Jed Rothwell wrote:
See:
Iyengar, P.K. and M. Srinivasan. /Overview of BARC Studies in Cold
Fusion/. in /The First Annual Conference on Cold Fusion/. 1990.
University of Utah Research Park, Salt Lake City, Utah: National Cold
Fusion Institute.
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/IyengarPKoverviewof.pdf
This is important because it shows how much dynamic, promising research
was going on in India from 1989 to the mid-90s. Unfortunately, nothing
is happening there now, as far as I know. I have heard that after
Iyengar and the others retired, the enemies of cold fusion moved in and
took steps to prevent any more research.
I did a lot of work to prepare this paper, so you folks better read it!
OK, OK! I'm reading it! :-)
I just started looking at it -- got through the first few pages -- and a
couple of things stood out that I don't understand. It's going to take
a while before I get through the rest of it so I thought I'd ask about
this now rather than digging through the theory section first.
First, they apparently were seeing neutrons and tritium _right_ _away_
in active cells, as the Pd was being loaded. This is in stark contrast
to excess heat, which only appears after the Pd is fully loaded. Did I
misunderstand this? It seems weird. Does anyone have a theory that
explains why the tritium and neutrons might be produced sooner than the
first excess heat bursts?
Second, it took a while for it to sink in, but they kept talking about
"anomalously low neutron counts" -- tritium was found, with just one
neutron being emitted per ~ 10^7 tritium atoms produced. I don't
understand this. They were using pure D20, so H+D->T is not a candidate
reaction; in fact, it would appear that D+D->T+n is the only path that
seems likely to produce tritium. But then, where did the neutrons go?
Is it possible that something was fusing with the Pd itself?
I am depressingly ignorant of the theories that have been put forth to
explain CF (aside from a general impression that there are an awful lot
of them), but none the less this seems puzzling. Is there any generally
accepted ;-) "speculation", at least, that anyone on the list is aware
of, for how this could happen?
- Jed
