At 03:38 PM 9/24/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote:
I wrote:
I think there is evidence that cold fusion can increase the reaction
rate of some conventional reactions.
See Reifenschweiler.
Well, no. That isn't "cold fusion." It's LENR. That is, there are
nuclear reactions that are known where the chemical environment
affects the rate of nuclear reactions. There are quite a number of
these known. Your favorite author, Jed, pointed this out, way back.
The idea that nuclear reactions cannot be affected by the chemical
environment is just another of those bogus arguments that were based
on shallow thinking.
The accepted examples involve beta capture, as far as I know, or some
nuclear interaction with the electronic shells. It's not necessarily
relevant to cold fusion, which operates in a different way.
I'm not sure that the Reifenschweiler effect has been accepted, so if
you are looking for evidence to use in a discussion, I wouldn't pick that one.
In A Dialogue on Chemically Induced Nuclear Effects (American Nuclear
Society, 1995), Nate Hoffman sets up this dialog between the Young
Scientist (YS -- and we see many of these in internet fora) and the
Old Metallurgist (OM, and this may represent Hoffman himself, to some
degree. He was, after all, an Old Metallurgist).
YS: I haven't been following this anomalous nuclear effects work,
but there seems to be an implication that nuclear behavior can be
affected by the chemical surroundings of the nucleus.
OM: Exactly so.
YS: But that violates physics! We have known for years that
radioactivity is completely independent of chemical state. The
reason for this is that chemical bonds are many orders of magnitude
less than the keV and MeV energies of nuclear phenomena!
OM: Are you familiar with the half-life of 7Be? The form of the
decay of the nucleus for this isotope is electron capture. When this
isotope is flying through space fully ionized, the isotope has
infinite half-life. When the 7Be+4 ion hits and is absorbed on the
surface of a satellite or meteor, the availability of the electrons
changes the 7Be chemical state. This new chemical state now has a
quite finite half-life. Does this reality violate your physics?
Hoffman goes on to more thoroughly deconstruct the YS's ignorance and
assumptions about what is possible, in a number of ways.
The half-life of normal 7Be is 53 days.
Hoffman was, I think, the first book I read when I started to study
cold fusion. Hoffman was a true skeptic, not a pseudoskeptic, and he
educated me in that approach. His book does not reach to the most
important work that really did nail it, Mile's finding about
heat/helium, he only addresses the earlier helium work, which was far
less conclusive. Hoffman ends the book treating cold fusion reports
as an enigma, something not resolved, but definitely of interest.
Hoffman focused, in the book, almost entirely on the "nuclear
evidence," i.e., neutrons and the like. This includes helium. As to
tritium, he *reports* a skeptical argument about possible tritium
contamination of heavy water, but actually rejects that argument.
Hoffman does not examine the calorimetry that was the true basis for
the claims of Pons and Fleischmann, except for a brief examination of
possible artifacts in one chapter, which he closes with: "In general,
these heat measurements are being done by very knowledgeable
experimenters who know how to avoid artifacts."
Miles published his findings before Hoffman came out, but the book
may have been in the editing and publishing process. Had Hoffman
considered Miles, the book might have ended differently, although, to
echo Huizenga -- who did recognize the importance of Miles --, Miles
had not yet been confirmed.
Hoffman actually says, about helium (p. 131):
Experiments have indicated that 4He may be generated and that
tritium has been produced, but neither of these ash products has
been linked with measured heat production.
And he examines other nuclear products, noting the same thing. This
is, for him, a huge mystery. Miles, of course, studied exactly what
Hoffman saw as missing. Helium has not only been linked to heat
production, but at levels experimentally consistent with the known
ratio for deuterium fusion. It *has* been confirmed, most notably by
McKubre et al.
Hoffman gives a clear picture of what an open-minded *and* skeptical
scientist in 1994 or so thought about cold fusion, having become
informed (as retained, I think, by the Electric Power Research
Institute, which also supported McKubre's work). He deftly skewers
the knee-jerk "impossible" arguments. He was willing to look, and saw
that continuing to look was important.
If the physics establishment had taken this position, it would have
all been over before 2000, and we might have a workable theory by
now. Instead, we have this very odd situation where it's over in the
journals -- the strong skeptical position is dead there -- but alive
among many physicists, and, I've found, physics graduate students.
They can be fierce in defending their Noble Science from these
fanatical interlopers who obviously don't know any physics, or else
they would not accept this nonsense about cold fusion.
They are strangely impervious to evidence. I think I understand
what's going on, but it's merely human, it's not science.
