Here’s a summary of the meeting held at the University of Northern Iowa yesterday.

I arrived at the venue early and after introducing myself to the people who were preparing for the meeting I was warmly greeted, and invited for a soup dinner before the event with Tom Wind and others, which was very pleasant, and I was able to get to know Tom a little there. He is a consulting electrical engineer and has been involved for most of his career working in the wind industry here in the State of Iowa. He told me that the program description of him working for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources was incorrect.

I won’t be able to cover all the content that was presented in the Lecture here — there was so much of it. I was actually surprised about how much ground Tom was able to cover in about an hour and a half, but he did a very good job at summarizing the LENR/Cold Fusion story from the days of Pons and Fleischmann to the very present in a way that was comprehensible to a non-expert audience. The event was filmed and I was told that video of the talk and slideshow will be posted on the UNI website in the near future.

Much of what Tom talked about will be familiar to readers here, so I will just present here some things that I found to be particularly noteworthy.

The event was held at the Center for Energy and Environmental Education (CEEE) at UNI, and sponsored by the Recycling and Reuse Technology Transfer Center. Catherine Zeman, Director of the Recycling and Reuse Technology Transfer Center and Pat Higby, Energy Education Outreach Coordinator made introductions at the lecture, and both expressed enthusiasm about hosting a lecture about ‘cold fusion.’

Tom said he became enamored with the subject of LENR after attending last summer’s ICCF-18 conference at the University of Missouri. He said that he was in awe meeting who he described some of the smartest people in the world there, and felt that this was a field of research that is very important. He mentioned talking to representative of Statoil, Norway’s giant oil company at ICCF, and Tom was surprised to hear that instead of having a negative take on LENR, his attitude was ‘this is great, we need this!’

The most common phrase Tom used throughout the lecture was ‘this is real’. He presented supporting evidences from academic papers, scientific reports and business developments. As far as commercial viability of LENR goes, he mentioned that until Andrea Rossi came on the scene, the levels of excess heat that researchers were obtaining were not at levels that could be useful in commercial products — but Rossi’s work has changed all that. He spent quite a lot of time talking about the E-Cat and emphasized the Levi report as providing solid evidence for the E-Cat’s viability. He showed the familiar pictures of the glowing hot cats and said that it would be impossible for that level of heat to be generated with the electric leads shown. He also mentioned other commercial players such as Brillouin, Defkalion, Jet Energy, Lenuco, and Mitsubishi.

He made some interesting comments regarding the effect of LENR on the utilities industry. At one point, he held up a small vial of nickel powder and said, ‘this is the gift from God to the utility industry’, and explained that Industrial Heat’s approach is to work on an large industrial scale which should involved retrofitting power plants with an E-Cat energy source. Tom mentioned that although he works in the wind industry he actually hopes that LENR will eventually eliminate the need for wind turbines.

Some of his concluding points were:

It’s real

Nuclear safety is not an issue

The theory is still not understood, but commercial products will be available anyway

The Chinese will use it first

This technology will be of great benefit to the poorer people of the world

I was a little disappointed that there were not more people in attendance — I counted around 20 attendees at the lecture. But the level of interest seemed high among members of the audience, and there were interesting questions and discussions following the lecture. I was introduced by Tom to the audience following the lecture. I was particularly pleased to meet other people in my part of the world who are following the story, and I got some contact details of some people, so we can stay in touch. I asked Pat Higby if there might be a chance for future events like this at the CEEE at UNI, and she seemed in favor.

I will keep an eye out for the posting of the video of the lecture.