Cold Fusion explained - it may have been a nuclear reaction but it wasn't fusion.

rote:

place, but they aren't going to wipe out anything that delivers at half the price per kilowatt hour, and can be spread around to service the local mar ket.

ockheed Martin nuclear reactor "

It's a fusion reactor, rather than the nuclear fission reactors that we wer e talking about.

And Lockheed-Martin can take out all the patents that they want, but they h ave to build something that works before they get taken seriously.

And - compact or not - their nuclear fusion reactor is still going to make its inner shell intensely radioactive, which is going to discourage people from putting them in stuff that moves around fast enough to break into smal l pieces if it hits anything else.

Venture capitalists looking for capital tend to play down that kind of risk , in part because their obsession with the big picture distracts them from the millions of tiny details that have to be get right before you can make money out of something new.

Dan does seem to think more like a venture capitalist than design engineer.

Although that might be true it is a hell of a high mountain pass for a quantum tunnel to pass through. Giving them the benefit of the doubt it would be a relatively simple matter to test the surface of the material for an altered isotope ratio and compostion since Pd has natural stable isotopes 102, 104,5,6,8 & 110 whereas the only stable isotope of Rh the result of a proton being converted is 103.

If you are claiming neutron capture by the Pd then apart from Pd104 all the resulting products would be radioactive. But there is no reason why the reaction products could not be tested with laser ablation ICMPS to see if there really had been any isotopic alteration in the craters.

Colour me sceptical - there have been too many false dawns on this one.

Indeed SQUIDS and the like work that way.

I recall it was just about possible in the 1980's to detect the change in the half life of metallic U235 and UF6 predicted to be caused by the extreme electron affinity of fluorine.

I'm not claiming anything. I just posted a link to an article in IEEE Spectrum, with the last line of my original post being

"Cynics might suggest that this more likely means that there's a venture capitalist in there somewhere, looking for more funding ... "

I stay sceptical even after somebody has published experimental results in a peer-reviewed journal, and we are long way from that yet.

We were taught about something similar in my undergraduate chemistry lectures in the early 1960 - something like that has been demonstrated more recently with Be-7.

On Thursday, December 13, 2018 at 11:53:31 PM UTC-5, snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrot e:

ere talking about.

Dud, THe subject for this thread is " cold fusion explained "

have to build something that works before they get taken seriously.

e its inner shell intensely radioactive, which is going to discourage peopl e from putting them in stuff that moves around fast enough to break into sm all pieces if it hits anything else.

of risk, in part because their obsession with the big picture distracts th em from the millions of tiny details that have to be get right before you c an make money out of something new.

Lockheed is not looking for Venture Capitalists. Your reference to Ventur e Capitalists is an attempt to distract the readers.

ow-has-a-patent-forem to think more like a venture capitalist than design e ngineer.

ote:

were talking about.

But the post you were responding to was all about the thorium nuclear fissi on reactor, which struck me as a blatant hijacking of the thread.

ey have to build something that works before they get taken seriously.

tent-for

ake its inner shell intensely radioactive, which is going to discourage peo ple from putting them in stuff that moves around fast enough to break into small pieces if it hits anything else.

risk, in part because their obsession with the big picture distracts them f rom the millions of tiny details that have to be get right before you can m ake money out of something new.

re Capitalists is an attempt to distract the readers.

The article is in the IEEE Spectrum, which means that they are looking for publicity. Lockheed-Martin might not be looking for venture capital, but th e publicity suggests they they might be looking to set up some kind of join t venture with somebody else to share the - considerable - risk involved in trying to develop something that might work.

eer.

In as far as he thinks at all.

The probability wave function can flow thru potential walls and splash "over" them; in 2D in position-space representation "particles" look like they behave a lot like a liquid (see animation):

te:

o neutron conversion

of them as forming one ?heavy? proton. The surface electro ns will similarly behave as a ?heavy? electron. Injecting e nergy ? a laser or an ion beam will do ? gives the heavy pr oton and heavy electron enough of a boost to force a tiny number of the ent angled electrons and protons to merge into neutrons."

ou'd need a much more expensive education than I've had to make any sense o f it.

