At 01:43 AM 12/27/2011, [email protected] wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> I'll comment on it: he went on to say, but it isn't fusion.
>
> That's apparently because he's swallowed, lock, stock, and sinker,
> Widom-Larsen theory, and isolated, idiosyncratic attempt to "explain"
> LENR by coming up with even more preposterous hypotheses, none of
> which have been tested and shown to be of predictive value.
Abd,
If you reject W-L theory, what would you regard as the most reasonable
explanation for all of the transmutations reported? Is there a particular
paper that you could recommend. I'm too overwhelmed by the complexity of
solid state reactions to take any side in the controversy.
Transmutations are not observed with any clean correlation with
excess heat. Some experiments produce more, some less. Levels of
transmuted products other than helium are produced at far lower
levels than helium, many orders of magnitude lower.
Thus I ascribe transmuations to rare branches or side-reactions. Note
that if fusion is actually taking place, it would only take a little
"leakage" of the reaction energies to produce transmutations. As one
example, suppose that Takahashi's TSC forms in the middle of a
palladium lattice cell. When it collapses, it's a very small
Bose-Einstein Condensate. It's conceivable that such a beastie could
fuse with a nucleus, producing a +4 Z transmuted element.
Suppose that 4D doesn't happen, but 6D does. This would produce +6 Z
nuclei, just what Iwamura has reported.
But this is all highly speculative. Bottom line, the main reaction in
the FPHE is relatively simple. The apparent fuel, we can guess -- we
cannot measure this, the amount consumed is way too low -- is
deuterium. The energy and helium correlate roughly as expected, and
no other products are produced detectably, except at levels way below
the helium. Some of those other transmutation products can be
detected, such as tritium, and there are many, many reports, enough
that we can say that the FPHE does *sometimes* product a tiny amount
of tritium.
McKubre points out in his recent video -- I highly recommend it --
that the DoE doesn't believe that this stuff works, because if they
did believe it, they'd be all over him for producing tritium at SRI.
I think you need a license for that! (and probably quantity doesn't matter).
In any case, sometimes tritium, sometimes higher-Z transmutation
products, but *always* helium.
