At 04:55 PM 2/8/2010, [email protected] wrote:
In reply to Abd ul-Rahman Lomax's message of Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:44:23 -0500:
Hi,
[snip]
>This was not an MeV/He-4 chart, actually, and it was not, contrary to
>Krivit's assertions, used to "prove" the 24 MeV correlation. What the
>paper was asserting was that there was a correlation between excess
>heat and He-4, and this was merely recent (in 2004) confirmation of it.
[snip]
BTW 24 MeV is not necessarily a sign of DD fusion to He4.
Well, it's not an exclusive sign, let's put it that way. It's
remarkable, though, if that is the actual Q factor. What people like
McKubre have said about the results is that they are "consistent"
with 23.8 MeV, the expectd Q factor for reactions starting with
deuterium and ending with helium....
In that reaction two
D's fuse to create He4, releasing 23.8 MeV, so the energy release is
about 6 MeV
/ nucleon. However that is typical of almost all fusion reactions because the
binding energy of most nuclei is on the order of 6 MeV / nucleon. Hence almost
any fusion reaction involving D will release about 10-12 MeV / D.
I have no quarrel with that. However, what's interesting here is that
we know helium is being produced.
Interesting to see what Huizenga said about Bush and Lagowski's
results back in roughly 1991. He claimed that the there was not
enough helium to explain the energy. But that, of course, would have
assumed that all the helium was being measured, and, as well, that
there were no other reactions. Obviously, Huizenga was indeed paying
attention to further research, but busy inventing reasons why the
results were impossible. He was upset that Bush and Lagowski didn't
look for gamma rays.
As if that mattered. It was already known that there wasn't enough
gamma radiation to be significant, nor enough neutrons, etc. Quite
obviously, the reaction was not straight, ordinary, brute-force hot
fusion, so playing up expected hot fusion signatures was, by this
time, thoroughly obtuse.
Anyway, I saw this in an old Science News article. So I decided to
look in Huizenga's book, Cold Fusion, which was, after all, published
after this.
His "Epilogue," p. 243:
The invited paper by Miles, Bush, et al. made the most spectacular
claim at the conference. It was reported that,
The amount of helium [4He] detected correlated approximately with
the amount of excess heat and was within an order of magnitude of
the theoretical estimate of helium production based upon fusion of
deuterium to form 4He.
This claim has been published elsewhere by Miles, Bush, et al., [J.
Electroanal. Chem. 304 271 (1991); 346 99 (1993)] and I have
commented on it previously ( see pp. 136 and 212). If it were true
that 4He was produced from room-temperature fusion in amounts very
nearly commensurate with excess heat, one of the great puzzles of
cold fusion would have been solved! However, as is the case with so
many cold fusion claims, this one is unsubstantiated and conflicts
with other well-established experimental findings. First, the
failure of Miles, Bush, et al. to detect 3He in their experiments
requires that the branching ratio of 4He/3He from D+D cold fusion be
increased by a facgtor of more than a hundred million compared to
low-energy (>=2 keV) and muon-catalyzed fusion (a type of cold
fusion). Hence, it is highly likely that the 4He is a contaminant
from the atmosphere. In accition, if 4He is produced in the amount
claimed (for earlier claimw of 4He, see Chapter VIII, Part B), it
must be accompanied by large intensities (in fact, lethal
intensities) of the associated 23.8 MeV gamma ray. Only when the
23.8 MeV gamma rays are observed on-line, can one be sure that the
4He is produced by fusion and is not an artifact. Finally, the 23.8
MeV gamma ray transfers essentially all of the D=D -> 4He + gamma
reaction energy outside the cell and destroys the relationship
between the helium production and the excess heat based on the
assumption that all the reaction energy stays inside the cell. More
recently, Miles, Bush et al reported that they can produce neither
excess power nor 4He from their electrolysis experiments (Abstracts
of the Third International Conference, p. 93)
Beautiful, John. Too bad you aren't still cogent enough to understand
what you did. If, indeed, you ever were.
He discounted experimental results on the basis that they did not
match a theory that it was D-D fusion of the kind he was familiar
with. And it wasn't! If there is any 3He produced, or gamma rays,
it's very little. He-4 is produced, and the report that he said must
be artifact didn't claim that it was fusion. It claimed that the
helium was "correlated" with the excess heat, and that it was within
an order of magnitude of what D-D fusion would produce if it formed
4He. And that is not only true, but it's been much more closely
confirmed. And, obviously, if the energy did not escape in the form
of gamma rays, but somehow ended up remaining in the cell, well,
*that's what it does.*
And, of course, just as one possibility, that's exactly what 4D ->
Be-8 -> 2 He4 would do. But the theory doesn't really matter.
That the helium was not artifact is shown by the correlation with
excess heat. He seems to have missed that. If Miles, Bush, et al had
some difficulty getting their cells to become active, later, then it
becomes necessary to explain why their ability to "discover" ambient
helium also suddenly vanished at the same time. Those later
"failures" were, with regard to this result, confirmations. And, of
course, we have much later work confirming this early work, and I'm
not aware of what Huizenga was talking about when he talks about the
work he reported being in conflict with "other well-established
experimental findings," except all he talks about is the results from
ordinary hot or muon-catalyzed D-D fusion. Which doesn't conflict at
all with the helium/heat results, it's fundamentally irrelevant. All
it does is to make a hypothesis (that this particular kind of fusion
is taking place in the cell) rather difficult, eh?
Now, the kicker:
Huizenga cites with approval the comment of Heinz Gerischer at the
Second Annual Conference. (p. 246)
The promary goal in the present situation should be to demonstrate
that fusion reactions occur in metal deuterides. *A convincing
proof would be finding the reaction products which can generate the
excess heat in the corresponding amount* [Huizenga's emphasis]. The
search for T and 4he should be performed in closed cells where no
products can escape. Parallel test runs with normal water are
mandatory for proof.
This is a statement any skeptic can approve.
Of course, a few pages earlier he summarily dismissed the work of
Miles, Bush, et al... doing most of this. I'd assume that by this
time Huizenga knew that Fleischmann and Pons had run controls with
light water and didn't see the "clean" baseline they expected. Did he
know what that really meant? What we know from other work is that
light water produces, with palladium as the metal to be loaded, much
lower heat, in the range where it might be explained by the deuterium
concentration in light water. Or none is detected. What may happen
with other materials isn't relevant. It is entirely possible that
there is more than one "low energy nuclear reaction," indeed, now,
with our wonderful hindsight, it seems very possible, even likely.
Basically, though, the standard for "convincing proof" has been met.
Helium 4 is a "reaction product" the formation of which from
deuterium can generate the excess heat, even if the intermediate
reactions and mechanisms are unknown and unexpected.
Parallel test runs with normal water are now pretty common.
