At 12:46 PM 9/20/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Lewis was quite right that the tritium results called for careful examination and questioning. An expert can be certain that tritium is real, and that it is not caused by separation, but an amateur cannot. In fact, I doubt that most amateur cells would even contain the stuff.
My intention is to make standard cells that are simple and cheap, so that lots of them can be made, someone might be able to run hundreds of cells at a time if they want to. Lots of things become possible under those conditions that are much more difficult with only a couple of cells at a time. Other things are hard unless you spend a lot on each cell. I have no idea what category tritium fits into, I haven't researched it.
But I do have an idea for how to nail down the neutron results, improving the neutron counts greatly over the SPAWAR report, I suspect. Before I put any money into it, I'll be getting as much expert opinion as is willing to volunteer itself when asked. It's obvious, actually, it was suggested by an engineer friend when I mentioned what I was getting into. I checked it out and the materials exist and are actually *cheap*.
Neutrons on demand, I suspect, with much higher counts. Better than tritium, perhaps. Hint: the SPAWAR neutron detection technique wasn't a neutron detection technique, it was a charged-particle detection technique that happened to indirectly show a few neutrons. Many more neutrons are generated than are captured by the odd chance collisions inside the CR-39 detector. So ... how to detect those neutrons? Electronic detectors, not good enough. But not the only option!
