On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 10:35 AM, Jones Beene <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > Cude: I missed the obligatory "tritium is claimed to be > detected", and no even if it's detected, there could be contamination, > accidental or deliberate. > > That is an absurd cop-out. There are dozens of papers by four top PhDs at > the top tritium facility in the World, LANL. Yet Cude wants to suggest that > the hundreds of experiments at LANL where tritium is detected are all > nothing but measure error - and furthermore that the management of the > facility was deceived and continued to fund the researchers for many years. > Dozens? Really? Storms lists tritium papers in table 6 in chapter 4 of his book. I count 8 papers from LANL, including two from Storms and Talcott. Rothwell has a few more, which Storms presumably skipped because of difficulty accessing them (e.g. Solid State Fusion Update, Los Alamos), or because they are only presentations (not papers) (e.g. NSF workshop). That's still pretty impressive, until you look a little closer. Most of the papers are conference proceedings, or highly obscure journals that don't even rate a calculation of the impact factor (e.g. Trans Fusion Tech, Infinite Energy). That doesn't exactly scream credibility for what would be a revolutionary result. Secondly, the same authors (Claytor, Menlove et al) also claimed to measure neutrons at levels similar to the SE Jones claims, and those claims were later explicitly retracted. So, working at LANL does not make you infallible. Thirdly, the most prominent of the authors' (Menlove) latest co-authorship appears to be 1991, so he appears to have lost confidence, or why abandon such a ground-breaking experiment. Fourthly, the levels really are very low. It's true that tritium can be detected at reaction rates orders of magnitude below those necessary to produce measurable heat, and surprise, surprise, that's where they are detected. The levels are mostly at a fraction of a nCi with one in the range of a nCi (far lower by the way than the BARC claims in 1989), with sensitivity (they claim) of 0.1 nCi. Higher yes, but why always so close. And they spend a lot of time explaining why "the detected ionizing material is tritium rather than an artifact of the instrument or some other isotope". That kind of kills the point of looking for tritium, which was supposed to be at unequivocal levels. But just like heat and neutrons and helium, it too appears at levels that are not far from the noise. Finally, the latest paper from LANL on tritium seems to be 1998, even though they certainly hadn't answered any interesting questions about it, like what reaction produces it. I don't think it's clear how much support they got from management, but the stopping of the experiments without resolving anything, or even getting a decent publication out of it, suggests that either the experimenters themselves lost confidence, or LANL killed it. And isn't one of the usual arguments of mainstream suppression that LANL *didn't* support Storms' research? You can't have it both ways. You can't say: LANL supports LENR research so it must be real, and LANL doesn't support LENR research so they must be corrupt. Unless you are in possession of received truth and so you must fit all observations to fit that truth. > > If this is such indisputable proof, why is it that > intelligent people don't buy it? Do they hate the thought of clean and > abundant energy? We know that's not the case from the events of 1989. > > Once again you're trying to conflate tritium with heat. Good grief. It's the advocates that conflate tritium and heat. No one here would care a whit about tritium for scientific interest. The reason it's brought up is to make the excess heat claims more plausible. You yourself say the results crush skepticism about LENR, so that you can carry on believing excess heat is possible too. Did you read what I wrote? I delineated the two carefully, and explained why tritium would still be important to investigate. Here it is again: 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. There's no conflation there. The idea is that if there is a connection (and you agree there is because you classify both as LENR), then it makes sense nail down the easier measurement first. And anyone interested in excess heat would still support tritium research. So my question stands without conflation. But if it makes you feel better, I could ask it in a way no less vexing: If tritium is such indisputable proof, why is it that intelligent people don't buy it? Do they hate the thought of new discoveries that could win Nobel prizes and have potential implications for energy production? We know that's not the case from the modern physics revolution and discoveries of high Tc superconductivity and the events of 1989. > Forget 1989, take a > deep breath and focus only on the tritium findings at Los Alamos. See above. The LANL neutron findings were explicitly retracted, and the tritium findings were implicitly retracted by the complete cessation of the work without a single respectable publication. Some of the Claytor papers give a link to a LANL web page where the tritium results were available. The site has been re-organized, but I was unable to find anything at their site about tritium measurements in cold fusion. It seems they don't consider those experiments to be very important. > > > What you really hate is that fact that tritium (with or without heat) > absolutely proves the reality of LENR - since tritium is so unique and > non-natural - it is the gold standard. I don't really hate anything, and I agree tritium is where the focus should be -- if there should be a focus, which there shouldn't. Unequivocal tritium would prove nuclear reactions at rates much higher than expected, and would represent fundamental new science worthy of a Nobel prize. But it would not prove excess heat from nuclear reactions, which is what I consider to be cold fusion. In any case, I don't agree that the evidence for tritium is unequivocal, because if it were, people would not abandon the experiments, and the explanation of their production would become clearer, and experts would be convinced by them. 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. Some of the highest levels were observed at BARC within weeks of the 1989 press conference, when people thought ordinary fusion might be taking place, 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." 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. > You cannot tolerate the reality of > LENR, even without heat You have to maintain this fantasy to rationalize the fact that most people are skeptical, but in fact I would be thrilled if cold fusion were real, and I could stop refueling my jet ski, and I could leave a better planet to our descendants. > You should be ashamed of yourself for this kind of transparent intellectual > dishonesty. > > > Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not ashamed. On the other hand the strong fringe support for cold fusion produces a fertile area for scams, and you should be ashamed for enabling the likely con men like Rossi, Mills, Dardik, Godes, and Larsen. I might even accuse you of crimes against humanity, but that would be kind of psychopathic.
