I can say this with absolute conviction:
There is NO single mechanism for CF, or any other form of LENR !!
Ockham be damned!
There are various known reactions, and possibly a few unknown, which
could be going on, depending on very small and seemingly insignificant
details, and depending on who is doing the experiment... one could see:
1)Helium commensurate with the excess heat (Storms, and others)
indicating D+D --> He
2)Helium commensurate with the excess heat, but indicating Pd(n,alpha)
with transmutation product Ag, Cd, Rh etc,
3) Helium - but incidental to the excess heat.
4) Tritium - but no or little helium (Claytor, etc,)
5) Transmutation products which do not involve Pd indicating multiple
alpha shifts
6) Deuterium production from light water - Mitchell Swartz.
Of all the experimenters Mitchell Swartz has seen the most varied
results, including (if I am not mistaken) 3He which is rarity.
It blows my mind that anyone could possibly opine that there was a
single underlying rationale for all the various experiments.
Hey Steve, call of write Mitchell. Contrast that with Ed Storms and Claytor.
Dr Swartz has done meta-analysis of a wide range of results - and he
actually came up with the deuteron theory a decade ago- the one which is
now being credited to Widom.
Could be an interest exchange at MIT for the August 2007 Cold Fusion
Colloquium on "Lattice-Assisted Nuclear Reactions (LANR) The Science and
Technology of Deuterated Metals" especially if Widom shows up.
Steven Krivit wrote:
Someone (who wishes to be anon) wrote the following to me recently. I'm
interested in the thoughts and comments in response to it from Vortexians:
-Steve
The ERAB council "proved" that cold fusion isn't DD fusion. The point
is, "So what?", there are a zillion nuclear reaction paths that are
exothermic, other than DD (well, there are a large number and
basically every path that takes a neutron from a deuteron and gives it
to any other atom is exothermic...including by the way, if it goes to
a heavy nucleus above iron, that is also exothermic, something many
people don't realize given that we are told that fusion above iron is
endothermic...iron plus iron is endothermic, but iron plus a neutron
is exothermic in the Fe (d,p) Fe +1 reaction path. I have had nuclear
fusion scientists be confused by this one until they thought about it
for a while.
So, proving that cold fusion wasn't DD fusion was a trivial and silly
accomplishment. It absolutely didn't prove that cold fusion wasn't
nuclear. And, IMO, cold fusion is neither cold nor low energy...it is
some sort of blazing hot high energy nuclear reaction path just like
every other nuclear reaction.
