On Sat, Feb 8, 2014 at 5:33 PM, Bob Cook <[email protected]> wrote:
However there was no apparent gamma radiation associated with the major > reaction of 2 D's going to He-4, only the evidence of large melted areas in > the Pd electrode and no apparent kinetic energy associated with those > alphas. > The finding of standing/low-energy alphas is very common in the older PdD research. It took me literally years to accept that this was possible. Ed Storms has been insisting on it, and I just didn't see how it was consistent with fusion, so I assumed that the alphas were being stopped in the material and the accompanying Bremsstrahlung screened out by the substrate and the material intervening between the substrate and the measurement device. Realistically, this is improbable, because holding an alpha emitter behind a sheet of palladium will give rise to Bremsstrahlung as the alphas collide with the far side of the sheet, as was seen in a control in one early experiment. I now am willing to accept the experimental finding of alphas being born without kinetic energy. The reason for this is that I think there is something along the lines that Bob Higgins described here [1] going on. It was not until I had some kind of explanation that made sense to me that I was able to go along with what the experimenters were saying. Note that in a lot of the CR-39 experiments (there have been many over the years), there is evidence for ~10 MeV alphas and ~1-3 MeV protons. But the important question is whether they are at a sufficient level to explain what is going on, and I think the consensus is that they are not. All of that is of interest in the context of NiH insofar as it points out the possibility of the gamma energy being dissipated in a benign way. Eric [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg89992.html
