At 11:22 AM 7/20/2011, Daniel Rocha wrote:
According to some theories of LENR, like Lewis Larsen, there is a layer on the surface of the metal which strongly shields against radiation.
That's right. It's how he explains the lack of gammas. It's just as outrageous an explanation as the claim of low energy nuclear reactions, so, shall we say, it hasn't been enthusiastically received. However, that it's a "LENR" explanation that doesn't involve "fusion," it's got some popularity in some circle, among people who don't want to be associated with that freaky fringe "fusion" stuff.
Evenif it's just a semantic device, because if the fuel is deuterium (being transfored into dineutrons by the W-L process) and the product is, at least partly, helium, this little process has accomplished fusion, even if the deuterons are broken down first to be slipped into the nuclei.
Did anyone try to put inside the metal some radioactive particle or try to irradiate it from outside to see if that really works?
Larsen was asked by Garwin, once, what the experimental evidence was for this gamma shielding, since it is, all by itself, really an amazing thing, if there is any evidence for it. Larsen claimed that this was proprietary information. Great. Apparently he was awarded a patent for this, which shows what insane preposterousness (as far as existing knowledge is concerned) can get a patent. As long as it doesn't cite Pons and Fleischmann, hey, why not?
The lack of patentability for CF has drastically inhibited investment in the research. It's completely unclear how the public interest is served by prohibiting patents of things viewed as impossible.
I've argued that there is a bypass, which is patenting CF process and materials for research usage, with other possible applications (like power generation) as additional claims. There have been patents awarded with this approach, but I don't know how much this has been tried.
(If I'm correct about the law, normally the US patent office doesn't require a working model or actual proof that a patented device or process works as claimed. But they have the right to do this if a claim is considered impossible. But I'm not certain.)
