At 08:42 AM 5/8/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Shanahan is proposing the oldest and least credible prosaic
explanation for cold fusion:
This is nonsense. See Fleischmann's response to Morrison about this,
p. 10 and 11:
<http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf>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.
If Fleischmann had stopped there, it would not have been enough. The
"cigarette lighter effect" is based on the fact that a loaded
palladium rod, *exposed to air* will heat up from catalyzed
combustion at the surface. Morrison correctly points out that such a
rod can burn something it is placed upon. As the rod heats up,
evolution of gas increases, so it would burn up the deuterium,
probably much faster than 29 days. Or not, if Fleischmann considered
the operating temperature.
So he points out that if the combustion was taking place at the
measured enthalpy, it would burn up the entire store of deuterium in
4.5 seconds.
Further, Fleischmann points out that (as Morrison had acknowledged)
the amount of palladium present was quite small compared to what was
used in the cigarette lighters. To heat up the rod, oxygen must reach
a rod which is supposedly outgassing deuterium at the same time.
My own analysis of this suggestion of recombination through small
oxygen bubbles was that the recombination would create water or water
vapor, which would push oxygen away from the palladium; an oxygen
bubble alighting on the palladium surface would, I'd expect,
recombine, but this would be self-limiting. For an explosion to
occur, it would have to be pre-mixed with deuterium.
In the cells taken to boiling, water vapor is rapidly being
generated, and that is, as Fleischmann noted, the principle outgas at
that point. Small amounts of oxygen would be generated by the
remaining electrolysis, but would be rapidly swept out of the cell
(with generated deuterium as well). The concentration of deuterium
and oxygen in the head gas would be relatively low, not an explosive
mixture, my estimation.
Morrison wanted to see closed cells, and that's understandable, but,
as Fleischmann noted, irrelevant. Closed cells require recombination
and are dangerous, because the gas inside can, indeed, be an explosive mixture.
This is what occurred to me, reading Morrison and Fleischmann's
response. The defenders of traditional fusion theory from the
chemistry intruders took the position that it was not necessary for
them to do any real work, any more. After all, some of them had tried
in 1989, and failed to confirm, and they blamed their failures on
Pons and Fleischmann. So, they thought, the burden of proof is on
F&P. And then they sat in judgment on every new experiment and piece
of evidence, simply thinking up hypothetical explanations that might
leave the phenomenon in the chemical realm, and it didn't matter if
the explanation was preposterous or did not match the experimental
conditions. They did not apply, at all, the same standards for
cogency of theory, to their own theories, that they were demanding of
Fleischmann.
A basic principle was forgotten: preponderance of the evidence. They
actually had *no* evidence that nuclear reactions were *impossible*,
under the F&P conditions; all the "proofs" depended upon assumptions
that the reaction being considered was known, typically d-d fusion,
and that it would therefore have known characteristics for that
reaction. What accumulated over the years was evidence that there was
an anomaly here. For decisions involving funding and allocation of
research resources, the issue should not be "proof," but rather the
simplest explanations of what's being observed, and such explanations
do not require comprehensive theoretical understanding.
Fleischmann was quite careful to point out that he wasn't claiming
"nuclear fusion," and that wasn't merely a device to avoid
approbation. He was claiming excess heat, at levels that were
unexplainable by chemistry. That does leave some kind of nuclear
reaction as likely. But excess heat is the fact being exposed, and
there was and is no special burden on Fleischmann to explain it.
This is what a real debunker would do, and it's what was done with
N-rays and polywater. Fleischmann was claiming high reproducibility
for heat after death, and a dramatic effect, so dramatic that the
accuracy of the calorimetry, he claimed, became moot.
A debunker would have reproduced the experiment, generating the kind
of heat shown. And then would have attempted to show that this heat
was coming from recombination, or that the calorimetry was in error
by correcting the errors, or the like. But, of course, this would be
risky politically. What if they couldn't find evidence for
recombination? And, in fact, the recombination theory was
preposterous on the face, for the reasons that Fleischmann so ably
and cogently pointed out.
Reproducing the F&P effect was difficult, but this was a claim of
reproducibility, and Fleischmann qualified the claim, "provided that
the starting materials were adequate." He mentions the problem of
cracking. But this experiment would be an exact replication, and at
that point the palladium could have been obtained from, or approved
by, Fleischmann (I do assume that Fleischmann would have cooperated
with such a replication), and presumably the same experimental
protocol would have been followed. If no apparent excess heat was
found, the mystery of why the two experiments didn't show the same
effect would presumably be addressed; but at this point, it would
have to be asked, as well, "Why didn't recombination occur this time,
when it supposedly occurred in the F&P work?"
Fleischmann hints at another problem: the heavy water might contain
surfactants. Apparently there are lots of ways to do it wrong, to
make assumptions that a certain material that might be available
would be okay. And it might not be okay. I bought heavy water from
CDN in Canada. The right stuff? Maybe. Maybe not! If I see neutrons,
I don't care, except that I will be aware that if I change suppliers,
say to Cambridge Isotope Labs in my home state, I could have a
problem (but Cambridge Isotope Labs was the supplier for the Galileo
project, I believe. Where did Scott Little get his heavy water? It's
not stated.)
As an example of a reason why Little might not have seen any nuclear
effect, heavy water is hygroscopic, and, I'm told, a small amount of
ordinary water will effectively poison the experiment; apparently the
electrolysis concentrates the hydrogen at the cathode and it is
preferentially absorbed, so the effect is much larger than might be
expected. Heavy water that isn't stored in a well-sealed container,
I'm given to understand, will gradually increase in hydrogen
concentration due to interaction with water vapor in the air.
I appreciate the work that Earthtech did, but with the Galileo
protocol, they did what I believe is the opposite of what they should
have done. Instead of narrowing the experimental conditions, they
varied the parameters in many different ways. They hardly ran the
same experiment twice. A more appropriate approach would have been to
get reproduction first. They were fooled, perahps, by the appearance
of "pits," which they called "SPAWAR pits," though the
characteristics were quite different (I think that most of what they
saw was, indeed, chemical damage). They were also using old CR-39,
with high background. My opinion is that this was simply a failed
replication, quite likely.
After succeeding in replication, and confirming reliability, *then*
they would investigate, now having something seen in their lab that
can be tested in various ways to discover what's going on. I hope
that they will return to working with CF experiments, it would be a
shame for their experience to be wasted.
If I can't see a clear effect, I'll assume I'm doing something
different. I'll then consult with SPAWAR, and narrow down the
possibilities. My goal is to reproduce and to make it easy for others
to do so as well. The process I'll go through is what I believe is needed.
I'm not bothering with magnets! But, later on, it would be easy to
try a magnetic field and see what effect it has, if any. Or to try
many variations.
But I am initially changing certain conditions, aware of the risks.
Other variations I may be helpless about. I don't have a means at
this point to test my heavy water for hydrogen content, for example.
Eventually I'll identify such resources, and others are welcome to help.
(I assume that if there are surfactants, I'll see foaming....)
This was Fleischmann's comment on the cigarette lighter effect, left
here for convenience, no more content from me below:
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
