On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 11:16 AM, David Roberson <dlrober...@aol.com> wrote:
The concepts they discuss are interesting, but I find it extremely > difficult to believe that neutrons are released freely at low energy. Agreed. Free neutrons are a huge problem if they were occurring. They are indiscriminate and will be captured by many isotopes, including ones that will subsequently decay by way of various decay channels (i.e., free neutrons will create radioactivity where before there was none). This is how neutron activation analysis works. Also, as Ed Storms has pointed out, not all free neutrons will be captured, and hence a good portion of them will thermalize and reflect out of the apparatus, presenting a danger to the researchers. In 25 years of cold fusion research, neutrons, when they've been seen, have been observed at levels many orders of magnitude weaker than can account for the heat. (And always few enough that they haven't presented a danger to researchers or graduate students.) The problem of free neutrons has been one of several issues faced by Widom and Larsen. Engineers like neutrons because they do away with the problem of the Coulomb barrier. (I include myself among the engineers.) If there is something happening with neutrons, an approach that uses tunnelling seems fundamentally more sound, because it will result in daughters that are more stable. Eric
