Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
[ ... ]
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?
Overlooked something.
They saw total counts of about 10^7 tritium atoms produced per neutron
produced for an experiment with a _titanium_ electrode, as well as the
experiments with Pd or Pd/Ag electrodes.
Since the ratio of tritium produced to neutrons produced is about the
same for the two electrode types, one would tend to conclude the cause
of the effect can't very well be a reaction in which the Pd is an active
participant. At any rate, if that were the case, I'd expect the results
to look totally different when titanium is substituted for palladium,
and they don't.
NB -- Unless I misunderstood something, the "total counts" were just
that: as I understand it, they calibrated the neutron detectors before
the runs, and then they extrapolated from the neutron detector area and
sensitivity to estimate the total number of neutrons produced by the
cell during the run. Obviously that's an error-prone process but one
would not expect the result to be off by a factor of 10^7. Tritium
counts were apparently done by sampling the electrolyte, which should be
pretty accurate, or should err on the low side if some tritium ended up
stuck in the electrodes or got out the top of the cell -- and that would
just make the actual T/n ratio worse.
