At 04:05 PM 10/13/2012, Eric Walker wrote:
Abd, your comments prodded me to read Oriani's
paper more closely and to dig around for
Kowalski's attempted replication. Â I see that
there are several papers with Kowalski as author
or coauthor that mention Oriani, and I wasn't
sure which one you had in mind. Â It might be
[1], but in that one Kowalski concludes that
electrolysis is the source of the tracks,
although he does not find evidence for Oriani's claim of reproducibility.
Additional comments inline.
On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 4:47 PM, Abd ul-Rahman
Lomax <<mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.com>a...@lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
Oriani did not use adequate controls, and his
"effect" was explicitly not correlated with the
electrolysis current. Basically, we don't
ordinarily leave radiation detectors sitting in
electrolytic cells, we don't know, really, what
"normal" behavior is, and it would vary with the lab environment.
I don't think you need a claim about the amount
of current to conclude that it is electrolysis
that causes the tracks and not ambient radiation or cosmic rays.
Actually, you do. Is there a minimum current at
which the effect appears? Does the effect scale
with current? If there is no scaling with
current, there would still need to be some
minimum current or it's not "electrolysis."
 A finding pertaining to current would be
nice, of course. Â But to my mind, current is
just a proxy for hydrogen flux (or loading),
and it is possible that you could get high flux
with lower current, so correlation with this
particular variable is a week finding, as far as I can see.
No, lower current would generally mean lower
flux. Further, lower current can mean lower
voltage, and if the voltage is below a certain
level, hydrogen/deuterium is not evolved.
Why did Oriani vary his current all over the
place? To me, it's stabbing-in-the-dark
investigation, which is fine, except this is not
how own establishes are reproducible effect.
Kowalski attempted to replicate Oriani quite
because of the claim of reproducibility.
I have no thoughts on whether it is a good
protocol to leave CR39 chips sitting around in
electrolytic cells. Â This might be a silly thing to do. Â :)
Maybe. These chips are fairly tough. To etch
them, they are cooked in 6N sodium hydroxide for
many hours. In any case, it's easy to run controls.
Â
I don't think Oriani used "control cells." I
think you made that up, Eric, by not reading his
paper carefully. If I'm wrong, I'd appreciate
correction, but I did review this fairly
carefully before, looking as well at Kowalski's
attempt to replicate. Kowlaski was not able to
see the effect that Oriani had claimed.
With regard to the question of controls, I
should distinguish between two important details
here -- what Oriani claims and whether what he
claims is valid. Â For every section of Oriani's
paper [2], which pertains to a different
protocol, he describes a different "control."
I his original paper, he claimed consistent
results for 25 experiments. On examination, the experiments were all different.
In the case of the finding of tracks within
the CR39 chips during electrolysis (sec. 6),
the control involves two rounds of etching of
chips that were in comparable cells in which
electrolysis did not take place. In the case of
the finding of tracks within CR39 chips
suspended in the anode compartment of a
U-shaped tube, where the oxygen and the
hydrogen bubble up into different compartments
and don't mix (sec. 7), the "control" is to
suspend chips in a similar assembly without electrolysis.
The control data is presented in less detail than
the experimental data. In the experimental data,
the front and back side are presented separately,
and it is considered significant if *either side*
has an increase over the mean from the controls.
I believe that some of the data has previously
been published in greater detail. Many features
of the tables presented don't seem to be explained.
I find the whole paper so confusing that I'm just
putting it down. Eric, your comments don't seem
to match the sections and description in the Oriani paper.
I try to look at at least something.
[...]
I think his main claim of reproducibility, at
least in [2], pertains to sec. 5, where the
CR39 chips are suspended in the electrolyte in
close proximity to the cathode, with 6um of
Mylar between the chip and the cathode to
protect against chemical attack. Â In this
section he says that the number of pits, either
on the facing side or on the opposing side, are
always considerably greater than those found in the controls (p. 112).
