From: Jojo Jaro
Forgive my simplistic understanding, but based on this hypothesis, all one needs to do is Ionize a bunch of Atomic Hydrogen and set them on a collison course with each other; and each collision should produce an excess energy, correct?? That has never worked for net gain, AFAIK - since it takes too much energy - to first produce atomic hydrogen from molecular, and then to ionize it and at the same time confine it to a space where collisions can happen regularly. Bottom line, no one has been able to reach breakeven in this "brute force" approach going back 40 years. In fact, this is essentially what the Farnsworth Fusor does - and even with deuterium it is far from breakeven, but you can produce a lot of neutrons. Note that George Miley's group made a fair chunk of money selling an advanced Farnsworth reactor to Daimler Aerospace. But - if his reactor ever reached breakeven, that has not been made public; and I doubt that it was anything more than a handy neutron source for the German company. As I see it, for finding net energy gain with Ni-H (no deuterium) - this is where nano surface topology comes into play and where the DCE supplies 'virtual' input energy. DCE is a "dynamical Casimir effect" which will permit atomic hydrogen to oscillate in a cavity, even an open-ended cavity - via a relativistic time distortion effect. Fran Roarty's blog has covered a lot of the background material on this step, and to delve deeper one must dive into "Lattice QCD" and other exotic stuff. This kind of cavity confinement does not amount to complete ionization - in fact there is almost no significant "real power input" . but in a cavity, a significant portion of the "residence time" of spillover hydrogen (atomic hydrogen) will be as a temporarily unbound proton. This is due to time distortion and electron decoupling. Occasionally, protons in adjoining cavities tunnel along the same vector and collide as protons; and the recoil energy is significant. That is your gain. It is QM based, but is robust in comparison to many kinds of rare QM reactions. The gain is in the EUV spectrum, way below gamma. In this hypothesis, there is an absolute necessity for "cavity confinement" of some kind - otherwise supplying the required ionization energy prohibits obtaining net gain. Jones