"The probability" isn't quantified. I've got a feeling that it can be, for some situations, and until somebody does, it's just more John Larkinesque h and-waving.

Higher IQ, better university, more money None of those indicate not thinking.

Dan

e:

ngineer.

king.

The fact that he bothers to claim any of them does - in fact - indicate tha t he can't think to any useful purpose.

He doesn't actually know what my IQ is, any more than I do - it has tested out high but I don't trust the results.

He doesn't know how much money I've got, and I'm certainly not going to pub lish any estimate here.

He did go to a university which is now higher in the international ranking table than mine is - now. That doesn't say much about what either of us wer e good for back then - if I'd been a card carrying genius I'd almost certai nly have still gone to Melbourne - and it says rather less about what we ar e good for now.

I've just been reading Robert Plomin's "Blueprint"

and one of the points the author makes is that educational attainment is ab out 80% heritable, but his twin studies and the single nuclear polymorphism s that he has been able to nail down more recently all indicate that the de tectable heritable bit becomes more obvious with age, hitting maximum herit ability around fifty years of age.

So whatever Dan was in his early twenties - which does seem to be the last time he had anything to boast about - isn't a particularly good indicator o f what he is good for now. Based on what he posts here, he's no great adver tisement for his undergraduate education.

The first suggestion was D-T fusion (it has a relatively low threshold) but that makes neutrons, and (Daresbury lab found) there weren't any. Years passed, and now the suggestions are better, BUT... how do you get an event cascade from tunneling? One event, could happen. But a heat burst takes LOTS of eV . At 8 MeV per event, each watt-second requires twenty billion neutron capture events.

And why would there be bursts? Where's the gain/positive feedback? Earth's magnetic field, hurricanes, and lasers are all unlikely-but-real, but how can palladium-hydrogen nucleonics join that list?

Drat, dropped the decimal again; should be 200 trillion.

The Mossbauer effect depends on specific gamma rays exciting a rather narrow resonance of the iron-57 nucleus.

One gamma ray photon of the right energy might distort a nearby nuclei enough to let it also capture a nearby proton and its associated electron. Most of the time it would be re-emitted unchanged ...

The interesting thing about Larsen's proposal is that it involves the palladium nucleus. A deutron could be captured by the same kind of mechanism as a proton plus electron, which would transmute the palladium into silver.

Palladium has a number of several stable isotopes

and it might be worth enriching the palladium with one or other isotope to see if it makes any difference.

None of it makes a lot of sense, but Pons and Fleischmann made some very puzzling observations, and we've spent a long time failing to make sense of them.

Palladium is one of the limited number of nuclei that do exhibit Mossbauer resonances.

talks about the effect of hydrogen loading in a palladium matrix, but doesn't seem to have measured any Mossbauer resonances for any of the palladium isotopes.

does seem to be a fringe publication from the lattice assisted nuclear reaction community. If the claims made - in 2008/2010 - had been true,or a least reproducible, one would have excepted to see real world consequences.

Lewis Larsen wanted to explain it (back in 2006) as a hydrogen atom to neutron conversion, with the energy release coming from the subsequent neutron capture in an adjacent heavy metal nucleus (which would release energy).

Prohibitively expensive to do and unlikely to make much difference. If there was neutron capture then for all but one of the Pd isotopes the the resulting odd mass species would be radioactive. That would be detectable by a geiger counter also there would be some neutron flux.

Trouble is ICPMS or even better TIMS done before and after would allow you to see any modification of the isotopic signatures. If they had done these tests and got a positive result I am sure they would report it!

All claims of nuclear ash from cold fusion have failed this test so far. They use a selective ligand binder in the wet method to remove almost all of the palladium from solution leaving just the trace impurities to analyse (this is a standard trick for all super pure metal analysis).

Laser ICP or SIMS will do it directly to the surface.

