-----Original Message----- From: Jed Rothwell > That was not the cause of the accident. It had nothing to do with the cathode. The accident was caused by a recombiner failure coupled with several other failures of safety devices such as the pressure relief valve and pressure gauge.
No. That is inaccurate. No recombiner could have handled the situation even if it functioned correctly, and at any rate this is not the "cause" of the accident, although it is true that had not other malfunctions occurred in safety systems, the accident might have been non-fatal. The underlying cause according to expert opinion, was recalescence. Old thread on vortex with comments from an expert in metallurgy - Brian Ahern: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg11242.html As I recall - the ~20% silver alloy of palladium was the culprit at SRI, which is the one that has been used to filter hydrogen since the 1800s and the same alloy that was dropped from a certain suppliers catalog shortly thereafter [which does not admit to culpability] ... but it is also the same alloy which was being used in the infamous runaway in SLC, although not the one used by Mizuno. Since Brian was involved in both investigations, and has personal unpublished information on this incident, you should interview him instead of relying on what could be a self-serving report from SRI (which will not open anyway). Needless to say there were legal issues and settlements. As a related explanation to recalescence, there is another strange property of Silver, which many may realize from its use in dentistry (fillings) and in soldering - as a certain amount of Ag will often lower the 'softening' point of an alloy disproportionately, even before it melts - which is another way to say that it turns it into a "hypereutectic". In the case of LENR - this softening could allow almost all stored hydrogen to be immediately expelled, since the structural strength disappears as if it was a liquid - and given that the amount of hydrogen stored in Pd is higher than in liquid hydrogen per volume, that can be quite a large amount of gas to come out, all at once. No recombiner can handle that kind of overload. Jones
