I was curious what the numbers would look like for a range of possible reactions in an NiH system if the only two assumptions that were made were that nuclear reactions are the main show in NiH LENR and that somehow there is a way to overcome Coulomb repulsion. Although I suspect this is not the whole story, I wanted to see what would happen if we keep things somewhat simple.
Here is what I found: - The Ni(d,p)Ni reactions are benign and can shielded against fairly easily. - Nearly all other obvious exothermic reactions (e.g., Ni(p,*), d(p,*)) lead to penetrating radiation, for which even 5cm of lead will not be sufficient. - The Ni(d,p)Ni reactions produce fast protons, which can potentially lead to secondary reactions of undesirable types. You can see the model here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ylFdUCZ65O7V06MAX1KGmYC4UaaVII4HU5vJ6BIHnPU/edit#gid=399187264 It is very crude and is surely wrong on some details. I had to estimate the cross sections in some cases, for example, and cross sections are pretty finicky. But even a set of back-of-the-envelope calculations can lead to insights. If the general trend of the model is correct, the numbers tell an interesting story. Perhaps the columns most of interest will be W, X, Y and Z, which estimate the number of escaping photons for each reaction for different thicknesses of various materials. If you find a mistake, let me know. Here are some possible implications of the model: - Proton capture in NiH leads to nasty byproducts, including gammas and electron-positron annihilation photons, and is to be avoided. - Anything that leads to proton capture, e.g., hydrinos being captured by nickel lattice sites, is similarly to be avoided. - If Rossi's E-Cat is powered by reactions of the Ni(d,p)Ni type, either there is something inherent in the geometry of the reaction that is avoiding proton-initiated secondary reactions or Rossi has found a way to avoid the secondary reactions. Again, I'm not sure the story is as simple as the starting assumptions suggest. For example, I'm interested the possibility that there's a mechanism that transfers the energy of a nuclear transition to sources of charge in the environment, thereby precluding the emission of gammas. If such a mechanism existed, the Ni(p,*) and d(p,G)3He reactions would not necessarily be harmful. Nonetheless it's quite interesting to me how under less generous assumptions a whole class of reactions (Ni(d,p)Ni) turns up as somewhat benign and all other classes turn up as quite dangerous. Eric
