Shanahan is proposing the oldest and least credible prosaic explanation for cold fusion:
"Once current stops, the driving force to load the Pd electrode with hydrogen is removed, and the system seeks to obtain equilibrium under the new state by releasing gas, converting the situation from an electrolysis cell to a gas unloading experiment. At the point where electrical contact was broken, the cell gas was very nearly a stoichiometric mixture of hydrogen and oxygen." With Fleischmann's open cell, that is completely wrong, as Abd noted. The cell head space is filled with water vapor only, with no significant amount of oxygen. "Significant hydrogen release will occur because the electrolytic loading was equivalent to many atmospheres of hydrogen gas pressure exposure, but the hydrogen present will inhibit complete Pd unloading. . . ." This is nonsense. See Fleischmann's response to Morrison about this, p. 10 and 11: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf To summarize, the amount of hydrogen in cathode is ~1,700 times too small to explain the heat after death, and heat after death occurs over 3 to 6 hours, whereas it would take 29 days for the hydrogen to emerge from the cathode. Quote: "In the first place . . . the vapourisation of the D2O alone would have required ~1.1MJ of energy whereas the combustion of all the D in the palladium would at most have produced ~ 650J (assuming that the D/Pd ratio had reached ~1 in the cathode), a discrepancy of a factor of ~ 1700. In the second place, the timescale of the explanation is impossible: the diffusional relaxation time is ~ 29 days whereas the phenomenon took at most ~ 6 hours . . . Thirdly, Kreysa et al [8] confused the notion of power (Watts) with that of energy (Joules) which is again an error which has been promulgated by critics seeking "Chemical Explanations" of "Cold Fusion". Thus Douglas Morrison reiterates the notion of heat flow, no doubt in order to seek an explanation of the high levels of excess enthalpy during Stage 4 of the experiments. We observe that at a heat flow of 144.5W (corresponding to the rate of excess enthalpy generation in the experiment discussed in our paper [2] the total combustion of all the D in the cathode would be completed in ~ 4.5s, not the 600s of the duration of this stage. Needless to say, the D in the lattice could not reach the surface in that time (the diffusional relaxation time is ~ 10^5s) while the rate of diffusion of oxygen through the boundary layer could lead at most to a rate of generation of excess enthalpy of ~ 5mW. . . ." - Jed
