http://www.lenr-canr.org/ Italian Cold Fusion Experiment 1/24/11 update
Nick Herbert wrote:
On Jan 24, 2011, at 4:50 PM, nick herbert wrote:
I've looked at lenr.org with great interest but as yet with very little enlightenment. Thanks.
About your suggestion that lattice recoil might absorb positron and gamma energies:
When a heavy nucleus emits light particles such as positrons and gammas the recoil of the nucleus absorbs a lot of momentum but not very much energy. It's like a light person pushing off into the water from a heavy diving raft. The Mossbauer effect (if it exists in this situation)
just makes this situation worse. In the M-effect the entire lattice recoils giving the light particle an effectively infinite mass to push against, hence zero loss of energy due to recoil. This is why the energy of Mossbauer photons is so precise--no recoil. So neither nuclear recoil nor lattice recoil can reduce the energy of the positron or gammas.
What we really need, Brian, before spinning our wild theories is more info.
Since the F-M experiment is so robust, ie, producing kilowatts of power not mere
"anomalous heat", several experiments suggest themselves.
The most obvious experiment is to take a very small amount of Nickel, measure the isotope
abundance in a mass spectrometer, run the experiment for as long as it takes to exhaust
the fuel (whatever that fuel might be). And of course measuring the declining power curve.
Then run a second mass spec on the exhausted fuel to discover what isotopes of Nickel were used up and what isotopes of Copper (if any) were created. This experiment would tell us a lot about what might be going on inside the reactor and produce some very solid evidence for the theorists to chew on.
This is an obvious experiment that any idiot could come up with and I would not be surprised if some version of it going on right now in Bologna. I certainly wouldn't invest in this machine until the results of some version of this simple and obvious experiment were carried out with the high precision that modern lab technology now routinely permits for these sorts of measurements.
Nick Herbert
Brian--
I did not realize you had done so much leg work on cold fusion. Thanks for the input. I admit my ignorance in this field.
I recognize your criticism that my analysis is just conventional nuclear physics and that other factors (you mention the lattice) might have to be taken into account. Fair enough.
Are you familiar with any serious analysis of the Focardi-Rossi experiment that uses conventional physics in a new way and that explains the high power output and negligible gamma ray output? My analysis suggests that for every kilowatt of heat produced a kilowatt of gamma rays should also emerge.
What reaction produces the energy? How much energy is produced per event? How is it transferred to the water?
I eagerly await your answers--more sophisticated than mine-- to these important questions. No hydrinos, please.
If you accept my "conventional nuclear physics" estimate of 1.5 MeV per event you get a reaction rate of 5x10^16 events/sec. Comparing this to Avogadro's Number 6.02x10^23 we find that to keep the reactor running for one year (3x10^7 sec) requires only 2.5 moles of nickel.
Since a mole of nickel weighs 60 grams, only 150 grams of nickel would be needed for a year's operation. Nice.
An American nickel weighs exactly 5 grams, so if it were made of pure nickel, it would only take 30 nickel coins
to run this reactor for a year. Fantastic! Coin-operated fusion to power your house for less than 1/2 cent a day.
(You will also need 2.5 grams of hydrogen)
I realize that my "conventional analysis" may be flawed. And am very interested in seeing your "unconventional analysis"
of this very unconventional experiment.
Nick Herbert
On Jan 24, 2011, at 1:38 AM, Brian Josephson wrote:
--On 23 January 2011 15:24:11 -0800 nick herbert wrote:
Thank you Brian for providing information on what
might be the most important discovery of the 21th-century--
the Focardi-Rossi cold-fusion demonstration at University
of Bologna (1/14/11) which produced 12 kW of heat for more than 30
minutes using ordinary hydrogen and Ni as the reactants.
This experiment is important not only because of the large amount
of heat produced but also because it uses hydrogen rather than
deuterium which would make power reactors based on the F-R Effect
much cheaper to run.
However I (Nick Herbert) am very skeptical concerning the results of
this experiment and predict that it will go the way of Pons-Fleishman,
that is, it will never be able to be reproduced by other researchers and may
even be a scam.
