As a point of historical reference, a cursory search was done wrt the isotope Pd-105 and its relevance to cold fusion, which turns up many hits including a very old and very provocative detail (patent application) – which only now is coming to light via the Biberian disclosure. AFAIK this information never made it to the newsgroups back then.
The information goes all the way back to early 1990 in a German patent application submitted by Hora, Miley and others. This filing was on the way within a few months of the P&F announcement ! This early filing was apparently unpublished for many years and therefore is new to many of us, “Cold fusion device for energy generation - with metal layers forming interfaces “ DE4027784A1 from early 1990 https://patents.google.com/patent/DE4027784A1/en One intriguing detail here is that Hora and Miley most likely already knew that Pd-105 was or could be the active isotope in cold fusion, at least from the text. This could have been merely a strong suspicion - based on the isotope’s cross section for neutrons or its high spin… or on little known government research that the editor of Fusion Technology would have access to (i.e. the American Nuclear Society's journal Fusion Science and Technology which was the premier journal at that time, edited by Miley)… not to mention Hora’s top level credentials. One implication of this change in perspective is that the main fusion reaction of deuterium (D+D) to helium could be rare and possibly a red herring in the big picture, since the main provable reaction from this sample is instead the fusion of deuterium and 105Pd into silver - 107Ag. Many observers including Brian Ahern remain highly critical of the helium “evidence” or lack thereof as in Krivit’s controversial articles. Now, instead of having to deal with a missing 24 MeV gamma, and/or helium at less than natural background – with the evidence of silver turning up, there is only the missing beta decay or a substitute secondary reaction - but actually that is not nearly the problem as the missing gamma. Secondary reactions are not demanded, as is the energetic missing gamma. Bottom line: If this information on the transmutation of palladium into silver from Biberian had been known earlier especially had it been known in 1990, it could have changed things. This causes some suspicion that there are hidden reasons why the German patent application was not published. Jones http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/ICCFabstracts.pdf There is a most interesting paper by Biberian on page 10 which begins with this background info: “In 2001, Stanley Pons gave me a palladium cathode that had produced a lot of excess heat. The electrode was 10cm long and 2mm in diameter. It was pure palladium and was used in an ICARUS 9 calorimeter. The electrode stayed in my drawer for years, until I found a laboratory that could do dynamic SIMS (Secondary Ion Mass Spectroscopy). The equipment was a Cameca 4f machine that can detect masses of elements with high sensitivity.” The curious thing is that active areas of the cathode labeled as “hot spots” contained silver isotopes and furthermore, the silver must have transmuted from palladium over the course of the gainful runs since the cathode was pure palladium before “lots of excess heat” was seen. Most of the transmuted silver was the isotope 107 by a very large margin. The ratio between Ag-107/Ag-109 was close to 10, whereas in natural silver this ratio is 1.06. This could mean with fairly high certainty that the single isotope of palladium, 105Pd (which is over 22 percent of natural palladium) absorbed or fused with deuterons to become 107Ag but without subsequent beta decay. Therefore if we assume for the moment that 105Pd is the active isotope of cold fusion (there are other possible conclusions but let’s start with this one) then several things stand out. First, this is a high spin isotope. Second it has a nuclear magnetic moment. In fact, this isotope is the ONLY palladium isotope to have a nuclear magnetic moment and the only high spin isotope and the Larmor frequency seems to be similar to D. Thus the excess heat and the fusion could have been a product of spin coupling without subsequent beta decay (so no x-ray signature or residual radioactivity would be seen). This is interesting information which - had it come out in 2001 could have made a difference in the way the field matured.
