Question: If, in the technological process in Peru, they could create a kind of nuclear plant, and use cold fusion for agricultural activities because--as I understand it--with cold fusion, you can produce a great quantity of energy, and the cheapest fuel is sea water. And I don't know if it can be done here, and where things currently stand with advances in cold fusion that are being worked on in the United States, and if there is a serious program to study it. I don't know that they are doing this now in the United States, and if it could be done in other countries, like Peru. Thank you.

LaRouche: Well, look, the idea of cold fusion as a source of energy was generally much exaggerated and misinterpreted. Cold fusion, so called, was actually a branch of physical chemistry, an anomaly in physical chemistry, which goes with a certain part of the Periodic Table, in the area of platinum palladium--a very specific effect. It's extremely important, because there are certain aspects of the concept of the Periodic Table which are unresolved to the present day.

I have a friend of ours--Larry Hecht has been involved much with this. He's trying to continue the work in a new direction of an old friend of ours, [Dr. Robert Moon], who did a lot of work in this area of physical chemistry, who died in 1989. So, we're continuing this.

So, experimentally, for fundamental scientific questions, what is called cold fusion, involves types of experiments, which have been understood, in part, since at least the 1920s, and are extremely important. The idea of using this as a substitute source of power is a mistake. It has a significance which we do not yet understand, though we understand the questions which these experiments tend to get into.

What we do have, is we have presently, we have very effective designs of high-temperature gas-cooled nuclear reactions, fission reactors. These run, in the present design, which is the so-called Eunuch [ph] design from Germany. This design runs from about 120 to 200 megawatts power. They are self-regulated in the sense that when the heat rises, the temperature rises in the reaction, that slows down the reaction automatically, keeping the weight of reaction within certain limits. Because the power is small, less than the 1.2 gigawatt type of reactors, and because it's much cheaper to construct these, because when you construct the big reactors, you have to do a lot of curing of concrete, which would take three to five years to cure the concrete, of simply the reactor. And often, you want a reactor much sooner than that.

So with a smaller, gas-cooled reactor of this high-temperature type, you can do several things. First of all, you can produce power. And you can produce power without the cost of transportation of coal or oil or so forth. And without the pollution effects. Also, not only can you produce power, but with a high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor, you can produce fuel. You can produce fuel, for example, from water. You can produce hydrogen-based fuels, by disassociation of water. These fuels then can power motor vehicles, trains, aircraft, and so forth. The wasted power from such facilities can be used as useful power, for heat, for desalination, and so forth, all these kinds of things.

So therefore, for a country like Peru, with its particular terrain, such reactors are ideal, because they permit us to set up new communities, which are, in a sense, self-powered, in that sense. If you need more gigawatt, if you need a gigawatt, you use four or five or these different, individual plants, which go up quicker, they're easier to maintain, the safety problems are much less, because when they have a problem, they shut down automatically, until the engineers can come in to fix the problem, or melt on you. So these are ideal.

So right now, I think the right is, for a country like Peru, and so forth, is to have the right to build and acquire such facilities, to train Peruvians in the development and use of such facilities, to use the existence of such facilities to create a more educated engineering cadre in the sciences. And to create new branches of industry, and so forth. So this is what I think we should be looking at. And we also need a conception of this throughout the Americas.

For example, you take the case of Brazil. It's a related case. Brazil is a place which needs precisely such types of reactors. It's a vast area, relatively, much of it very thinly populated, so you're going to build concentrations of population in urban centers, within Brazil. Therefore, this is the type of reactor combination you need. Now, if Brazil needs it, and other countries in the Americas have a similar need, then, obviously, this is a technology which should be characteristic of South America. It should also be characteristic of Mexico. So we should have the technology, we should share it, we should use it. And as far as the so-called cold fusion, we have to continue, as our friend Larry Hecht is doing, to put forward this work of our friend from Chicago [Dr. Moon], and get this research on the nature of the nuclear structures worked through, the so-called Archimedean solid method done.

But the cold fusion should be looked at as an area of experiment of which a certain mythology was built: It has a very specific significance in physical chemistry. That should be pursued. It may lead to who knows what benefits. We should seek those benefits, but in the meantime, we should concentrate on, right now, the fission we have.

-30-