Eric,
It really gets down to whether the gainful reaction is thermonuclear or quantum mechanical. If you look in the archives, “stripping” was favored by me for many years, and I first introduced it here - but opinions change. Your opinion may not change, but here is what convinced me that there is a better model than stripping. If the gain is QM based – which is to say a type of nuclear tunneling which is different than electron tunneling in semiconductors, then bosons are highly favored to begin with. Horace Heffner use to talk about a QM “slingshot” effect where the positive end (of a cold deuteron) enters the electron cloud of the nickel. This could work with a proton as well but the dynamics change at some point since the proton can go only as deep as the inner electron orbitals, to which it is strongly attracted. Because the deuteron is shaped like a barbell, and has a positive end with long separation to the neutron end, which has a negative near-field, the deuteron can be whipped around in a spinning motion like a slingshot by the inner orbital. Most of the time the positive end of the deuteron is eventually repelled by the heavy nucleus, as the proton is all of the time - but on occasion the neutron-end of the deuteron is aligned perfectly to lead the way into the femtometer geometry of the strong force. The probability of this precise geometry is low, but the transaction rate is high. From: Eric Walker The strong force is so much stronger than electrical repulsion, that any small effect can make a difference at close range. If the possible Coulomb shielding effect from the neutron works at the same range as the strong force (i.e., is quite short-range), then I think the deuterons needed for the proposed bosonic deuteron capture will require a kinetic energy that is on the same order as that for neutron stripping via the Oppenheimer-Phillips process. Eric
