From: Bob Cook
*
* What on earth make Ni-62 a good catalyst?. It would nice to at least
to have a suggested catalytic mechanism… it is a singularity with the highest
binding potential energy per nucleon of any nucleons. That means it’s stable.
Yes, a lot of thought has gone into this mystery. Why should the most stable
isotope in the periodic table be the one which is active for gain in the Rossi
effect? That runs contrary to commons sense about nuclear stability.
Without going back to billions of years to nucleogenesis (in a putative big
bang), here is a partial explanation which is “out of the box” so to speak
(hopefully not Pandora’s box). Think about what makes an isotope not only
stable, but the most stable. Obviously it is a peak in binding energy.
Next, and this is most important - consider that 62Ni is NOT the most abundant
isotope of nickel, far from it. In fact, it is only 3.6% of the natural
abundance. Logic would seem to indicate that if it was the most stable nucleus
in the periodic table, then nickel should be almost all this isotope instead of
only a tiny fraction.
When you consider both of these facts together, it becomes possible to consider
that binding energy itself can reach a peak which is superfluous to long-term
nucleon stability and even counter-productive – in the sense that it is “too
stable.” In short this is saying that binding energy and nucleon stability are
not in a linear and predictable relationship but in a progression which ‘flips’
and becomes negative.
I realize that this is not the answer you are looking for, and everyone wants
to know precisely how “superfluous binding energy” gets translated into thermal
gain. Is it via a reaction with lithium or with hydrogen? I do not pretend to
know that mechanism, but it is clear to me that when we are talking about
roughly 8.8 MeV of binding energy, then it could easily be possible to remove
several hundred keV per nucleus without changing the identity of the isotope.
If nuclear stability maximizes at say 8.5 MeV, then there is a lot of excess to
share.
Answering that question is why LENR needs and deserves funding in the $10
billion per annum range – once the effect is proved beyond doubt. As of now,
there is still a reasonable chance that it is a sophisticated scam.
That is where we are now: awaiting the “proof beyond doubt”… and sadly,
depending on a very unreliable source to provide it. If one is only concerned
with personal enrichment, at the expense of science, then it could take decades
to understand this problem to be resolved.
Jones
