever is happening has to be consistent with the rules that apply to the chemical environment. Those rules are well understood. Chemistry is a very mature science. We know a huge amount about chemistry. Fusion has to play by those rules…. There's a chemical environment that's going to affect the electrons and the atoms in the nuclei in totally predictable ways. And those predictable ways have to be taken into account.”

This chemically-informed approach is, for Storms, necessary to arrive at the truth. “Cold fusion phenomena are in fact a real phenomenon of nature that has a particular mechanism…it follows particular rules. It is not a mixture of all kinds of crazy ideas. It is very specific.” While he acknowledges that there are many diverse approaches to studying cold fusion, he insists that we need to ascertain which ideas are truly worth pursuing. “We don’t know who’s right,” he told me, “but some people are more right than others.”

“Cold fusion phenomena are in fact a real phenomenon of nature that has a particular mechanism…it follows particular rules. It is not a mixture of all kinds of crazy ideas. It is very specific.”

But despite these differences in approach, Storms thinks it’s imperative that research continues and reasoned scientific debate allows the best ideas to triumph. Before any of this can happen, we need serious investment in the field. This is warranted because, as he puts it, “information is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. By normal scientific standards, the information is so overwhelmingly supportive, it would be a total embarrassment. It would demonstrate complete ignorance for anyone to say that this is not real. .. the nature of that reality is not understood, and therefore we don’t know how to control it. We don’t know how to amplify it. We don’t know how to turn it into something useful. But that’s the only issue at this point. The reality is no longer an issue.”

His ardent commitment to studying this reality is coupled with some caution. Storms sees some cause for optimism in the fact that people are recognizing that this phenomenon deserves serious attention. But he is wary of political influences in science and concerned that we are losing the opportunity to make a timely energy breakthrough. Progress is slow, and clean energy isn’t a priority when we urgently need it to be. “The irony of this whole worrying thing is that to protect ourselves from global warming, we're going to have to use even more energy than we used to cause global warming. And so if we continue to use the normal energy sources, [to defend against] the consequence of global warming, we're just gonna make it worse. And so if you want to at least help civilization survive to a greater degree, then work on cold fusion.” But the lethargic response to the climate crisis makes him worry that the ship has sailed. Though cold fusion could make cheap, abundant, non-hazardous energy available to everyone, the inevitable political challenges of making the science applicable put the brakes on Storms’ optimism.

He thinks a more reasoned, structured approach is crucial to combat this lethargic pace. This would, he explained to me, guard against wasted effort and bad faith attempts. He recommends building much more robust and streamlined experimental systems to make headway in this challenging field, similar to the systems he worked within at Los Alamos.

"...if we continue to use the normal energy sources, [to defend against] the consequence of global warming, we're just gonna make it worse. If you want to at least help civilization survive to a greater degree, then work on cold fusion.”

Solid-state fusion owes a lot to the work of Storms, and he’s compiled a considerable archive of experimental records. While Storms is a scientist first, he has high regard for archival work and knowledge preservation, having himself published important data collections that serve as guideposts in the cold fusion field. Storms has spent decades refining his approach, but he worries that important efforts–not only by himself but by his fellow scientists–will be squandered if newcomers don’t take the time to understand what has been done. “They will just simply rediscover the wheel, the wheel that they're going to rediscover is wrong, and we'll just keep forgetting all the work that's been done and starting all over again. It's kind of self-defeating.”

He insists on the importance of building on the careful experimental work that’s already been done, a large portion of which is Storms’ contribution. “This is like an explorer, going through the jungle trying to find some pot of gold or whatever. And without a map and everybody's going off in different directions, hoping by accident to come upon this treasure. And that's pretty much what we have in the field right now. Everybody uses their imagination and pays no attention to…the experimental work… and then they just go wandering off into the wilderness, searching. I've taken a different approach. I've looked at all of the experimental work, and then I use that knowledge to do other experimental work to verify whether or not what we're seeing is correct. And gradually, I have built a map and a path that leads to that.” To follow that path to gold, we need more investment. “I don't have the money to dig. And I can't tell you exactly where to dig, but I can tell you the direction that you must go to find it.”

Storms is ultimately a pragmatist and wants to make the most of the work that’s been accomplished so it can inform future investigations. For the field to flourish, we need to “make sense of all this” and figure out the relationships between different experiments. We must “put all this into a form that not only can people understand, but then can be maintained as an archive into the future.”

We need reasoned scientific debate to “make sense” of it all. Recalling high school debate years, Storms says that it’s an excellent method for weeding out nonsense and strengthening well-supported claims. “I enjoyed that debate format. It provided a mechanism to get out the truth, find the points of agreement and the points of disagreement, and find very clearly what has to be essentially changed in terms of beliefs to gain agreement. It's a very, very powerful tool.”

Storms is a devoted follower of the scientific method. But he considers that our political priorities and our styles of collaborative research need to fundamentally shift to enable the scientific method to work. He is not equivocal about the truth of the science. Nor does he waver in his commitment to a clean energy future. But he is cautious about unwarranted optimism because he knows that serious challenges require serious effort to overcome. Nonetheless, I left our conversation inspired by Storms’ work ethic, commitment to scientific discovery, and intellectual curiosity. As the field grows and we approach an inflection point, Storms’ work and his reflections on the field will inform future work, permitting us to progress toward a solid-state fusion-powered climate solution thoughtfully.