See below ... On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 12:23 PM, Stephen A. Lawrence <[email protected]> wrote:
> Ah. Thank you. I didn't realize this is based on Rossi's work, though I > certainly should have, given the way it's set up. > > So, *if* we assume all of Rossi's results were bogus (and I know of no > reason not to assume that), *then* it would be remarkable indeed if this > actually was a real, robust, replicable result, as it would indicate that > Rossi *accidentally* made something up that was real, correct, and new > while faking his experiments. Somewhat as though the word salad generated > by a spam bot accidentally contained some deep philosophical truth which > nobody had thought of before. Not impossible, but certainly surprising. > Personally, I don't have a strong feeling that all of Rossi's work is bogus. I trust Focardi, and Focardi believed Rossi had something, and it was something nuclear from the radiations Focardi himself reported. While the hotCat technology (Ni+LAH) doesn't seem to be terribly vigorous at the temperatures that we can readily work with, it does seem to be LENR. There are certainly ways to work at higher temperature than are being used today. > > "Thermal runaway" might better be described as "Destructive overheating" > as that describes what happened, without specifying a mechanism. "Runaway" > implies we *know* this is a non-standard exothermic reaction of some sort > and that it can take place with great vigor if the temperature exceeds some > threshold; but in fact we don't know that. > > Similarly, the fact that attempts to goose the reactors harder destroyed > them doesn't indicate runaway, it just indicates overheating, and it's > anyone's guess how that happened. When there's a joule heater running > through the thing, and it's turned on during the experiment, and something > overheats, the hot wire is an obvious candidate for the cause. > Well, yes and no. When these reactors fail in the "meltdown" mode, it is not usually from a failure of the heater wire - the only source of electrical input. Instead, they seem to melt from inside the ceramic fuel container, where the only source of heat would be chemical or LENR. There is some small opportunity for a thermite-style oxygen exchange reaction with the silica in some of the mullite tube experiments, but it is unlikely the cause (very hard to ignite and poor mixing of reactants). If the failure was from overheating via the heater wire, the heater would fail by ~1400C from rapid oxidation at the grain boundaries of the wire. Such heater failures are observed, but are not classified as "meltdowns". The "meltdown" failures appear to be at higher temperature still (~1600C) - where the ceramic fails.
