Many years ago in the early days of cold fusion I was running an experiment at Los Alamos. We had a high quality Germanium gamma detector and a neutron detector. The neutron detector was old but good though it printed it's data counts onto a paper tape. It had been calibrated in another lab down the hall from the lab I was working in. We wheeled it into my lab and placed it near ( 2 meters away) my deuterium palladium fueled sonofusion experiment which was known to produce prodigious amounts of 4He, (prodigious = e16 atoms in machines sensitive to e9 atoms.)
No one had paid much attention to the neutron detector and its big box of spirals of paper tape that had the counts recorded. In a lull in work on the sono-fusion machine I paused to look at the paper tape counts. They were very simple having just a time code and a counts per minute recorded on each line. Every minute the machine would type out a new line of data. As I peered at the tape I noticed that the count rate had gone up suddenly by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Yikes I thought and with the other guys in the lab we stepped outside of that lab and down the hall just to put some distance between us and the experiment while we talked it over. We phoned the labs top neutron guy whose counter we were using and I told him what was happening. His immediate response was 'get out of that lab', I told him we were already calling from a phone down the hall. He came over immediately and once having briefed him he and I ran quickly back into the lab so I could show him the counts on the tape and back out again. Well he said that's a lot of additional counts but not so high as to be terribly dangerous. We should think about it a bit. He then walked to the door of the lab and peered in. Ah Hah he exclaimed I see the culprit. In the cornor of the lab, 15 feet from the detector, was a very massive block of lead that was used to encase the Germanium detector when it was in use. It was sitting on a wheeled cart. "That hunk of lead is catching cosmic rays and kicking out neutrons", he said. "Let's get it out of the lab and see what happens." Sure enough we wheeled the lead out of the room and that was that the count rate in the neutron detector went right back down to normal background. When we looked carefully at the paper tape and time codes we could see the count rate had gone up when we moved the detector from its home lab to our 'lead heavy' lab. No one had looked at it until I had done so and there was no mark as to the switch of labs. We were all well acquainted with looking for radiation from many cold fusion experiments and had not seen any up to that time. Moral of the story is radiation measurements are so wonderfully sensitive one can be fooled by what appears to be large signals but which are really such tiny signals many simple explanations can explain them away. -----Original Message----- From: H LV [mailto:hveeder...@gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, February 28, 2016 5:29 PM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: Re: [Vo]:Bremsstrahlung radiation On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 6:44 PM, Jones Beene <jone...@pacbell.net> wrote: > -----Original Message----- > From: H LV > >> In the Lugano test dosimeters were used to check for gamma/xray emissions at >> more than 50 cm from the reactor... over the 32 day duration test it looks >> like the dosimeters didn't record anything above background... If the MFMP >> reactor resembles the Lugano reactor why didn't the dosimeters register any >> radiation? > > > I may sound like a broken record on this but it is fairly obvious: remove the > lead bricks - the "apparent" radiation goes away. No lead at Lugano. > > The operative difference was the bricks. The lead captures muons which are > documented by the adjoining scintillator as gamma radiation. Some of the > muons are cosmic but some can be produced in the Holmlid effect. > > This can be easily tested next time around: remove the lead - the apparent > radiation goes away. In a thesis which was referenced earlier on the known > muon interaction with lead: > If it is do due cosmic rays then it is quite a coincident that it happens just when the reactor enters phase 7. Also if it is due to muons then it supports some of Holmlid research. Nobody loses here. Harry > "overall the study has demonstrated that effects such as neutron > production in Pb shielding from muon interaction is an important effect in > sensitive GRS experiments as the secondary/tertiary neutrons produced may > interact with target nuclei to produce γ-ray events which could not be > accounted for otherwise" > > https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OzhUEPLFX44J:htt > ps://researchbank.rmit.edu.au/eserv/rmit:161164/Turnbull.pdf+&cd=11&hl > =en&ct=clnk&gl=us#87 > > >
