One more thing to add ... wrt the overdue suggestion (Doh, slaps forehead) that Rossi's "secret sauce" is looking like it is deuterium. Thank you, Clean Planet.
The reaction would probably work best if it is started with regular
hydrogen, and then deuterium is added later. This is because the "exchange"
reaction between hydrogen and deuterium itself is so robust. In fact, many
of the early critics of LENR thought that the entire phenomenon could be
related to deuterium exchange. It is that energetic.
As we know, Rossi has this mysterious system - which he calls cat-and-mouse.
He has been intentionally vague on how it functions. Yet in reappraisal,
this system is fully consistent with having two chambers, the main one
containing hydrogen and the nickel reactant - and the smaller one deuterium
(or a mix of H and D). The metering response can be simply by voltage to a
window, since deuterium will diffuse through many proton conductors in
direct proportion to negative charge. Positive charge stops the diffusion,
which is easily controllable by a sensor.
The purpose of the small chamber (mouse) is to meter D into the main chamber
at a controlled rate, to avoid a runaway. If Rossi can be believed, he
suffered several runaways with the HotCat which we can imagine did not have
this kind of metering device.
This seems to fit into everything we know, so long as one ignores Rossi's
own denial of using deuterium. But deuterium is the one thing which, if true
- he would never admit to. That is, if Ni-D is indeed the essence of E-Cat,
in the same way that the change from palladium to nickel could be the
essence of the Mizuno reactor.
Things just keep getting curiouser and curiouser...
_____________________________________________
One interesting detail, in retrospect, about
Yoshino/Mizuno's MIT presentation and the switch to nickel (from palladium)
while keeping deuterium as the active gas may have been overlooked to date.
Apologies- if this slant on the underlying reaction has appeared before.
It is the copper connection. As we know, Focardi and Rossi
believed that the E-Cat is/was transmuting nickel into copper by fusing with
a proton. When one mentions a copper connection, seldom does Mizuno's
amazing new work come to mind. However, all reactions of nickel with a
proton result in a radioactive isotope with a half-life which is long enough
for it to have been seen. This kind of hot isotope is not reported in any
study of the Rossi reactor - but his proponents are hoping that the TIP2
report will find evidence of copper transmutation.
The same kind of signature radioactivity is not true with
deuterium as the active gas. In fact, the solution is so stunning - that we
have to wonder if Rossi may be using deuterium as his "secret" ingredient.
Terry will remember that in the very first image to come from Rossi, there
was a color-coded tank of deuterium in the Lab. Apparently it was not
intended to be noticed. When questioned about this later, Rossi glibly said
the purpose of D was to stop the reaction if it got out of hand !
With this new information... well... you can be the judge of
whether Rossi's excuse was ever true. Notably deuterium in never seen
again...
Nickel 58 is the most abundant isotope of element 28, and as
recently mentioned is "out-of-place" in the periodic table, being lighter
than any stable cobalt isotope, the element to the left. By itself, that
factoid would be unique in that it only happens in one other place in the
entire periodic table, where elements routinely increase in average amu, in
step with z.... But wait there's more than "relative lightness" (putative
receptivity to nucleon addition).
Look at Copper-60 , the expected product of a deuteron
fusing to Ni-58. Cu60 has a short half-life and decays back to Ni60 in
minutes. It could escape detection in any reactor - so long as a reactor was
not opened for a few hours, since all one would see is a nickel isotope
which is expected to be there. The beta decay is fairly strong however.
The biggest problem with this scenario could be conservation
of spin. Ni58 is 0 spin, Cu60 is +2, and D is +1. A beta decay ostensibly
does not solve that problem. But the chance of this being the gainful
reaction in conjunction with nuclear spin-coupling as a predecessor is
otherwise worth looking at ways to get around conservation of spin.
This elegant possibility of a gainful reaction in which
stable nickel converts to stable nickel, giving up energy, is why my
prediction for the Mizuno presentation in November is to suggest that they
will see a relative decrease in Ni58 and a relative increase in Ni60.
The more intriguing idea is that Rossi has been using
deuterium all along in his E-Cat, but the only time the secret almost got
out was in the original demo !
Jones
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