Michel Jullian wrote:
> Then how about letting a not-so-impermeable (e.g. sealed plastic) > closed PF cell, with recombiner inside, run in ambient air for a > sufficiently long duration for helium to build up to an indisputable > *above ambient* concentration? Jed says this has never been done. > If the cell is not impermeable, the helium will not build up. It will escape. We are talking microscopic amounts of helium. If you ran a cold fusion car for a year the engine would produce ~1 g of helium. > A single current source could drive hundreds of identical test cells > at a time (in series arrangement) for weeks or even months. Finding > helium above ambient in only a single cell among those hundreds would > be an indisputable proof of LENRs wouldn't it? > No. Skeptics would come up with reasons to disbelieve it, such as helium already in the cell materials. Also, setting up an array of hundreds of cells can be difficult, and running an array for months would be a nightmare, I think. Toyota used to run 64 at at time, which wasn't easy. They had millions of dollars in equipment to do that. They were not trying to sample the helium. That would cost millions more. > Such an experiment, where only helium would be looked for, would be > IMHO several orders of magnitude cheaper, faster, and, importantly, > *more sensitive* than doing calorimetry and input energy measurement > on the same number of cells. It would be far expensive and difficult! Frankly, I think it would be impossible. Imagine trying to sample helium from hundreds of cells, keeping them all separate. The SwagLok connections alone would cost a fortune and would be a nightmare of complexity and work. I think it would be impossible to make the array leak-proof, so any helium that showed up would be leaking in from the atmosphere, and it would never go much above atmosphere even if the stuff was being produced because -- as I said -- it would be leaking out. Doing a helium study with even one cell is difficult and the experiment often fails. Even if it worked it would be far less convincing than the cells at Energetics Technology that produce 20 W out with 0.8 W in. Only a fool would doubt that is a nuclear effect, and we will never convince the fools with anything less than commercial devices. Helium that is not correlated with heat means nothing, so you would have to separately track the heat production from each cell. Bockris once ran arrays of 100 cells looking for tritium. That is far easier to detect, and easier to contain than helium, and he was not trying to monitor heat. I think about 1/3rd of the cells produced tritium, in varying amounts. This plan is highly impractical. - Jed