On this section the "control chips were of four
kinds." The analysis presented makes an odd claim:
A comparison of the active chips with the
controls leads to the conclusion that a nuclear reaction of an unknown
kind is consistently generated in the course of
electrolysis. The many instances of nuclear tracks on the rear surfaces
of the detector plates is particularly
significant because it is strong evidence that
ordinary radionuclides contaminating
the electrolyte can not have been responsible
for the observed tracks. This is because charged particles of 15MeV or
less can not traverse the plastic of 0.83mm thickness.
Nuclear tracks on the back side would indicate
one of two things: neutron-induced tracks, or
tracks from the electrolyte on the back side. He
seems to assume, here, that any tracks would
originate with the cathode, but he hasn't shown
any spatial relationship between the tracks and
the cathode (which SPAWAR generally has done for
their work). Some charged particle radiation
could penetrate the 6 micron mylar film. He's
assuming penetration of the whole detector chip.
As I've written before, this is investigational
work, not the kind of work that can be used to
draw clear conclusions. A great deal more work
would be needed, with tighter controls, and a
single variable. If there is an effect from
electrolysis, at what level of electrolysis does the effect appear?
If all conditions are held constant, how consistent are the results?
Nobody has substantiated. Kowalski tried. From
Oriani's original paper (not the recent review),
I didn't see that Oriani's data supported the
claim of "reproducible." It wasn't clear what was being reproduced.
It is not entirely clear what happens when one
re-etches CR-39. Is one seeing new tracks, or is
one seeing small features from the original etch
that are magnified by further etching? Tracks
being buried in the CR-39 that were not present
at the surface would have to be from neutrons,
almost certainly. Yet the track counts shown by
Oriani are large, compared with anything that has
been shown from neutron-induced tracks in
electrolytic experiments. The large cluster he
shows is almost certainly from a piece of
radioactive material that snuck into the
apparatus, a piece of dust or the like.
Note that tracks can also be created on the
originally etched material, at the end of or
after the etch, by background radiation. They say
that the etched chips are protected by aluminum
foil, but they'd have to be exposed both for the
first etch and the original counting and for the
second etch (which could be a significant times,
up to 24 hour -- he's not clear).
I know very little about the quality of Oriani's
work or the difficulties involved in making the
claims he's making. Â The claims themselves are
pretty interesting if they can be substantiated.
The claims are not clear, the evidence for the
claims isn't clear. He seems to be claiming that
electrolysis, per se, produces the tracks, which
he infers as radiation-caused, but he's got no
controls that would establish what kind of
electrolysis, minimum current, as well as ruling
out various ways in which natural radioactive
sources could sneak in. (He does attempt to do
this to some degree, but it's not clearly adequate.)
He also overstates the significance of this work.
Oriani:
An experimental protocol has been developed that
is able reproducibly to generate the nuclear reaction.
He has not shown this. It is not clear that any
nuclear reaction, other than natural decay, has
taken place in the cells. Electrolysis increasing
radiation could be due to a natural phenomenon,
it is not, itself, proof of a nuclear reaction.
With the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect, there are
two major evidences that the reaction is nuclear:
heat beyond that expected from chemistry, and
helium correlated with the heat at a value
consistent with deuterium fusion. Those reactions
also show some radiation evidence, but it's at
very low levels, and likewise with transmutations.
What he's shown is an anomaly, at this point.
There seems to be an increase in track counts
associated with some kind of electrolysis, but
not necessarily reproducibly, as he claims (many
cells did not produce an increased track count.)
(Plus, of course, Kowalski failed to reproduce.)
Oriani:
Nevertheless the mechanism of the
track-producing nuclear reaction needs to be
understood in order to progress towards
developing a much needed non-polluting source of nuclear energy.
There nothing here to indicate that the mechanism
producing these tracks is related to "developing
a much needed non-polluting source of energy."
There isn't any sign that these cells are releasing usable energy.
What is interesting about Oriani's work is that
replicating it would seem to be reasonably
simple; hence Kowalski's replication used
amateurs. I could think of trying this with
LR-115, which I find may be easier to interpret
(though it may also have other limitations).
What I do expect to do, anyway, is to run lots of
LR-115 controls. The material is cheap.