It would be expensive. "Prohibitively" is a value judgement, and anybody wi lling to take low energy nuclear fusion seriously has probably got seriousl y impaired judgement. It has been done for uranium (and was very expensive) . Iran has got quite a few gas centrifuges that they might be happy tie up doing something that wasn't enriching uranium.

The local quantum computing crew put down a micron layer of enriched Si-28 - 99.9%. They wanted to exclude Si-29. They didn't make any fuss about the expense involved, though they were more forth-coming about the cost of the He-3 they used to cool the layer and its isolated phosphorus atoms to its working temperature.

"Unlikely to make much difference" is another exercise in judgement. Since we don't seem to have clue what is going on, predictions about what might o r might not make a difference could be seen as premature.

If there was deutron capture - which is what Pons and Fleischmann might hav e seen, even if they were looking for deutron fusion - the resulting even m ass species would mostly be stable. Pd-112 (from Pd-110) has a half life of 21 hours.

tron flux.

Every last unstable odd-mass Palladium isotope that might get created seems to decay by beta emission or electron capture. No neutrons.

Inductively coupled mass spectrometry and thermal ionisation mass spectrome try are extremely powerful techniques, but do require expensive test gear.

I worked on a laser ionisation mass spectrometer once and it was going to s ell for about a quarter of a million UK pounds back in 1991 when we finally got it working. My contribution was discovering that an optical fibre data link was too long to work with plastic fibre and couplers. Swapping in gla ss fibre solved that problem, but cost money.

If you can afford it. Ligands and wet-way chemical analysis are a lot cheap er.

Low energy nuclear fusion hasn't got the kind of credibility that attracts large investments.

Lewis Larsen wanted to explain it (back in 2006) as a hydrogen atom to

Uranium is fairly simple since UF6 is a gas and has only two main isotopes. I think you would have to use a calutron for enriching Pd.

Enriched spikes are made for some analytical tasks but they are insanely expensive and available usually only in mg or 10ug quantities. eg

You can never trust Analar grade Lithium to have natural abundance since the H-bomb people have invariably skimmed some Li6 off it.

But the original hypothesis was that neutrons were being made and captured. If they come into existence at all then some of them will inevitably escape from the material before capture.

Most larger universities have a geology department and will do contract analysis on the side if someone is willing to pay them.

The company I worked for was a world leader in all forms of mass spectroscopy and the first with a laser attachment. Initially NdYAG IR then doubled to the green line and finally quadrupled into the UV. If cost really was no object there was an excimer version too.

OTOH there are plenty of contract analysis labs with the kit that will do such analysis for around $50 per species or thereabouts. Its a while since I looked at what they actually charge their customers.

Someone would also have to pay for method development but with a reputable external laboratory doing the testing it would take some bias out of the equation if they came back with a positive result.

What Larsen seems to have proposed is that a proton plus and electron got c aptured by a palladium nucleus, presumably by a process of quantum mechanci al tunneling. There wouldn't be a free neutron at any point in the process.

A deutron plus and electron could presumably get captured in the same way, and again there wouldn't be any free neutron.

The new - heavier - palladium nucleus would be highly excited and would eve ntually de-excite by emitting gamma radiation. Palladium shows the Mossbaue r effect so that radiation might excite nearby palladium nuclei (of the sam e weight) and the excited states of those nuclei might be sufficiently dist orted to make quantum mechanical tunneling more probable for them.

And if they have that kind of gear, which isn't cheap or ubiquitous.

I got short term work with Cambridge Mass Spectrometry, after they'd been t aken over by Kratos and before they'd finished the move up to Manchester - they'd messed up the timing of the move and needed more people in Cambridge to finish the job than they'd planned. I had thought that Cambridge Mass S pectrometry were the first with laser ionisation, but since Kratos did take them over, Kratos might claim that.

Perhaps because they were looking for the wrong sort of cold fusion.

Big if. If Larsen has the right idea about what's going on, the fusion prod ucts would just be more of the heavier isotopes of palladium, which isn't t he kind of nuclear ash that's easy to identify.