I wrote: The claim I will egregiously ignore for the moment as either being artifact > or something that is different from what we currently understand it to be > is the idea that there were twice as many gas molecules after the > experiment had run than at the time it had started. >
I think I found a way out of this difficulty. There might be a straightforward way to explain the increase in the number of gas molecules after the runs by Yoshida et al. If we're seeing neutron capture after a deuteron has been forced to approach a nickel lattice site, with a corresponding expelling of a 5-7 MeV proton, we can expect there to be a lot of spallation. Here is an image of what I have in mind: http://i.imgur.com/cATIdcT.png The idea is that the current from an arc between two grains is causing great downward pressure on deuteron ions, forcing them into a recess in one of the grains. (They're ionized because they're in the midst of an electric arc.) That pressure forces a deuteron at the bottom of the recess to approach close to one of the lattice sites. At some point the Oppenheimer-Phillips process takes over and strips the neutron from the deuteron, yielding a high-energy proton. While the lattice site barely moves, the proton flies with great force into the ions above it. As happens when a bullet is fired into water or sand, the momentum of the proton is quickly dampened. In the process you can expect a spallation, in which some of the other deuterons are broken apart into protons and neutrons. The neutrons will have a half-life of 14 minutes and will decay into protons. Outside of the electric arc the protons will combine to form some multiple of H2 molecules of the original number of D2/DH molecules that were fed into the system. Since the high-energy proton is colliding primarily with other ionized protons and deuterons, I'm guessing there will be little high-energy Bremsstrahlung from collisions with lattice site electrons. Presumably all of this happens before a dislocation occurs at the bottom of the recess and relieves some of the pressure. Eric
