In reply to Jones Beene's message of Fri, 4 Dec 2015 07:09:37 -0800: Hi, [snip] >Answer: if deuterium experiences accelerated beta decay (the first miracle) >then a modest amount of excess energy and no high energy radiation are >expected. No other single miracle reaction of deuterium has yet been >proposed to meet this criterion, since the excess energy is generally way too >large to hide with any alternative explanation such as fusion or spallation.
Deuterium does not undergo decay at all, accelerated or not. It is a stable isotope. *Free* neutrons decay, neutrons bound in stable isotopes do not. The most likely reason for this is that they have already lost more energy when forming the stable isotope than they would lose by decaying, in short they are in an energy well, so one would have to add energy to get them back to the point where they could decay. Specifically in the case of Deuterium, one would first have to add 2.2 MeV to produce a separate proton and neutron, before one could get .8 MeV from the neutron decay. This implies a loss of 1.4 MeV rather than a gain of 233 keV. The problem with your line of reasoning is your miracle i.e. the basic assumption that the mass/energy of bound neutron is the same as the mass/energy of a free neutron. This is clearly not the case, given the value of the binding energy per nucleon. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
