Jones Beene wrote:
Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
Second, I keep choking on the fact that this is light water on a
tungsten electrode. It runs head on into Ed Storms's observation that
light water reactions produce transmutation products (which Mizuno has
seen) but little excess heat. Why is Mizuno seeing so much excess heat,
using light water? What reaction path could be taking place in his
cells that very few others can evoke?
One possibility. Anytime there is electrolysis w/o radiation, there is
always the possibility that the experiment has stumbled on a regime
where electrolysis itself is catalytically OU (utilizing the Casimir
force, for instance, or the hydrino reaction) and the excess heat seen
is chemical - being the recombination of excess H and O... but this is
less likely in an open cell, where there is no forced recombination.
I'd have to double check the numbers, but some of his experiments are so
far over unity that I don't think you could account for it that way. In
any case he doesn't recombine the O and H but rather lets it go and
accounts for it in the energy balance computation. These experiments
are pretty violent; there's no way he could use a sealed cell.
I find it really frustrating that the Little experiments ended on such a
vague note. After reading the summaries on Vortex I had the impression
that Little had just totally bolixed it so it was no surprise that it
didn't work. But when I read the account on the EarthTech website, that
didn't seem to be the case at all -- contrary to the mistaken impression
I had formed, Little never used an opaque cell for the incandescent W
experiments (his initial calorimeter had a sight hole, and later he
dispensed with the calorimeter entirely to try to fully duplicate
Mizuno's setup), he never used anything but platinum for the anode, he
always let the run go for a reasonable time (I didn't see any sign of
3.5 minute runs in his descriptions, which I thought I had seen
mentioned here), he used some cathodes from Mizuno's lab, some of
Little's cathodes were tested by Mizuno and found to produce excess
energy so the cathode wasn't the problem anyway, and none the less, the
experiments didn't work. He did something like 15 or 20 runs all
together, and they all showed energy-out == energy-in within a few
percent, save for one which showed a loss (not gain!) of something like
7%. Hands-on observation by either Little of Mizuno or Mizuno of Little
could have settled the issue, one would think, but that kind of thing
isn't easy or cheap to arrange even if both parties want to do it and
I'm not at all sure they did.
By the way, Little also blew up two or three cells in the course of
tracking down the identity of the "excess gas", as a result of
flash-back from an external recombiner to the headspace of the cell.
But the calorimeter contained the explosions and nobody got hurt; it
just messed up the innards of the cell. Later, with a flame arrester in
place to protect the cell, he had any number of explosions inside the
recombiner, which apparently did no damage. The contrast with Mizuno's
explosion is striking -- it makes one wonder if that really was just an
ordinary hydrogen/oxygen explosion, or if there was something more going on.
Transmutation products would indicate that some level of nuclear
reaction occurs, but these are usually such tiny amounts that they could
be indicative of a secondary reaction, which is not the real source of
excess heat, and could even be the endothermic product of a QM tunneling
'balance sheet' or due to the end product of hydrogen 'shrinkage' if
that is occurring.
Mizuno's biggest problem, in my opinion, is having about 3-4 really good
(either ongoing or incomplete) experiments - as in the current
literature on LENR/CANR - like the cryogenic-neutron exp. especially -
and yet not having the staff or resources to start eliminating some of
the alternative ways in which excess energy, or in the case of the
cryogenic D2 - neutrons - could be showing up... or even calculating the
energy profile and mass of the transmutation products. In a perfect
world, this guy would have a staff of dozens plodding away in an
Edisonian approach.
Indeed! He does an awful lot with awfully little.
It's easy to throw peanut shells from up here in the peanut gallery but
the most I've ever done with electrochemistry is copper-plate a nickel,
and it didn't turn out very well, at that.
In a war-free USA, imagine what could have been done with some of that
whopping one trillion dollar cost of the Iraq war ...
Yes, and maybe our next Thomas Edison was one of the 2000+ who didn't
come back.
