Ed,
Suppose the Ni in contact with NaH provides a place for the electron released from NaH to go that then gives the energy change the right value. After all, NaH does not have a conduction band and the electron could not find a way out of the local system without a conductor with a conduction band being present. If this is the explanation, any finely divided conductor would work, for example finely divided Pd. This idea would suggest that nanosized Pd in a cold fusion environment is only required to take the released electron away from the actual catalyst, which has not been identified in this case. What do you think about this idea? Well - there is plenty of evidence that finely divided Pd does produce excess heat if there is 'something else', correct? And it certainly looks like trial and error is the best way to find that 'something else', At a minimum, with Arrata it was zirconia and almost no added energy and with others it was some form of carbon etc. even coconut shells ;-) It could be that the main difference between using deuterium with palladium instead of Mills protium with nickel is that in the end one gets helium, and possibly more energy per molecule but possibly less in total due to a reverse economy of scale. At least no one has been able to scale-up any CF reactor like Mills has done. It could be that your glow discharge is simply a brute force way of doing what local field gradients on nanoparticles can do somewhat more elegantly... or else the discharge itself is producing the nanoparticle in situ. It seems that all of these various phenomena have a nexus or a connection with the increased surface-area afforded by the small particulate size, and the high field-gradient which can results from simply the geometry, especially if an exciton puts a nominally free electron in some kind of group orbital - say with the quantum dot. One of the biggest things about the Rowan confirmation is the scale-up to commercial size. Can that be done with palladium as easily ? Jones
