From: Eric Walker … Jones Beene wrote:
BTW Jack – if memory serves, you used iron oxide and potassium in an early experiment which melted the heating wire ... (a special spillover catalyst called “Shell 105”, used by Holmlid, contains iron oxide and potassium) Earlier I asked if any of the replicators had tried potassium or vanadium. The reason I asked this was because 40K and 50V are natural beta emitters. It is possible that UV radiation or electric arcing accelerate the decay of beta emitters… Eric, Perhaps it is more subtle than that. Nickel has the highest propensity of all elements to form beta emitters on isotopic shifts. This is because it is neutron-heavy while still being tightly bound. In a way, one can say that beta decay is nature’s way of rectifying “neutron heaviness” but without emitting neutrons. A tightly bound nucleus does not emit neutrons. In Ni-64, the 6 extra neutrons (over the most abundant isotope Ni-58) make the nucleus of stable Ni-64 more than 10% more massive. This is a singularity of sorts - the largest percentage excess of neutrons by mass in the periodic table for metals. Nevertheless, most of the data of LENR indicate that it is an thermal anomaly which is mostly non-nuclear – no gammas or neutrons -- unless incidental. That is why the results of Holmlid are so alluring.
