Historical note:
CETI has been mentioned - and their plastic beads. Everyone assumed the
beads were inactive and merely provide a neutral substrate. But were they?
Patterson used ordinary water instead of the usual heavy water and
palladium-coated plastic beads as a cathode. Not sure Patterson ever
divulged which plastic was used.
When Merriman's group "debunked" Patterson - they produced their own
beads by plating palladium on 1 mm glass cores, instead of plastic.
The procedures used by Merriman are described in great detail and are
pretty much identical to Patterson - except for the substitution of the
glass beads for plastic beads. Glass is certainly inert.
Merriman measured no excess heat production.
Thus, if we take Merriman's experiment at face value, then we must
conclude either that the CETI claims of energy production by cold fusion
from ordinary water have no validity ... oops ... or that the "active"
ingredient was the plastic beads (instead of glass) interfacing with
palladium !!!
If the hydrino was the active modality - and O++ was the catalyst, and
it was "borrowed" from the underlying plastic somehow - then the
combination of palladium coated plastic - as is found in SPAWAR cells
reinforces this same notion - that in fact a complex set of reactions
can be built upon the shrinkage of hydrogen/deuterium to form a
subthermal quasi-neutron of dineutron.
... or not. But it is a fascinating possibility (although admittedly of
remote likelihood).
Jones
To combine the contributions of Mills, Swartz, Widom and Larson (MSWL)
there is an emergent hypothesis coming out of all of this: which does
fulfill the goal of explaining the bulk of LENR reactions in which
Helium or tritium is not found commensurate with the energy produced.
Unlike the far reaching and false claim of W/L, this theory will not
attempt to explain D+D --> He or D+D (T,p) etc.
--BUT--
...having this theory in place, along with the availability of a
strongly exothermic reaction in any compound system, can and does
provide an explanation for the energy input necessary for those more
demanding reactions to proceed.
ERGO - The MSWL hypothesis is not fusion nor fission, but weak
exothermic interaction, involving quasi-neutron formation, and
subsequent beta decay — strongly dependent on Mills' "below ground
state" electron orbital shrinkage; and using using the O++ catalytic
hole either from water or preferably from a double bound species.
Furthermore: In any electrolytic system, the energy of this non-fusion
exotherm, or alternatively - the QM statistical enhancement of the local
environment - may lead to real fusion or real fission reactions, which
are dependent on higher levels of energy input than are otherwise
available from the electrical input.
Ockham be damned!
Jones
In the light water SPAWAR cell, presumably the interaction of
monatomic hydrogen (which has been split-off via the deposited Pd)
when it occurs with the O++ ion (from the polymer) would then result
in a "faux n" (false-neutron) which is to say a subthermal highly
shrunken hydrogen atom which is closer to a neutron in size and
physical properties than it is to hydrogen and which entity has
already given up (in the form of UV photons) much of its original
mass-energy.
This is probably a testable hypothesis!
All SPAWARS needs to do to confirm this is to mount a UV photocell in
the electrolysis cell itself and in close proximity to the film.
They can probably even borrow the appropriate UV photomultiplier from
NIST, which has them available (or had) on a lease program. They
should be getting high levels of EUV, if this hypothesis is correct.
Jones
