On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 1:38 PM, Bob Higgins <[email protected]> wrote:
Where would the 3He be coming from? 3He is only 7e-12 in the atmosphere. > It might be a daughter of another reaction. Because the tritium is in small (but detectable) amounts, not commensurate with heat (I've even heard that it is not correlated with heat, but am less sure about this), there's more room for explanations that do not quite fit within the constraints of the primary heat-generating process. Another possibility is that tritium arises from neutron capture with deuterium. Again, because there's so little tritium in general, you wouldn't need too many neutrons. I'm having a hard time thinking of a situation in which a charged particle like a proton would lead to tritium, since there's an overabundance of neutrons, unless it's through spallation or ejection of some kind. What do you propose in this connection that would normally be prevented by the Coulomb barrier but in this case is not? Eric
