FEEDBACK NOTE NO. 5
RESPONSE TO A JOURNALIST
Copyright, Harold Aspden, 1999
On February 5, 1999 I
received a brief E-Mail message from 'a Pennsylvania journalist working on a
story about the twentieth anniversary of the partial meltdown at Three Mile
Island, site of the nation's worst nuclear disaster.'
She stated 'I would
like to discuss future alternatives to nuclear power and the burning of fossil
fuels. From your Web site, it seems you would have much to contribute to this
discussion. I'd love to hear more about your findings - in layman's
terms.'
I do not know at this point what I will send to her as my message
in reply and it has occurred to me that it may help to clarify my own thoughts
if I draft this Feedback Note and then review it to see if it warrants entry on
my Web site. I certainly do not see this note itself as that reply - it is just
an aide memoire to reconcile a few points from my own perspective.
It may
seem presumptuous to offer one's personal views on what might appear on the
future horizon concerning viable energy alternatives that can make us
independent of nuclear methods of generating electricity or methods that do not
burn our fossil fuel reserves. Why should my opinion be of interest?
My
early academic and industrial background was spent in electrical power
engineering. My main career pursuit has been concerned with the development of
the technology that fed the computer industry, but from the viewpoint of its
patentable merit and the risks of patent infringement. That has little relevance
to the alternative energy topic. However, I believe I know enough to know the
borderline between what is practical and what is non-practical and I know enough
about the ways of the scientific community and the business community to see
things from a sensible viewpoint.
Added to this I bring to bear something
quite unusual, the dimension of having, since my Ph.D. research years, a deep
conviction founded in my experimental pursuits which says that there is
something lacking in the physics taught concerning how electrical energy is
stored in our immediate space environment. This includes the conviction that
energy radiated into space as heat does not go off on an endless journey in
search of infinity but is absorbed into the fabric of space in the early phases
of the journey. That energy becomes part of an unseen quantum dance routine
taking place in the vacuum that we imagine as 'nothing', yet it is the basis of
quantum physics and that quantum dance is revealed in the regulating interplay
between atoms and that unseen quantum world. Many of the secrets that can affect
our energy future lie in the related field of ferromagnetism.
In layman's
terms the problem which our scientific community faces is one of opening one's
mind to consider something as being possible which 19th century physics assured
us was impossible. The scientific community can justify spending enormous funds
on projects that they know conform with standard physics but will not spend one
cent or one moment of their time on projects that they 'think' are out of tune
with their past experience of physics. Yet invention thrives on surprise! One
cannot be surprised if all one does is stay in a conventional rut. Surprise
comes from exploring new fields and, I submit, also by not just looking at new
ground, but probing deeper and deeper into old and explored territory, just in
case one has missed something and encounters the unexpected.
Well, back
in the 1950-1953, I delved into the problem of an inexplicable energy loss that
occurs all the time, even today, in all of the electrical transformers that are
used in the distribution of electricity by power companies. Three years of
research did not reveal the true answer and, to this day, there is no answer of
public record, save that which I, forty years on, later discovered by, as I say,
'digging deeper into explored territory'.
The loss is small in relation
to the overall electrical power transmitted, being of the order of no more than
1%. That is not important. After all, what is a billion dollars worth of power
loss set against a hundred and more billion dollars of power that gets through
to its destination? What is important is the cause of that loss and the fact
that power engineers do not understand it. If they did then they should be able
to see the way forward and see prospect for turning that loss into an escalating
bonanza for the future of energy generation.
