At 11:58 AM 8/17/2012, Jones Beene wrote:
Further on this point (with some rewording):
IMPLICATION - there are 20+ years of positive experiments
with palladium-deuterium, most of them using hydrogen as a control. Hydrogen
does not seem to work at all in pure palladium. If H worked at all, then the
thermal gain with D is even more than we realize, since it is used as a
control.
BUT deuterium seems to work better than hydrogen ONLY in
palladium (possibly better in Titanium but that is less clear). Surprisingly
D is much poorer in side-by-side comparison in Ni-Cu (but is still gainful).
Most interesting, since much faith has been put in the 'boson connection'
prior to recently!
THERE IS A LESSON HERE ... but damn, I'm not sure exactly
what it is !
We won't know for sure until we know much more than we currently
know. Various people propose this and that, but nothing, so far, has
truly been confirmed.
Hydrogen is used as a control, but there are lots of reports that
hydrogen is not a completely "clean" control. I.e., all the way back
to Pons and Fleischmann, it was reported that small amounts of heat
were sometimes seen with light water controls. I don't know if they
tried deuterium-depleted water, because it's possible that light
water heat was from the normal light water deuterium contamination.
However, this has little import with respect to levels of heat from
deuterium, because that was independently determined. The calibration
is not done with light water, but with other means. The light water
controls are evidence that the calorimetry is, at least
approximately, correct. It's not perfect, because deuterium and
hydrogen do differ, slightly, in chemical/physical properties.
Among the possibilities are nuclear, magnetic and/or quantum properties.
Here are a few.
1) The deuteron has spin +1 and is a nuclear boson, but two bound
protons is also a composite boson
2) The NMR frequency of deuterium is significantly different from
hydrogen and nuclear magnetic moment is vastly less. NMR sensitivity is two
orders of magnitude less for D.
3) Nickel, as a host is ferromagnetic, so NMR or another magnetic
property may play a major role in defining the difference.
4) OTOH - Palladium is a paramagnetic but local ferromagnetism has been
documented in Pd! (could this relate to why these systems seem to be less
reliable than Ni-H ? (i.e. itinerate ferromagnetism)
5) Helium ash is often seen with Pd-D but no helium is seen with Ni-H.
In short, it could be possible that deuterium reactions are fundamentally
different, and always result in nuclear ash, whereas Ni-H reactions, if they
are nuclear at all - depend on direct transfers of nuclear mass from the
proton to supply excess energy, resulting in no transmutation. However, both
systems depend on some kind of magnetic coupling to the host metal lattice -
and that coupling defines which metals or alloys work and which do not work.
Finding helium as the ash with strong NiH experiments would be quite
unexpected. Finding helium with deuterium cold fusion was actually
one of the most strongly suspected possibilities, early on, because
of the rare d+d hot fusion branch, d+d -> He-4 plus gamma. To remind
readers, there are three branched to that reaction:
d+d -> tritium + proton, 50%
d+d -> neutron + He-3, 50%
d+d -> He-4 + gamma, rare.
"cold fusion" was assumed to be, at first, d+d fusion. After all, the
experiments were being done with deuterium oxide. But Pons and
Fleischmann actually only proposed d+d fusion to explain their
(erroneous) neutron findings. They claimed "unknown nuclear reaction"
for the actual reaction causing all that heat.
The "triple miracle" was, as I recall,
1. That any nuclear reaction would take place at all, because of the
Coulomb barrier.
2. That no neutrons or other major radiation was observed,
commensurate with the heat.
3. That there appeared to be a single product, causing a problem with
conservation of momentum.
However, if the hypothesis is "unknown reaction," there is no miracle
necessary, beyond something being observed that may not have been
observed before. Unknown "nuclear" reaction wasn't really much
different, but enters the territory of Miracle 1, possibly. "Nuclear"
was proposed because *chemists* concluded that the level of heat
observed wasn't possible, under the circumstances, from a chemical reaction.
*Physicists* said that the *chemists* were wrong about their chemistry....
It was a real mess, the "scientific fiasco of the century" (Huizenga).
In any case, we still don't know what the mechanism is, so the first
miracle remains unexplained, as to anything proven.
When we talk about "cold fusion," however, we create a lot of
confusion if we aren't specific about what we mean. We now have a
reasonable basis for considering the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect to
be the result of some kind of fusion, unknown mechanism, but we have
no such basis for NiH reactions. Yet you'll certainly see NiH
reactions considered at ICCF. The *field* is actually "low energy
nuclear reactions," or "condensed matter nuclear science."
Magnetic fields are sometimes found to have an effect on LENR. Unless
very low fields are effective, they don't seem to be necessary under
most conditions. Letts has found that the effect of dual-laser
stimulation appears to depend on the presence of a magnetic field.
This, however, has been inadequately investigated, so far. It's one
of the many loose ends in cold fusion. Yes, the Larmour frequency of
deuterium may play a role. However, it's way premature to base much
on the magnetic issue.
Cold fusion shows us that there are things we don't know. That does,
indeed, open up possibilities, but it is way premature to start
revising all the basic theories and findings of physics, just because
there is something not explained. There are "near" explanations to be
explored, and "far" ones. Near explanations include concepts like
Bose-Einstein condensates, electron catalysis, etc. Far explanations
include things like the formation of black holes, or even hydrino theory.
(Hydrino theory is kind of a special case. It should really be
established experimentally, on its own, before being used to explain
cold fusion. Yes, I'm aware that there are claims of experimental
confirmation, and these deserve careful attention, but ... the
experimental confirmation of cold fusion is *vastly* broader than
that for hydrino theory, so I don't want to confuse the two.)
This opens the possibility that the known mass of the proton is an average,
and the population of hydrogen which is heavier than average can give up
slight mass in some form - and still retain nuclear stability. Note that QCD
was presaged by 50 years (1962) when Fermi discovered that soft pion
emissions could result from an electromagnetic interaction. Who knows -
stranger things have happened than protons shedding slight mass and still
retaining identity.
It would be totally revolutionary, probably far to much so.
Thankfully - this last possibility is FALSIFIABLE with Ni-H since large
continuous gains are possible, allowing average mass of hydrogen reactant to
be tested before and after via highest precision mass spectrometry.
Mass spectrometry can detect mass changes, but ordinarily, detecting
the difference between He-4 and D2 is close to the limit. If a
reaction results in only a small change in the mass of each proton,
but across many protons, it might not be so simple to detect. Still,
I do expect it would be detectable. However, with PdD cold fusion, we
already have a mass change that explains the observed heat, the
conversion of deuterium to helium.
Storms interprets his theory to predict deuterium as the product of
Ni-H fusion. Great. It would be a bit difficult to detect because of
the normal deuterium impurity in light water. One might use
deuterium-depleted water to lower the noise floor. Operating an NiH
reactor for a long time, there should be a measurable shift in
deuterium abundance; Storms also predicts that as deuterium builds
up, tritium as a product would increase.
None of this has been adequately investigated. Some of this work
could rather simply and cheaply be done.
