On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 5:38 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: Never mind. Entirely my mistake. > > I totally forgot to include gammas released during the neutron captures. > These can be significant. >
No worries. I think the neutron capture reactions will result in characteristic radiation that you would be able to detect and trace back to the reactants, assuming the gammas were not halted by some mechanism. I think the lack of expected radiation is the reason for the proposed "heavy electron patches," which are understood to intercept gammas. Many people do not like them; I personally don't mind working with the assumption that gammas are present at some point or in some form, although I don't have a strong opinion about what might happen to them -- e.g., whether they are dealt with in the way that Widom and Larsen describe. I also see the possibility of there being no gammas whatsoever. Having no knowledge or expertise in this area, it's obviously not something on which I would try to assert an opinion. I'm personally starting to take a liking to the proton-proton chain as something to explore in connection with LENR. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton%E2%80%93proton_chain_reaction There are three attractive things about it. First, it is entirely aneutronic. Second, it is not well-understood. To quote the Wikipedia article: "Even so, it was unclear how proton–proton fusion might proceed, because the most obvious product, helium-2 (diproton), is unstable and immediately dissociates back into a pair of protons." Obviously it proceeds; it's just that we don't understand how it proceeds. So there are some basic unknowns about the conditions under which it is possible. A third reason that I like it is that it is an important way that fusion occurs in nature; as such, it embodies an energetically optimal way of dealing with the forces involved. Humans up to now have taken some rather ugly approaches to nuclear energy. We have bombarded heavy, radioactive elements with dangerous neutrons. Or we have used a radioactive isotope of hydrogen in order to make possible a form of fusion that will spit out neutrons. Or we have come up with huge contraptions that inject neutrons into a hot plasma that is being irradiated with microwaves of various frequencies. Perhaps we lack imagination of the right kind -- we're thinking that it's impossible to get the combination of temperature and pressure that would be needed for something like the proton-proton chain, so we resort to complex, Rube Goldberg contraptions. We've been trying to brute force our way into fusion. Eric
