A key date for LENR, possibly the most important date since 1989, could be the 15th Japan Cold Fusion Research Conference in Sapporo, Japan on Nov. 1-2, 2014 where Yoshino and Mizuno will present detailed results of the kilowatt reactor upgrade.
They will also present nuclear data which may explain the lack of helium (or alternatively why they made a mistake and missed helium in the first presentation) and the increase in mass-2 species, both of which have been presented at MIT in what may be the most important experiment in the field - since the first one. The MIT experiment, in terms of thermal gain per unit of time, was 600% more robust than the next best experiment in the history of cold fusion (Roulette/Pons) which itself was at least double the third best. What is special about nickel with deuterium? Somehow, the switch to nickel from palladium has allowed Mizuno to leapfrog everyone for the past 25 years of experiment, and without need for fusion of deuterium to helium. If it is shown that deuterium reactions in nickel do not yield helium, yet in palladium, there is helium- then there is an obvious but painful conclusion. Unfortunately, it is not the conclusion that many observers want to see, since it will suggest that helium is an alpha decay product of palladium and not a product of fusion. In fact, the pathway to rhodium, via alpha decay stands out. Here is Gene Mallove's famous article about the 5 isotopes of rhodium which showed up in 1992. http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MalloveEalchemynig.pdf Notably the appearance of rare Rhodium indicates that the helium seen in LENR could derive from alpha decay of Pd, which can happen in numerous ways via deuteron interaction. There is a backstory to the Kevin Wolf story, which is why many in the field do not agree with Mallove's suggestion that helium could be coming from the alpha decay of Pd -> Rh. This route does have the distinct advantage of no expected gamma. At any rate, deuterium in Nickel does not yield helium, apparently from the charts in Mizuno's paper - yet it may produce robust excess heat in some other modality involving deuteron manipulation. One clue is that Ni is one of only two elements in the entire periodic table whose atomic weight is less than the preceding element (lower z). In this case the preceding element is cobalt (element 27) which is heavier on average. Nickel-58 is to blame, as it is "too light" for its place. Atomic weight is found by taking the atomic mass of each isotope and averaging to natural abundance. The reason for the drop in atomic weight in Nickel overall (compared to Cobalt which precedes it) is due to the distribution of isotopes: nickel-58 (68%) nickel-60 (26%), nickel-61 (1%), nickel-62 (4%), nickel-64 (1%). Because the largest contributor to the atomic weight of nickel is the Nickel-58 isotope, which is lighter than Cobalt-59 (100% of natural), the overall atomic weight average comes out "light" despite nickel having the extra proton. In terms of what we expect to see, if everything were to be predictable - most nickel "should be" Ni-60 - but that is not the case. This is not quite a singularity, but the only other place that it occurs in nature is with tellurium and iodine. Of the two cases, the first (Ni/Co) occurs in two ferromagnetic species, which could be important, especially since the copper isotope Cu-60 has such a short half-life (minutes). The combined importance of all of these factoids - is through some kind of magnetic enhanced route, which is the essence of the Letts/Cravens effect, along with the fact that Ni-58 is the most "relatively receptive" element in the periodic table for the addition of nuclear mass, due to its inherent "lightness" on relative stepwise scale. IOW - if it turns out the hydrogen or deuterium do in fact have one or more redundant ground states, and even if the reduced orbital is not stable over time, then there will exist the ability of the altered near-field of hydrogen and its ultra-strong magnetic susceptibility as an atomic species (and altered statistics of charge placement in the case of deuterium) to assist in overcoming normal Coulomb repulsion wrt other nuclei. As for predictions about November and Mizuno's show-and-tell: Mine is that the mass-2 species will be attributed to atomic deuterium, but as a stable monatomic isomer. And secondly, that there will a relative increase in the Ni-60 isotope. Both of these outcomes can be further expounded on later. Jones
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