BTW - with all the emphasis on Boeing - we tend to forget that last year there was an actual explosion at a lithium battery lab run by GM. It was hushed up, but it was a real explosion. Boeing was lucky by comparison.
http://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2012/04/explosion-reported-at-gm-tech-cen ter.html One of the most important reactions in Cosmology is lithium burning. A proton reacts with 7Li, and the result is two alphas which carry away the energy efficiently with less secondary radiation than one would expect. This is one of the most common nuclear reactions in the Universe, and it is a mystery why some version of it seldom turns up in this kind of discussion, related to lithium batteries - other than it invokes LENR. In terms of overcoming the Coulomb barrier - the 7Li(p,a)4He reaction (it is often written this way) has a similar threshold to the D+D reaction, the one which is normally associated with the P&F effect. The reaction rate is lower, but it requires nothing but lithium and water - two ingredients that are found in lithium batteries. The reaction rate would be expected to be much higher if the hydrogen itself were below ground state in a dense state and thus "not exactly" natural hydrogen. It could have been a population of f/H "fractional hydrogen" (below ground state and dense, ala Mills or the IRH of Miley or the KGS or DDL) that is the culprit here. Not to mention that most lithium batteries use Nickel electrodes. and more recently, nano-nickel has become all the rage for improving these batteries. This is not speculation - look in any battery journal: article after article on nano-nickel. My prediction is that GM was doing long-term automatic testing of advanced lithium batteries, going through many charge/ recharge cycles - and these particular batteries employed nano-nickel electrodes. The result of this long-term testing (unknown to them) was an accumulation of fractional hydrogen over weeks or months, which eventually reached the equivalent of a critical mass condition. The f/H then reacted with lithium to fuse to helium in an explosion. The good news is probably that it could have been worse. The "trigger" was possibly an inadvertent over-discharge of a large battery pack ... this kind of discharge causes instant excess heating, and the batteries are never supposed to go below 30% of full charge. This heating could have been the trigger needed for the 7Li(p,a)4He to proceed in an auto-catalytic way. Heck - Boeing could be very lucky the plane did not explode in air. They probably had not accumulated the critical population of f/H. But I doubt if we will ever know the full details of this GM explosion, and whether helium or radiation was seen. We can only hope that someone at GM has enough curiosity to "take off the blinders" - long enough to forget about "pathological science" and figure this one out. A closer look at LENR could turn out keep the next Dreamliner problem from becoming a Nightmare. not to mention that the technology could become the power-plant in a future LENRliner. Jones
