-----Original Message----- From: Horace Heffner > I think you need to read the SPAWAR articles. SPAWAR detected triple tracks deep the CR-39. They show the photos.
Yes, my original post cited both the article and the image of triple tracks- which I am merely hypothesizing comes from something other than what the authors ascribe them to. I have read articles by them going back to the mid nineties where they find a tiny amount of tritium, but AFAIK only recently did they make this dreadfully incorrect leap of faith to include such a rare reaction involving carbon fission. As best I can tell, they are apparently unaware of the low cross-section problem. > Such triple tracks in CR-39 are common when high energy neutrons are present. Nonsense, if you are talking about a small flux of fast neutrons ... or else ... to be diplomatic, let me change that to: can you please provide a citation for this being a "common" occurrence with a very low flux of fast neutrons. As best I can tell from what is available online, only a massively large flux of fast neutrons would leave any detectable triple tracks in adjacent film. This is due to the extremely low cross-section, and the extremely high penetrating power of fast neutrons. A flux of fast neutrons, sufficient to cause even one triple track in a single sub-mm layer of film - would seem to be most undesirable - even deadly. The infamous "Dead Graduate Student Problem" came to exemplify what hot fusion practitioners thought about P&F's original announcement, and yet even so- that was with no suspected tritium being involved (in 1989). If D+D fusion generated heat, so the argument went -- the neutron flux should have killed the Grad Student operating the cell... but later - the rationalization was found that it was full helium fusion, and with very few neutrons, so Grad Students are safe ... ...but fast forward and now we find that the SPAWAR team wants to return to that scenario made even worse via tritium ... and surely D+T fusion should have nailed everyone in the entire SPAWAR lab, if even a few triple tracks were seen. Of course, here we are not talking about excess heat - merely the number of triple tracks observed (about 10 per every three day run it would seem), and then calculating back from cross-section of carbon for fast neutrons to the flux which should have been required to produce them. > It is a logical conclusion on their part that their co-deposition experiment created enough T that DT reactions were detected. Horace, it could be logical that a few thousand DT reactions occurred, since there was a tiny amount of tritium. What is not logical is that any of the fast neutron would be stopped by carbon in a single layer of film. The problem that SPAWAR seems to dodge is statistical. They claim there are only a few thousand tritium atoms, so that even if there is a complete fusion of it all with deuterium, there are way too few fast neutrons; since the probability of any of them being stopped in a single layer of CR-39 by a carbon atom is beyond comprehension in a statistical sense, even in hundreds of years. Plug in your own numbers. No, I have not done so, and am no expert - but (self-appointed) expert in news groups say this claim is impossible. Even the ones who are open minded about LENR will probably opine that the cross-section is way, way too low for 3 triple tracks per day without a huge and deadly flux. One remark claims that the SPAWAR authors appear to be blithely unaware of the cross-section problem. Have you seen where they have addressed it? IOW, the bottom line seems to be that it would require such a high flux of fast neutrons, that there would be extremely dangerous consequences for the experimenters, who seem perfectly healthy. Unless there is something more to the story. What I now surmise is that: 1) They created bona fide LENR reactions, with some tritium 2) they found a number of 'triple tracks' in a ratio of about 1:1000 with the number of tritium atoms available 3) they looked for any possible explanation. 4) they chose a preposterously wrong explanation - pretty much by default, since apparently it was the only one that they could fit into the circumstances of having found tritium and triple tracks together. Jones
