On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 2:08 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote:
I regard tritium as proof that a nuclear reaction occurred. It is as > convincing as excess heat far beyond the limits of chemistry. It is easy > for experts to confirm that tritium is real. This is another type of > evidence that people such as Cude never address. > > > How would you know if you don't read what I write. Tritium is detected at levels far below what is necessary to explain the claims of excess heat, and the levels vary by about 10 orders of magnitude. Its observation would of course have important scientific implications anyway, and since tritium and cold fusion are both nuclear, there might be some connection, so you would expect people to investigate it. Since it avoids the vagaries of and careful control and calibration necessary for calorimetry, and since tritium can be detected at reaction rates orders of magnitude below those necessary to produce measurable heat, the experiments should be vastly easier and more definitive. And one might expect that to be the main direction of research until at least the tritium question is understood. What factors affect it? How does it scale with the mass, shape, loading, and topology of the Pd, or with the electrolysis or gas-loading conditions, and so on. But in fact, as with heat (or neutrons), the situation is no clearer now than it was 20 years ago. There were a lot of searches for tritium in the early days, when people thought there might be conventional fusion reactions, and many people claimed to observe it. Interestingly, some of the highest levels were observed at BARC within weeks of the 1989 press conference, in spite of the now frequent argument about how difficult the experiment is, and how long it takes to get the appropriate loading etc. But as it became clear that the tritium could not account for the heat, and as the experiments became more careful, the tritium levels mostly decreased, just like pathological science everywhere. And some early claimants, like Will, got out of the field. In 1998 McKubre wrote: "we may nevertheless state with some confidence that tritium is not a routinely produced product of the electrochemical loading of deuterium into palladium." He was, interestingly, involved with the Clarke indirect observation of tritium in Arata electrodes, where the tritium is determined by measurement of 3He using mass spectrometry, removing the great advantage of the simplicity of measuring the radioactivity. In the last decade, there has been very little activity on the tritium front, which again, fits pathological science, and puts those early results -- some already under suspicion -- in serious doubt. To my mind, if they can't resolve the tritium question in some kind of definitive and quantitative way, there is no hope for heat.
