Eric - Yes, this is situation is very puzzling, especially that it went un-noticed in Russia.
One detail worth adding into the mix is that zinc is a Mills catalyst, and one of the few with a lowest value (27.2 eV) Rydberg fit... meaning that it is more accessible at low temperatures than nickel or potassium. In search of other references to 64Zn in the past, lots of the isotope turned up in old report from Tom Passel and Russ George as the largest anomaly in the transmutation products of Pd-D electrodes. Bizarre since in that case, it is a product of the reaction and apparently not a cause -- but the weird thing is that the pathways to get it is absurdly improbable since there was no copper or nickel present... Go figure. It just gets curiouser and curiouser, as Alice might opine... -----Original Message----- From: Eric Walker > However ... it should be noted that there is one other possibility to > consider. Zinc-64 is the most common isotope of zinc, and it is > slightly radioactive ! I like this suggestion a lot. As 64Zn comprises nearly half of natural zinc, it strikes me as more likely there would have been zinc impurity than that there should be a surprisingly high relative fraction of 64Ni. If this is what happened, I'm further surprised that Parkhamov didn't catch something so obvious (with hindsight and/or skill). I'm going to further wager that there was a high degree of measurement uncertainty, obscuring a change that was minor or not at all in this case. Eric
