From: Kevin O'Malley
It should be noted that the most common nuclear reaction in the Universe, by
far - which is the reversible fusion of two protons into Helium-2 - such as
happens with unimaginable frequency on most stars including our sun - is
thought to produce no radiation. However, this reaction may produce excess
energy.
Jones
***I do not understand why this isn't being investigated more thoroughly.
It's not as if you've proposed some "new physics".
Well Kevin - it is new physics insofar as using a solar phenomenon to
explain LENR in a way that has never been done before. This methodology had
never been proposed before I took up the cause a few months ago. However,
the hypothesis fits the circumstances of Ni-H in such an elegant way that it
is unwise to ignore it despite its lack of provenance :-)
There is a solvable problem with it. "Reversible fusion" as an explanatory
hypothesis requires a mechanism for confinement of protons, such as can be
provided by the huge gravity field of a star. The leap of faith for this
being an active mechanism in LENR (or even the predominant mechanism) then
becomes "cavity confinement". or more precisely, "can cavity confinement at
low temperature be a substitute for an immense gravity field of a star at
much hotter temperature?"
There must exist a mechanism on Earth to hold two protons together long
enough for the strong force to temporarily bind them, in a similar way that
gravity does on our Sun. In LENR, this would be the metal matrix of the host
- such as nickel or palladium. In the original P&F paper, they computed
something like 10^26 atmospheres of "virtual" pressure exits inside the
palladium matrix - way more than enough even for fusion. That's electrolytic
compression, sometimes confused with overpotential. Not everyone agrees that
this high level of virtual compression is a physical reality, and P&F later
dropped the explanation. But another approach, essentially with the same
result - is the relativistic approach, which Fran Roarty suggests on his
blog - for Casimir cavities.
So yes - to the extent that reversible proton fusion is applied to explain
LENR via cavity confinement, and to the extent that QCD can be interpreted
to show a small amount of actual gain in every "failed" instance of
reversible fusion, this is indeed "new physics". But it does not involve a
pure "invented" mechanism to explain lack of gammas - the so-called magic
phonons.
So the bottom line, and the beauty of RPF -reversible proton fusion- is that
it requires no rationalization for the lack of radioactivity - since the
energy derived from QCD color change is on the order of a fractional eV per
instance. To get substantial energy out, you need a high transaction rate of
these failed fusions.
RPF of course does NOT explain deuterium/palladium, where there appears to
be correlation of excess heat to helium (unless you accept Krivit's
criticism of that data).
Therefore another knock on RPF is that to explain everything in LENR,
including palladium/deuterium, there must be at least two (or possible more)
active mechanisms. Ockham supporters do not like this, as it complicates
everything - but "parsimony" can be argued to be a gross over-generalization
anyway, and has never been really helpful in physics.
Jones
