planning stage for a replication

Hopefully this is the case, but there is no guarantee. While LENR is another, and perhaps most important, aspect of saving the Planet and its biosphere that we're likely to see in at least my lifetime. We all know there are huge financial interests in fossil carbon energy, its marketing, distribution and consumption... That "power corrupts" still must be kept in mind.

A question for WishfulThinking:

How do you "heavily armor" your reactor? I am concerned that your microwaves are not seeing the inside of the armor if it is metallic.

thanks,
Longview

Уважаемый Александр Георгиевич, мне кажется самый интересный результат Ваших опытов - последние восемь секунд после разрушения нагревателя. Реакция продолжается за счет саморазогрева. Возможно, при более высоких температурах можно этот эффект получить более устойчиво. Но конструкция Росси не позволяет поднять температуру.
У меня есть 20ти летний опыт изучения хим реакций при темпекратурах 1000-3000 градусов и давлении
100 -1000 атмосфер при холодных стенках реактора. Буду рад поделться с Вами моим опытом.
[email protected]
желаю Вам успехов. Щипачев Виктор Степанович.

Liquid metal has been seen, particularly in spectacular failures and surely in the oft-reported microscopic craters in Pd experiments. My off-the-cuff recollection is that it starts in the 1920s with Peters and Paneth's, Tandberg and others' exploding wires in deuterium, and continues in the mid 1980s with the spectacular failure by melt-through in the Fleischmann & Pons pre-announcement era which they later reported anecdotally. It may be so effective that it is dangerously susceptible to going out-of-control.

Liquid metal LENR reports are prevalent enough that they may substantially undermine most "micro-crack as NAE" theories.

For me, there is the fascinating possibility that liquid metal, liquid / solid metal interfaces may allow sufficient decoupling of d- or f- orbitals from high Z nuclei to enable the electron "gas" (Fermi "sea") behavior favorably LOW in at least one vector of motion-- enough to allow high effective electron mass. Please see the recent thread here under "DeBroglie waves, Planck units, mass".

All possibly good points, Alain. A potentially fertile domain of good experiments to be certain.

Novel components for liquid metal LENR experiments:
Metallic sodium [sodium reacts with hydrogen to give a hydride]
Mercury [HgH is an extremely unstable gaseous hydride, but HgH2 is a stable solid]
Mercury / sodium amalgam [might form LENR useful hydrides]
Mercury itself is a very unusual transition metal, it forms amalgams easily with nearly any transition metals, but not with platinum or with iron.The amalgamated surface of a transition metal in some LENR contexts could be expected to frustrate the formation of microcracks and be "self-healing". This might be instructive as to the true nature of any NAE present. On the face of the issue we might expect Hg to readily inactivate any NAE based on cracks or surface morphology.
On the other hand, Hg would be unlikely to heal any NAE that was simply some sort of island of oxidation.

Speaking of metallic liquids again, and my apologies to "Build it Now" or whoever the originator is over at E-cat world, in their excellent comment on the topic of Andrea Rossi's response when asked about heating an E-cat with natural gas. [And that itself is an interesting post!]

http://www.e-catworld.com/2015…-a-matter-of-simple-heat/

But here is what is said that again brings up metallic liquids, perhaps as in Alain and my brief discussion here of nanoprotrusions and later about liquid metal and its possible role, or not, in higher COP CF / LENR:
"[W]hen you compare the fuel-vs-ash photographs of the nickel grains, what emerges in the ash has transformed from a typical carbonyl-process nickel surface morphology (ie spiky and rough, not smooth) to a smooth, sintered-appearing surface. This suggests

to me that during reactor operation, at least the surface layers of that nickel grain are in a liquid state, as evidenced by the ash photograph (page 43, particle 1 of figure 2). Have you considered this possibility?"

At the risk of boring the readers, I am compelled to return to the molten metal idea, and to its implications, for example not only against tiny cracks as the sine qua non of NAE. I again direct readers' attention to the thread here at LENR Forum on "DeBrogie waves, Planck units, mass". Once again, there is a plausible connection between liquid metal and the behavior of that metal's d- and f- orbital electrons. In a liquid form of these "transition elements" with their often partially filled orbitals, the character of the metal itself can take on unusual catalytic properties well known in the chemistry of those elements. Further the orientational decoupling of such electrons from their nuclear bases might well lead to even more unusual or anomalous electronic properties. In addition to oxides and other electron deficient regions, that might correspond to some aspect of NAE, there is the now over 60 year history of semiconductor physics, which seems always to give the desired properties to the parent element through careful addition of impurities, that is "dopants". These create "holes' in p-type semiconductors which are virtual positrons or perhaps even virtural protons, and in the n-types, creates virtual electrons or possibly even virtual anti-protons. These virtual particles can contribute to real chemistry, and by extension possibly to nuclear chemistry.

My conclusion from too much reading and not enough benchtop work, is that liquid metal substrates may allow electrons to participate in coherent activities enabled by this nuclear decoupling. The proof of such might be to find examples of superconductivity or enhanced catalysis using liquid metals or liquid / solid transition element interfaces. But, in any case, we should not shy away from thinking of metallic liquids in LENR experiments.

Liquid metal electronic decoupling can be facilitated by external magnetic and/or electrostatic fields. Key ingredients of many LENR reports.

In short, my concern for us all here is to make sure that we are not missing something only because physicists or other scientists may have neglected to look.

