You have generated an excellent list Eric which includes many reactions that I have been analyzing. The latest demon run that I posted reduced my concerns a bit since it suggested that the barrier energy can be reclaimed after the fusion event has been initiated. This might help explain some interesting possibilities.
First, the lowering of the barrier appears to be possible with screening by negative charges. The same energy must be applied to get into the nucleus as before, but now that energy is temporarily borrowed from the shielding charges. Once fusion has taken place, some of the released energy can repay the loan. After repayment the books tally because the same energy is required in net regardless of the mechanism. The lack of path balance was a problem, but now there is an explanation. My thought experiment also helps to explain why some of the reactions appear endothermic if insufficient energy is released to totally cover the coulomb barrier cost. I am still struggling with this issue and might modify my thinking again in the near future! Dave -----Original Message----- From: Eric Walker <[email protected]> To: vortex-l <[email protected]> Sent: Mon, Sep 3, 2012 10:56 pm Subject: Re: [Vo]:RSH in Electric Fields On Sun, Sep 2, 2012 at 10:01 PM, David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote: It would be ideal if the pseudo neutron can be formed which would then penetrate the nucleus but I am afraid that the energy equations would not balance. If there are two different paths to the same ultimate result, they should release the same net energy. What would be the proposed reactions so that we can look at these? I just did a few calculations, and there are some promising reactions that would take place if we were able to shield the proton and significantly reduce the potential barrier to proton capture in nickel. Apart from the Coulomb repulsion to be overcome, I think the important thing here would be to have an exothermic mass balance at the end. I did a little bit of rooting around, and it seems there are such reactions, even with nickel, which is generally very stable. I consulted the paper by Hadjichristos et al. [1], and they mention seeing evidence of transmutations to the following elements in their nickel gas phase system: Cu, Zn, Co, Fe, K, Ca, Li, Be and B. The masses of some of these elements are in the vicinity of nickel, and it's possible to get to a stable isotope by way of a straightforward reaction. The masses of some of the elements are far smaller, and the pathway from nickel may either be by fission or unlikely. Here are some straightforward reactions: Cu 58Ni + p -> 59Cu + 2.9 MeV (beta+ decay to 59Co) 60Ni + p -> 61Cu + 4.3 MeV 62Ni + p -> 63Cu + 5.6 MeV 64Ni + p -> 65Cu + 6.9 MeV Zn 58Ni + alpha -> 62Zn + 3.396 MeV 58Ni + 6Li -> 62Zn + D + 1.895 MeV Co See beta+ decay, above. Fe 59Ni + p -> 56Fe + 3.8 MeV (59Ni is has a half-life of 76,000 years and exists only in trace amounts) The Fe reaction above requires a trace isotope of nickel, and I was not able to find a path to a stable isotope of iron from a stable isotope of nickel. This further calls into question iron being a significant product of any purported reaction with nickel, although, obviously, the iron must be coming from somewhere; contamination is a possibility, of course. The elements Ca, Li and Be in the list above might result from fission, or alternatively, by being built up somehow. With regard to fission from nickel, I have little sense of whether this would be possible. EXFOR does provide reactions from nickel to these elements, but it does not mention the other end products, so I wasn't able to calculate a mass balance. In these instances I've just listed the reaction as it appears in EXFOR. Ca 28-NI-58(P,X)20-CA-42 Li 28-NI-64(P,X)3-LI-7 Be 28-NI-60(P,X)4-BE-7 28-NI-64(P,X)4-BE-7 EXFOR does not provide information on any kind of reaction from nickel to stable isotopes of boron or potassium, the last two elements in the list from the Hadjichristos paper. So perhaps these elements would need to come about via other pathways. Since the new isotopes that are seen in previous cold fusion experiments are generally stable, my method here has been to omit reactions that proceed from very short-lived isotopes of nickel or that result in short-lived isotopes, so a number of reactions have not been considered. In addition, there were many reactions in which neutrons are a product, but I have not considered these since neutrons are not detected. There is a table at the end of a note by Jacques Dufour [2] which leads me to think that in the case of nickel proton capture reactions there would be no radioisotopes lying around after the reaction to give off gammas; please vet this conclusion, though. The alpha decay reactions that I looked at for nickel proton capture were not energetically favorable. This could potentially explain why helium has not yet been detected in nickel gas phase systems. More generally, this exercise was very interesting to do; I suspect that people's expectations that Coulomb repulsion rules out any kind of proton capture in the systems we're looking at has left us with a lack of knowledge of what would happen under the influence of a large flux of (shielded) protons. A Monte Carlo simulation could be very fruitful here. Note that the lack of correlation between heat and transmutation products is a tentative finding of prior research on palladium systems, specifically. I don't think there's been enough study of the Ni-H systems to draw a similar conclusion. More generally, I wonder how solid the lack of correlation in the palladium case is in this instance; it may be fairly difficult to do this calculation in an experimental setting. I would not be surprised if the helium in palladium systems comes from alpha decay, for example. Eric [1] http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ICCF17/ICCF-17-Hadjichristos-Technical-Characteristics-Paper.pdf [2] http://newenergytimes.com/v2/library/2010/2010Dufour-NuclearSignatures.pdf p.s. I'm not specifically /trying/ to quote sources from NET.
