At 02:51 PM 10/26/2009, Terry Blanton wrote:
What I fear is that, with the various geometries, electron configurations, confinement pressures, etc., optimized, we might still be looking at a probability of fusion in the population which would never yield a cost-effective replacement for dinosaur fuel.
The goal of replacing fossil fuel by cold fusion is quite premature, it was over-excitement over this possibility that led to the 1989 fiasco. If we don't know what is causing nuclear activity in palladium deuteride or other condensed environments, we have no clue about whether or not it could ever be anything more than a curiosity.
So, what's needed right now is neither proof that there is an effect -- that already exists --, nor is it the engineering of an effect on a practical scale, though obviously that would be desirable. Jed Rothwell has pointed out that venture capitalists want to see proof of something that is *close* to practical before pouring in funding, but rather basic research into the nature of the effect and the conditions that allow it to manifest.
I'm not doing my work to prove that LENR exists, I am doing it for two reasons: first, to make it possible for direct demonstrations to be seen by large numbers of people, with the demonstrations being as dramatic as possible (which doesn't mean "big," necessarily), and second, to start creating a large body of work that has a baseline, a standard experiment, reliably reproducible. Hopefully, in the process, some *symptoms* of the primary reaction will be identified, symptoms that allow rapid determination that the effect is taking place or not, which can then facilitate exploration of the parameter space.
Looking at the Earthtech attempted SPAWAR replication, I see evidence that they didn't get the effect at all, but that they assumed they did, because of some resemblances of the CR-39 damage they found to SPAWAR photographs, especially some of those first released. I now suspect that the "hamburger" sections of those SPAWAR chips may indeed have been due to chemical damage, because Earthtech fairly conclusively established that what they saw was chemical. In this light, then, what SPAWAR found on the back of their chips becomes very important, and, in spite of their most reputably published report in Naturwissenschaften, which was based on maybe 10 triple-tracks per chip, with background being one, they have shown what is almost certainly copious track results showing neutron radiation, detected through proton-knockoff in the chip material itself. And this radiation should be similarly detectable outside the cell, using the easier material, LR-115.
If anyone is already set up and running codeposition or other LENR expriments, and would like to try using LR-115, I can provide small quantities of fresh material at a reasonable price, contact me. You can buy the material directly from France, if anyone wants to buy it in the minimum order, which is 25 9x12 cm sheets of 6 micron red cellulose acetate on 100 microns of clear polyester, I paid about $350, all things considered, for the package delivered to me. I also have some Boron-10 neutron converter screen which will convert thermal and epithermal neutrons to alpha radiation.