Alain, I should first indicate that I have nothing against the concept of the NAE (Storms' Nuclear Active Environment). But I am seeing considerable evidence against microcracks being a consistent feature of NAE.
In respect to your indication above that you "would rather consider that the NAE is resisting to heat."
I believe, this may be quite compatible with a couple of features of the "deBroglie concept" I've attempted to outline earlier. That is, oxides of nearly any metal are almost always of much higher melting point, much greater rigidity, much lower electrical conductivity than the parent metal. The repeated appearance of oxides or sometimes other electron deficient materials in proximity to conventional transition metal conductors in LENR devices is a reminder of the the very low work function for electron emission, particularly of calcium oxide which is repeatedly seen in CF / LENR work, and appears to have an electron emission work function of 1.69 eV, lower than virtually any other material.

There have been few if any satisfactory explanations to directly overcome Coulomb in D+D or H+D or H+H models. Additionally, how to get from say 23 MeV down to a few keV is rarely explained well. For the latter, coherence is Prof. Hagelstein's possibly plausible and more recent explanation. But for the former he has demonstrated fairly convincingly that heavy electrons don't get to the mass requirement relativistically. Coherence offers some promise for Coulomb as well, but in my opinion it has by now been demonstrated that the model has to be quantum, not relativistic.

Your extensive summary [thanks] shows many phenomena co-occur with LENR. Paraphrasing your list as heat, THz radiation, liquifaction in certain domains, local or general alloying, high current density, and carbon nanotubules,,, all are highly consistent with QM mechanisms. I would add the frequent if not universal presence of oxides, the success of H2 with Ni, and the evidence for catastrophic failures at relatively low input energies is also supportive of QM mechanisms, while discounting relativistic [which have a much greater activation energies and much more tendency to self quench].

I think this is a very important discussion. I think the central issue is
DIVERSITY- how many kinds of LENR phenomena exists?
People who know everything about Pd D try to convince us that there exists
only one basic phenomenon- Storms and his theory being one example.
Cracks, hydroton and hydrogen isotopes. I was very much against the Storms theory from its embryonic stage and I have explained in my blog papers and in messages why.

I think PdD, NiH a la Piantelli, Warm Cats and Hyperion and Hot Cats- as e climb on the scale of temperatures are all different forms, with many stages.
Mixing them does harm. THe field neeeds a great dosis of realism and awakening.
Peter

Yours is a good point Peter Gluck. While it might eventually be necessary to say yes there are at least two or more fundamental mechanisms, I still hold out hope that there may be some fundamental unity-- at least a shared subset of important mechanisms. I have been using Pd examples bacause of the very large accumulation of data and phenomena in the literature. The H2 / Ni work is much newer, seems to have much higher COPs while having much less theoretical and phenomenological history with which to work.

The diversity of reported LENRs goes well beyond the two big ones we're often discussing here. I have confidence that there may well be a fundamental QM process shared by many, if not all, of those tentative CF and LENR reports that prove out during the coming years of what SHOULD be much better funding for basic research in the field.

One speculative point would be that the "hot fusion" physics that dominates the era that may just be passing, seems to have made many errors in assessing cold fusion. Are these all individual failures of theoretical and applied physics of the latter 20th century, or are they all simply the failure of many physicists to incorporate the diverse ways in which quantum mechanics (electrodynamics etc.) can surprise us?

Chemists, chemical engineers and semiconductor materials engineers have long seen the benchtop effects of quantum physics. Some physicists have too.

Nice idea, but some may be vegans and some allergic to maize....

More seriously: is Widom et al dependent on the electroweak theory? Isn't their model asking for relatively low mass/energy makeup?

The 4n and other such increments are certainly a potential hangup for simple Widom-Larson theory. If very cold neutrons like to hang around, or are stabilized in groups of 4, then perhaps not so bad.

I think we all agree we need to keep focus on the physics of small experiments, just as seems to be happening now thanks to the LENR community often seen here. Unifying the fundamental forces may or may not gain the little guys much.

Let's get over fossil fuel first, it is certainly possible even without successful LENR, but will be relatively easy with it.

I would suggest the Iwamura 4n where n=1,2,3... is also suggestive of another sort of geometry. That is free neutrons may have a tendency to form tetrahedral structures. The tetrahedron is unique among the platonic solids, in that its vertices are all equidistant from one another. In larger platonics (cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron) the distance across the enclosing sphere is larger than the distance to the adjacent neighbors.

So rather than requiring the creation of 4n, n=1,2,3 structures de novo, more plausibly they essentially create themselves due to their inherent stability in such a grouping. Then these structures enter recipient nuclei, and perhaps even do so in "trains" so to speak. Such tetrahedra and possible groups of them might well give neutrons greater stability than their inherent ~ 8 minute half life. Tetrahedra also may provide interesting magnetic properties due to spin up / spin down pairing and the orthogonality of the remaining two neutrons. Surely the nuclear entry as groups is one plausible way to get to such changes confined to single nuclei within a large number of unaffected nuclei. It would appear improbable or even impossible for the same target nucleus to be selected in temporally independent sequences. The n=2,3 etc must happen as a coordinated sequential or even simultaneous event.

So, essentially I am suggesting a geometry of stability may contribute to a geometry of formation, which then leads to the observed Iwamura isotopic numbers.

I might add that a predictable result of this tetrahedral neutron idea might be seen through simple centrifugation of materials presumed to contain them. They should move easily between atoms. They should acquire some considerable velocity, depending on the centrifugation g-force and the length of the acceleration path. Their acceleration there might be used to characterize them on CR-39 or other assays for low speed neutrons-- including generation of specific isotopes within defined targets.