Bob H---
I agree with you.
I consider the the term "run-away reaction" is accurate when it comes to
nuclear processes.
Bob Cook
From: rj.bob.higg...@gmail.com
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2016 12:53:06 -0600
Subject: Re: [Vo]: English translation of Parkhomov's latest presentation
To: vortex-l@eskimo.com
See below ...
On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 12:23 PM, Stephen A. Lawrence <sa...@pobox.com> wrote:
Ah. Thank you. I didn't realize this is based on Rossi's work,
though I certainly should have, given the way it's set up.
So, if we assume all of Rossi's results were bogus (and I
know of no reason not to assume that), then it would be
remarkable indeed if this actually was a real, robust, replicable
result, as it would indicate that Rossi accidentally made
something up that was real, correct, and new while faking his
experiments. Somewhat as though the word salad generated by a spam
bot accidentally contained some deep philosophical truth which
nobody had thought of before. Not impossible, but certainly
surprising.
Personally, I don't have a strong feeling that all of Rossi's work is bogus. I
trust Focardi, and Focardi believed Rossi had something, and it was something
nuclear from the radiations Focardi himself reported. While the hotCat
technology (Ni+LAH) doesn't seem to be terribly vigorous at the temperatures
that we can readily work with, it does seem to be LENR. There are certainly
ways to work at higher temperature than are being used today.
"Thermal runaway" might better be described as "Destructive
overheating" as that describes what happened, without specifying a
mechanism. "Runaway" implies we know this is a non-standard
exothermic reaction of some sort and that it can take place with
great vigor if the temperature exceeds some threshold; but in fact
we don't know that.
Similarly, the fact that attempts to goose the reactors harder
destroyed them doesn't indicate runaway, it just indicates
overheating, and it's anyone's guess how that happened. When
there's a joule heater running through the thing, and it's turned on
during the experiment, and something overheats, the hot wire is an
obvious candidate for the cause.
Well, yes and no. When these reactors fail in the "meltdown" mode, it is not
usually from a failure of the heater wire - the only source of electrical
input. Instead, they seem to melt from inside the ceramic fuel container,
where the only source of heat would be chemical or LENR. There is some small
opportunity for a thermite-style oxygen exchange reaction with the silica in
some of the mullite tube experiments, but it is unlikely the cause (very hard
to ignite and poor mixing of reactants). If the failure was from overheating
via the heater wire, the heater would fail by ~1400C from rapid oxidation at
the grain boundaries of the wire. Such heater failures are observed, but are
not classified as "meltdowns". The "meltdown" failures appear to be at higher
temperature still (~1600C) - where the ceramic fails.
