At 03:02 PM 9/25/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Alan J Fletcher <<mailto:a...@well.com>a...@well.com> wrote:
The NRL recently repeated the Arata experiment several hundred times
in a row with automated equipment, completely degassing the samples
between runs. It worked every time. So I do not see why you say that
nothing has changed.
(Got a quick link to the paper? -- too lazy to search !! )
That was Kidwell et al. at ICCF15. Kidwell insisted it was chemical,
especially in the Proceedings paper which came out after I wrote
that. I disagreed then, and still do. See:
<http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/KidwellDdoesgasloa.pdf>http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/KidwellDdoesgasloa.pdf
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/ViolanteVproceeding.pdf
They described a lot more about it at ICCF17. Kidwell finally agrees
it is anomalous.
Okay, an anomaly. Very important point: anomaly does not equal cold
fusion. It means something unexplained.
If the level of heat is high, it may indicate a nuclear effect. I
don't think that is the case here. The heat is simply unexplained.
However, I keep virtually banging my head against the wall. There is
very likely a way to know, with certainty, that PdD heat is nuclear
in origin. Measure helium. Arata apparently did that, though lots of
Arata results seem hard to find.
They did not measure helium, though they did many experiments. Helium
measurement is tricky, but should have been accessible to them.
If they are getting heat such that there should be measurable helium,
from anywhere near 24 MeV/He-4, and they *don't* find helium, it
would be quite suspicious, given what we know about PdD LENR. It
would be a first, quite a remarkable result all on its own.
Why was this not done?
When I became involved with cold fusion, I found that the full
significance of heat/helium seemed to be overlooked, and great
confidence and attention was placed on calorimetry alone. I'm not
knocking the calorimetry, but one of the important values of helium
measurement is that it confirms that the heat is coming from a
nuclear source, and it roughly validates the calorimety. As we
accumulate experience with helium capture and measurement in these
experiments, it could become quite an accurate confirmation.
