Earlier I had written, but not given the obvious terminology to the following:
AFAIK - no one in LENR has ever tried large amounts (kilograms?) of active matrix material before, even Mills, and a liter volume capacity tube will hold ... perhaps 2 kg of nanopowder. Moreover, the 5 PLC controllers indicate that thermal control is of the highest importance to this device; and a large mass of active material would possibly make it easier to keep the internal heat steady at a threshold, so that only a small amount of differential heating is required, mostly on startup. OK. If it is not obvious yet, the most apt term for this kind of M.O. is "critical mass"! ... and the reason that it was not apparent to me is the low energy context. We only expect to see 'critical mass' in with nuclear fission reactions; and that is because a critical mass supports a chain reaction of neutrons, which is far easier to control by damping a runaway, than it is by adding energy to a subcritical mass. Since there is not radiation or neutron flux, then we easily ignore the possibility that there could be a *chain reaction of another kind* which needs a critical mass or reactants. The more I have thought about this, the more obvious is the cross-connection or the Rossi reactor to a fission reactor. And the easier it is to imagine how, without much of an understanding of what is going on in the physics, he could have simply gotten lucky by 'supersizing' the work of Piantelli/Focardi/Mills). Forget all of the intentional disinformation from the patent application, and the double-talk from Rossi himself. He does NOT want anyone to find this out until he has already given the megawatt demo in a few months, and has reaped the rewards of a the largest IPO in history. Something is happening in this reactor which is the functional equivalent of a chain reaction, and it demands a critical mass of reactive material and a threshold flux of reactive particles. A main conceptual problem, as always with LENR, is: how is the gamma and neutron radiation being suppressed? Jones
