Dr. John Dodaro: Taking Flight with Solid State Fusion

John Dodaro has always been passionate about science and mathematics. Throughout his studies, he’s pursued various interests, from equations that explain everything to the theory of quantum gravity to semiconductors and material science. His twin motivations have been an unrelenting curiosity (what if?) and a desire for concrete change (what’s the application ultimately?). With a passion for climate solutions, he searched for a domain where he could make the most significant impact.

John Dodaro has always been passionate about science and mathematics. Throughout his studies, he’s pursued various interests, from equations that explain everything to the theory of quantum gravity to semiconductors and material science. His twin motivations have been an unrelenting curiosity (what if?) and a desire for concrete change (what’s the application ultimately?). With a passion for climate solutions, he searched for a domain where he could make the most significant impact.

With his penchant for approaching problems quantitatively, Dodaro noticed that nuclear energy had impressive metrics. “When we run the numbers, I think you realize how powerful nuclear power is as a technology,” he told me. Dodaro explains that running the numbers also shows the safety and effectiveness of the technology, despite the bad press. He insists we know much more about safety measures now, and, like plane crashes, "it's only in the news because it rarely happens. And that's a testament to how good the technology is."

His interest in nuclear power and his drive to make an impact led him to solid-state fusion. While at Stanford, Dodaro met with Robert Huggins, who performed measurements in the early days trying to establish a control experiment with light and heavy water. After all these years, Huggins had stood by his results and thought it was an exciting problem still worth pursuing, further sparking Dodaro's interest. Dodaro read many of the original papers in the LENR field. Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger’s cold fusion theories also caught Dodaro’s attention. Schwinger spoke the language of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, which Dodaro was studying in graduate school. Though Dodaro considered Schwinger’s theory incomplete, he was inspired. “I said, this is a serious guy thinking seriously about a problem that could have a massive impact. And so I think that encouraged me a little bit more–that there were a few serious theoretical physicists thinking about the problem and the serious chemists thinking about the problem.”

“When we run the numbers, I think you realize how powerful nuclear power is as a technology,” he told me. Dodaro explains that running the numbers also shows the safety and effectiveness of the technology, despite the bad press.

While finishing his doctorate, eager to learn more and collaborate, Dodaro connected with Matt Trevithick, who was organizing the Google research, and Michael McKubre at SRI. He was pleasantly surprised to see growing interest in a field he thought was languishing. “What I thought [of as a] field that was sort of dead or slowly decaying with time, it turns out there was this renewed interest. And so for me, I felt like, ‘okay, this seems like something is brewing here. There's going to be some interesting experiments possibly on the horizon. Let me throw my hat in the ring.’”

Dodaro took scientific rigor and coupled it with an entrepreneurial approach. He decided to start a company. This was the genesis of Aquarius Energy. Startups change how knowledge is made, but they can be generative engines for science. “With a startup, you have a certain passion, thinking about the applications and wanting to change the world.” While a focus on applications is controversial in the field, he thinks it’s productive if it’s on a long enough horizon, given investors understand that applications are far away. But “hopefully not too far away,” Dodaro adds. The incentives of a startup structure add a “good type of pressure to the process” for Dodaro and his teammates at Aquarius.

The team was interested in pursuing an approach that combined the key ingredients they felt had the most promise–for both controlled material synthesis at the nano-scale and real-time detection of reaction products. Seeing the endless debate around calorimetry–independent of the quality of the work–made Dodaro feel that the ultimate proof to convince himself and others had to come from direct measurement of the "nuclear ash", the reaction products, instead of heat.

The pressure pushes toward a singular focus, the “irrefutable proof of principle.” Essentially, the IPP is an experiment that demonstrates the claim. “For us, ultimately, we want to hit that milestone and demonstrate yes, there's something there that can convince us and can convince the scientific community that there's something to LENR–not just a few reactions here and there, but something that can actually generate heat, which would ultimately, potentially have useful applications.”

“With a startup, you have a certain passion, thinking about the applications and wanting to change the world.” While a focus on applications is controversial in the field, he thinks it’s productive if it’s on a long enough horizon, given investors understand that applications are far away. But “hopefully not too far away,”

For Dodaro, the potential benefits of this energy source are huge. As he explained, if we could generate heat without neutrons from deuterium at the energy densities reported in the LENR literature, it would be a game changer. “Some simple back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest an energy density that is ten, one hundred, maybe even one thousand times what we see with chemical fuels, with oil.” That energy density, he enthusiastically explained to me, would have revolutionary applications. For example, based on the available data, if we replaced the hydrogen in a hydrogen fuel cell with deuterium, we'd have a vehicle with a massive range. “You're worrying about a Tesla not being able to go five hundred miles…[imagine] a LENR-based car that could go ten million miles.”