Nick,
First of all, in saying that the P-F results have never be reproduced you have yourself been the victim of a scam, organised by those for whom the phenomenon would be inconvenient in various ways. You should look at the library and other items at lenr.org to get the facst, which you will not get from journals such as Nature who censor such research (though there are accredited, less well known journals that have published such research).
The predominant fallacy is to start from the assumption that 'cold fusion' is just a scaled down version of hot fusion so that the same equations may be applied. This ignores the lattice, which may take away the excess energy instead of high energy particles/gamma rays.
My own perspective on this was changed by being given the video 'Fire from Water', which shows scientists who work on this explaining their experiments. It became clear from this that the usual assessment is badly flawed. While in Boston for a conference I took the opportunity to visit the lab of Mitchell Swartz, who had a pretty convincing setup: there are two identical boxes, one with an ordinary resistor and one with his 'phusor', and you compare temperature rises. In this case the phusor's temperature rise was bigger by 30%, not a negligible amount. While the total power was of the order of a watt it continued for the order of days, so that stored or chemical energy could be excluded as an explanation (the amount of active material being very small). I have also visited the lab of Thomas Claytor at LANL, where he uses a glow discharge and finds tritium being produced, the evidence for this including detecting the specific decay with a scintillation counter, and having the correct half-life. Finally there is the famous anomalous (and fortunately not reproducible) event in an expt. by Mizuno, where the metering equipment recorded the rapid rise of the water temperature to near boiling (the resulting explosion left Mizuno deaf for a week. The energy required to heat this amount of water was far greater than could be explained by ordinary means.
I should add that while Pd-D gets the most publicity, Ni-H has been studied also, so it should not be thought that there is something fishy about this. While Rossi's demonstration was far from perfect, it looks fairly convincing assuming it has not been 'fixed'. One hopes that they will do a better and more controlled expt. (e.g. measuring heat produced more directly, and running it longer) before long, to settle doubts that have been raised. The difficulty is that if one plans to develop something for practical use and make money then one cannot publish in the usual way so people can reproduce it -- there a number of people who are doing this. The test will be when (if) people start to use the devices for energy generation.
Brian
PS: I wonder what Hal Puthoff, who I see is on the cc list, thinks of the Rossi expt.?
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From: Paul Zielinski
Date: January 24, 2011 12:37:08 PM PST
To: nick herbert
Subject: Re: Italian Cold Fusion Experiment 1/14/11
OK I guess the otherwise unexplained appearance of copper isotopes in the nickel could be
considered to be the signature of a nuclear reaction. So the situation here is not simple.
I really cannot understand the ferocity of the attacks on Fleischmann and Pons. If it turns out
that they did discover a reproducible anomalous effect that cannot be explained chemically,
then they should be given full credit for the discovery regardless of which theoretical explanation
eventually eventually comes to be accepted by the trade union of physicists.
What is this, scientific Balkanization?
Could it be that members of the trade union of chemists are simply not permitted to make
fundamental discoveries in physics? Even if the discovery is purely empirical in character,
coupled with a declaration that there is no obvious chemical explanation for the phenomenon?
On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 10:33 AM, Paul Zielinski wrote:
Obviously, even if there is no ready theoretical explanation for the anomalous quantity of heat
generated by such devices (given that none of the usual signatures of a nuclear reaction are
present) the empirical fact of anomalous heat generation is in itself significant and, as Nick
says, potentially world changing. That such a process is theoretically unexpected is then
merely a challenge for the theoreticians.
On Jan 24, 2011, at 12:57 PM, Paul Murad wrote:
Paul:
This process is quite interesting. When the original experiment came up, people did their due diligence but expected things to happen right away. They did not recognize that the process may not start from 24 hours to a week.
In an attempt to eliminate unknowns, they used electrodes involving pure Palladium; however, it was the impurities in the Palladium that actually started the reaction. The purer the Palladium, the longer the time required to start the process.
George Miley presented a STAIF paper where he used a laminated anode that consisted of several layers of material. What was intriguing was that the reaction almost started instantaneously. His next part of the experiment was to count neutrons to ensure that it was a nuclear reaction and not something else.
Ufoguy....