To digress just a little, a
topical example of large scale funding in efforts to pursue alternative energy
research is the presently topical claim that Russia has put a large mirror into
orbit in space with the object of reflecting sunlight to illuminate a part of
Siberia. It will save the cost of lighting that region at night and make the
region more habitable. What I have not seen mentioned in the fact that the
mirror must also connect by reflection the rest of Earth with the vastly large
area of outer space not taken up by the solar disc. Outer space is very cold and
mirrors can reflect cold as well as light and heat, so that mirror must cool the
Earth overall. So we see here the prospect of redressing to a small extent the
problems of global warming as well as illuminating parts of Siberia. But is that
really worth the cost? So much more can be achieved by getting researchers to
dig deeper into the sacred ground that forbids what might, in fact, be
scientifically possible, once we avoid mixing up thermodynamic effects and
electromagnetic effects!
Reverting again to layman terms, that loss
problem in power transformers arises because loss caused by electrical current
flow produces heat and, inside the transformer, that heat is being converted
back into electricity by the magnetic deflection of heat flow. In the
transformer this enhances the parasitic current flow and escalates the loss, but
our scientists have seen the symptoms but not understood the cause and so cannot
exploit that knowledge. You see, the factor of the loss anomaly is not just a
few per cent. In my own research I was seeing a six-fold factor of loss, and a
factor of ten was later recorded by independent researchers. That is a mammoth
rate of energy conversion of heat into electricity, given that the temperature
difference in parts of a transformer core are little more than 40o C.
The second law of thermodynamics, sacrosanct to physicists generally, says this
is not possible. So there you are. What is sacrosanct cannot be changed. That
loss remains a mystery, not to me, but to the rest of the world, and yet here
may lie the secret of our energy future.
It is a secret I could not solve
at Cambridge in England where I did my Ph.D. because, being conventional and
well trained academically, it never occurred to me even to think that my
research was encroaching on the holy ground of that second law of
thermodynamics. Yet, once that law is breached we can expect to produce useful
electrical power from ambient heat and so let our air conditioning technology
generate rather than absorb electricity.
That statement, given that I am
saying that the mystery loss in power transformers does breach that law, is
enough for the orthodox scientist to classify me as a crank and ignore what I
say. However, one day, when the scientific community wakes up to some of these
realities, they will find that they really can begin to solve the world's energy
problems. In the meantime, all I can do is wave a flag and explain myself in the
formal language that scientists should understand.
There are, I now know,
other ways of making progress in breaking through the barriers on the energy
frontiers. Those barriers are mainly mental barriers, not technological
barriers. They preoccupy the minds of many as one can see by the stream of
reports of record in the periodical Infinite Energy. However, I think it
best to forge ahead by concentrating on technology familiar to electrical
engineers generally to get those who design the electrical alternators of the
power industry interested in knowing what they are missing. Yes, they should
have their attention drawn to that transformer energy loss, a loss occurring
under their very noses without them even knowing what is happening in their
equipment. If they have never heard of the 'eddy-current anomaly' then it is
time they brushed up on their training! I first heard about it when I was an
undergraduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at university
back in the years 1945-48. Yes, I know designers get by using test specification
data supplied by electrical steel manufacturers. They let the test data
concerning loss suffice in their design calculations, but that does not excuse
the academic community generally for their ignorance in not having addressed and
solved the mystery of that anomaly.
My message, in simple layman terms,
is to demand that those who fund research in academic institutions pay attention
to what I have said above. In turn they must demand that efforts are made to
solve the mystery of the anomalous loss in power transformers. It may well be
possible to devise a kind of transformer that taps ambient heat and generates
electrical power without the Carnot efficiency constraint. One therefore needs
to challenge what professors of mechanical engineering teach concerning that
second law of thermodynamics and its broader application to energy in the
magnetization process, a subject within the province of the electrical
engineer!
What more can I say? I will try to supplement these thoughts as
I write more on this, my Web site, but if the academic world is looking to me to
prove my case by demonstrating a commercial product before listening to common
sense then I may be dead before that day comes and the world will, no doubt,
live on for a while consuming fossil fuel and generating nuclear pollution until
death comes to all!
Harold Aspden
February 7, 1999
Footnote This Web page was edited on March 24, 2001 by removal of an
erroneous end section. The correction is reported in FEEDBACK
NOTE No. 7.