As Dodaro told me, a fuel cell car’s H2 tank holds ~500 Megajoules; replaced with D2, the same tank holds over a billion Megajoules from LENR. Moreover, this fuel would be incredibly cost-effective. Converted to helium, D2 fuel ($0.018/MMBTU) becomes two orders of magnitude cheaper than natural gas ($1.77/MMBTU)

That kind of energy would allow humans to take flight. “Thinking about going to Mars: how will youdo that with solar panels? …nuclear would shine and be perfect for space travel by supplying the fuel; you'd have water out there. It's perfect for space travel, which is, I think, the ultimate goal, part of the LENR future.”

“Some simple back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest an energy density that is ten, one hundred, maybe even one thousand times what we see with chemical fuels, with oil.”

As a kid, Dodaro dreamed about being an astronaut and avidly watched space movies. He wondered why we’d never returned to the moon and why we were earthbound. “I just thought, from a purely technological perspective, what if we did have new energy sources that could take us further into space? And so that's something I was always motivated by as what could get us into space?”

But more urgently, Dodaro thinks this will have huge implications for climate change, as it would be a carbon-free energy source. This would be the first level of innovation. The low-hanging fruit would be simply to generate heat. Always a numbers guy, Dodaro remarks, “If you run the numbers, how much energy we use just for heat generation just for heating up water, basically, and all sorts of applications from agriculture and chemical distillation. Commercial water heating, just heating water, would be a pretty good product if you could do it a lot cheaper because of the energy density.” Indeed, process heating is over a third of total US manufacturing energy, and space and water heating account for two-thirds of home energy use and one-fourth of commercial energy costs.And despite the high price of deuterium, it would offer such an abundant source of energy that it would ultimately be cheaper than natural gas.

The next level of innovation is the ten-million-mile car: better chemical fuels and batteries. But Dodaro’s imagination is even more capacious. He adds, “Maybe there's even a third tier that could use more exotic reactions, which we don't quite understand yet. If the first level is ambiguous, this is ambiguous raised to the ambiguous power. Like, what if you could get rid of nuclear waste or have some transmutation of the elements? Or some fast-charged particles coming off. Could those be used for space travel? So I think there might be more exotic applications." Though they may not be as immediately impactful as addressing climate change, these “niche applications'' may broaden our knowledge and have future implementations.

The next level of innovation is the ten-million-mile car: better chemical fuels and batteries. But Dodaro’s imagination is even more capacious. He adds, “Maybe there's even a third tier that could use more exotic reactions, which we don't quite understand yet."

Way before Dodaro was thinking about these applications, he was struck by the extraordinary potential of everyday materials. During his doctoral studies, he was inspired by his professor, Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin. He pointed out to Dodaro that the fascinating quantum effects he studied were present in a piece of silicon. “He said, ‘all these particles and antiparticles, all of these things that sound very exotic. You could see them in real-world materials like silicon, like a photovoltaic solar cell.’”

This gave all of the equations and theories Dodaro studied new life because, as he put it, “you're applying them to do something very powerful.” This was incredibly exciting. As exciting as black holes and astrophysics were, Dodaro tells me, “We can't really test and explore.” By contrast, “the real materials that people were taking and studying led to the transistor and the laser and all of these revolutionary technologies that came from understanding basic foundational level physics.” This extraordinary power of ordinary solid-state materials resonated with Dodaro early in his doctoral career. He thought, “Yeah, the equations are interesting and the theory of quantum gravity would be really cool. But what's the application ultimately? And so myself, I was passionate about climate change, and I didn't know exactly where I could make an impact.”

In his usual mathematically-informed manner, he made a calculation.

