Speaking of nonsensical arguments that "grow on you" ... One other thing that does make an internalized photodisintegration sound a little more palatable, assuming that it happened at ~21 MeV and was itself "energy poor" is this regard, is this ... such an internalized photodisintegration would likely produce on the bottom line - not two deuterons, but two ultracold neutrons and two ultracold protons.
The UCN produced would then cause NA in the matrix Pd, with some alpha release. Since there are a few alphas released this way, compared with a larger amount of 3MeV energy from the original 3He fusion; and since no one can trace energy to source except by ratio ... voila ... if it turned out that 8 of these 3He reactions resulted in an average of single alpha from palladium activation, then any observer would think the ~24 MeV had instead come from the near zero probability D+D-> 4He reaction instead of the complex pathway above involving a high branching probability, which itself was missing. There are lots of parties which are AWOL in this scenario, but there is a prediction which can be made ! You heard it first on Vo! The 'falsifiability' would be in a rather large amount of plain H2 (from the cold protons of internalized photodisintegration) ... relative to 4He. Perhaps it should be 4:1 or so. Hmmm... Come to think of it, a surprising number of the SPAWAR tracks are attributed to protons !?! I should add a few more smileys to this half-hearted speculation... but say, where do all those proton tracks come from? -----Original Message----- Collins, Walker, Norbury article There does exist a provocative implication to the expected (but missing) high branching ratio of 50%, which they mention here. IOW the issue is why is so little 3He seen in LENR as well as so few neutrons -IF- this reaction is favored half the time: d + d -> 3He + n (Q = 3.3MeV) Especially when combined with an observed neutron emission rate which is -10e7 times smaller than expected from the reported levels of energy generation. OK, if the neutrons were ultracold due to the circumstance, and in effect stayed localized, then they might conceivably react again in a 3He(n,γ)4He reaction - BUT instead of the γ (gamma) being radiated, in the constrained matrix of LENR we have an immediate internalized photodisintegration of 4He. This makes things reversible but with a significant "free energy" gap, presumably to be made up by ZPE ;-) Ha ... ROTFL However, some 4He would not photodisintegrate, so there should still be a few big gammas, which are not seen - just as with the other scenarios, and consequently this is unlikely but slightly less unlikely than D + D -> 4He (if we stick to standard reaction branching ratios of hot fusion). Anyway - worth a mention on Vo, but no place else ... especially since there is some available data (not from LENR but from hot fusion) for the 3He(n,γ)4He reaction http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRC/v48/i5/p2375_1 Jones
