Google Web Alert for: LENR
http://www. <http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Kirkinskiicalculatio.pdf> lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Kirkinskiicalculatio.pdf. For some reason this article showed up on the google alert service. The gist of it is that LENR is to be expected in a phase of iron - in the earth's mantle for instance, and this could be a previously unrecognized source of heat for the molten core or earth. Of course, LENR in nickel has been claimed for almost twenty years, but if LENR could be engineered to happen in iron - especially molten iron - that is rather significant news. In fact - in one version of iron refining - hydrogen is (was) pumped into molten iron to remove the last bit of oxidation. Not sure if this process is still in use, due to the expense. It could be possible that small changes to that refining process, such a special alloy to get the correct geometry - and placing it all under pressure - this would bring about a way to convert the heat of LENR rather efficiently on a large scale into steam ? Crystallinity, as we know, refers to structural order in a solid. In a crystal, the atoms are arranged in precise gridlike manner but if you go down to the scale of atoms, there is a constant flux, even in a solid. In a gas everything is usually random. However a few gases have structural order, and in fact water vapor can have significant ordering. In a liquid, there is still a degree of structural order, especially when pressurized ! The degree of crystallinity would have a large influence LENR, and it would be reduced but not absent in molten iron. Who cares ? if you can provide 50 tons of iron alloy cheaply, but the crystallinity is reduced by 99% - there is still going to be a thousand pounds of active sites for deuterium being pumped through the alloy ! BTW - palladium is up to ~500/oz, even in a slow economy, so the enticement of molten iron as an alternative is obvious - and best of all - the active site is instantly "self-healing". All of this assumes that Kirkinskii is correct. To be honest, I doubt that he is correct. Conclusion of the Kirkinskii article: Thus, the results of the numerical modeling unambiguously show the principal possibility of nuclear synthesis of helium isotopes from natural hydrogen in the crystalline structures of Fe under Earth's conditions. It is known that iron is the major component of the Earth's core, and native iron is found in some basalts as well. If this iron contains hydrogen admixture, the nuclear reactions could be the additional source of thermal energy in the Earth, whose significance must be estimated further.