“I just did a back-of-the-envelope calculation. I had heard about the experiments. When you do the calculation for fusion, it's a quantum tunneling process. And so you know how to calculate that if you know what the repulsion is–the barrier, the Coulomb barrier. And you could say, well, if I bring particles this close together, what's the probability that they overlap? And you could write that down? And you could say it's 10-2000 or something? Well, if I put an electron in between them, I form a hydrogen atom. And I repeat that calculation–and there's papers that repeat this, and find like 10-64.So you say, Okay, I went from 10-2000 to 10-64 by just putting in an electron. That's a massive leap in terms of orders of magnitude, because we're talking about something that's exponentially small! And so a slight change like an electron just bringing them closer together. And so then you say, well, what if there are these other effects on top. You can imagine Nature being creative and finding ways to get you the rest of those orders of magnitude until you start getting heat at these measurable levels that we're interested in. If you say cold fusion and LENR/solid-state fusion is impossible, I would say, no, it's not. You calculate and find 10-2000, which may be astronomically small, but that's not actually zero. Right? It's exciting. There's so many stars in the universe, and the probability is very low, but it's not impossible. I'm not creative enough to think of all of the ways that Nature can do this and fail. And so I'm always open to the possibility that some configuration of atoms can make it work.”

If you say cold fusion and LENR/solid-state fusion is impossible, I would say, no, it's not. You calculate and find 10-2000, which may be astronomically small, but that's not actually zero. Right? It's exciting."

Dodaro hasn’t been able to shake that possibility. “Part of it is I just want to know,” he told me. His “scientific curiosity” propels him, but so does his hope that this will help us solve the climate problem. We need clean energy, and Dodaro believes LENR should be on the table alongside other nuclear power sources. Fusion as a whole is having a day in the Sun, and Dodaro hopes LENR will get some of the light.

While Dodaro is pro-nuclear, he thinks that the engineering challenges of hot fusion are difficult to surmount. There are the neutrons that need to be dealt with, not to mention, he expands, “there have to be superconducting magnets which are as cold as Pluto” within three feet of material at temperatures as hot as the core of the Sun. While he acknowledges that fusion gets easier the bigger you go, he points out that the engineering and cost challenges remain at this scale. Sustaining the reaction is tough, energy sources are limited, and byproducts are challenging to manage. Despite these challenges, he notes, fusion has received considerable funding.

“That's great–it's clean energy. And if it works, it's fire from water. And that's fantastic. But what if there is this other approach? What if it could work on a tabletop?”

That possibility would allow us to avoid the engineering hurdles. “We’d just leapfrog a lot of the challenges,” he argues, “There could be this short circuit to applications and technologies…that's something worth exploring, and even if it is this moonshot and low probability, I think serious teams should tackle this.”

We need clean energy, and Dodaro believes LENR should be on the table alongside other nuclear power sources. Fusion as a whole is having a day in the Sun, and Dodaro hopes LENR will get some of the light.

Dodaro has assembled a serious team at Aquarius Energy to do just this. The team has people who are excellent experimenters as well as the more theoretically inclined, like himself. He thinks this synergy will be productive. “If you look at the history of science, it's all this game of experiment and theory reinforcing each other…you need to have the two connecting and intersecting.” In this context, where there are many unknowns, he says, “We can take theoretical baby steps and then take experimental baby steps at the same time. Hopefully, we're learning something rather than saying, ‘Here's the complete theory that's tried and tested from beginning to end, because I don't think there's enough evidence that we have experimentally to say, here's a complete theory.’”

Looking ahead, Dodaro hopes that students enter the field. “I think what was missing early on…was the feedback loop between grad students coming into the field and publications going out, and if you have that feedback loop, I think scientific progress works pretty well.” The inability to publish in a field has made that difficult. “But I think we are seeing an inflection point,” he says, pointing to the Google group publication, which Nature published. “Even if we're not seeing the smoking gun result yet, I think enough interest is nucleating at this point where there are serious groups and serious people who want to get serious scientific answers.”

Attending his first ICCF meeting, Dodaro got to meet some of these people. “Just the level of discussions, the lunch discussions, talking to people and seeing new ideas and interest in the field. I think that was the most motivational for me, that there was this palpable sense that the field wasn't dying, because here were these other people who are interested and thinking about this seriously.” Gatherings like this are instrumental to the flourishing of the scientific process, he says. And it’s not just the formal lectures, he adds, “the best science happens at the coffee breaks.”

Dodaro is hopeful that the field is going in the right direction and that it can shed some of the stigma of previous decades. He points to the increasingly high caliber of research as one reason why its fortunes may improve. “We're approaching this as seriously as we can. We're not trying to make extreme claims. People are trying to make extreme claims. But if it's serious people working on serious scientific questions, that's acceptable.” In time, he hopes, research will accumulate so that we can harness the extraordinary power of solid-state materials to fuel a clean energy future.