Fusionist's NiO FiberFrax experiments

Hopefully Fusionist is still around and can put the process he developed into clear view. He may insist that it is "anecdotal", but my impression is of great detail and specificity.

I have notes, but I will only post those if Fusionist does not appear here in a few days.

Speaking of replication, I believe we have enough descriptive material to reconstruct some if not all of the essentials. Fusionist (a retired and highly experienced spectroscopist) has warned of some safety issues that might ensue. But, he saw no radioactivity. There was thermal runaway that occurred somewhere at or above 830 degrees C. That runaway resulted in melting of the Fiberfrax (greater than 1790 C).

The "Fusionist" system was apparently completely nickel and hydrogen, no lithium added or present. (I would guess that FiberFrax could have some lithium from incidental spodumene, but it is not supposed to). Of course Fiberfrax has alumina and silica.

Quote from ogfusionist

I now believe that the exothermal measurement from my NiO/fiberfrax experiment was simply the result of partial reduction of the NiO in hydrogen. Wishful thinking played a part in the misinterpretation. Partial retention of the characteristic green NiO color played a part in the illusion.

That seems like a bit of a stretch-- if I understand your system. The bulk of the mass there was simply FiberFrax (not really redox active). The nickelous oxide was a thin layer on the ceramic fibers. The amount of hydrogen available may have been limited, but for discussion, let's say it was unlimited. Complete reduction of NiO requires significant energy, I see from my Handbook of Chemistry and Physics that the Gibbs free energy for NiO formation from Ni + 1/2O2 is in the mid minus 230 to 240 kJ/mol. Similarly I see the formation of water (that is the oxidation of hydrogen) is also in roughly the same range, that is minus 228 kJ/mol. I suggest that the net energy gain from such a redox pair is likely quite low and may even require work. Hardly enough to give a runaway meltdown of borosilicate glass or whatever.

Before we give up on your observations from decades back, let's do some trials.

Thanks,
Longview

Quote from ogfusionist

Thanks Longview for your Handbook of Chemistry and Physics reference that restores some confidence in my FiberFrax/NiO experimental results relative to fusion. Yes, you understand the system I used that was an attempt to keep it simple for me. Serendipity played a part because the setup was to test the reduction of NiO on fiberFrax for another process. The 830 C reaction was a surprise. I had convinced myself that the mysterious 830 C activity was the result of H2 dissociation and interaction with the NiO array for fusion to occur. Then I was convinced that it was simply a redox reaction. Now I'm sorry this ever came to attention.

I'm now less depressed and looking forward to more tests.

Don't despair. Many here are very pleased that you allowed this to come "to attention". Pure nickel and hydrogen systems have a lot of potential virtues. They should be aneutronic. If they somehow catalyze direct H + H fusion to deuterium it would be with the loss of a positron at 511 keV, which in a co-annihilation with an electron would yield an opposing momentum gamma also at 511 keV. These are medium gammas, fairly easily shielded against by my recollection-- Well an inch of lead to get rid of 99% according to a reference I just found.

Please see my questions in another post here. Thanks,
Longview

So I assume that XRF was operating during the time of the meltdown? So let's go with that, because a 511 keV gamma is fairly penetrating, although it has to traverse the wall of your reactor device, the brick and steel walls of the furnace, the spreading under inverse square in traversing the air over to the XRF device, and the attenuation by the air itself, and finally likely the wall of the detector, and the likely fact that the gammas would not be in direct line to the face of the photomultiplier, semiconductor crystal or whatever the particular technology was.

Critiques are welcome, from you ogfusionist and anyone else. Don't let me make errors, OK? Please.

Quote from ogfusionist

Thanks Longview for your response. I'm not at your level of expertise to offer any criticism. You certainly jogged my memory out of its stupor and now recall all the concern with isotopes.

This happened many years ago and accurate recall is a problem. At the time I had flow proportional, x-ray fluorescence and a Geiger counters operating for other analytical work. Something to do with SiLi on one (silicon drifted lithium?) I remember thinking it was interesting that the incident did not cause an increase over the average background count. Also recall doing some analyses with a quadrupole mass spectrometer on reactor residue and finding the isotopic distribution for nickel you mention, nothing unusual. The detectors were only sensitive to gamma all others couldn't enter the detectors although I was considering a windowless approach. This left me with the conclusion that what I witnessed was fusion although I did an analysis on the hydrogen exiting the reactor and found no helium. Someone mentioned that this was luck because if enough helium would have been produced to detect with my crude sprectrometer the lab would have been missing. So maybe it was more than simply a redox reaction. At this point it would certainly be worth a try at replication.

You're not making it easy for me in my retirement, I was going dormant and this is causing me to awaken. The excitement associated with this work just joyful reverie until now..

Let's do a rerun, it's easy and cuts down on thousands of words. I know this is redundant but if this work is repeated the key to success is particle size. The activity is at nanoscale levels.

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I hope we can get to nano much more easily through chemistry. Both the reductive firing and the grinding seem like good places to simplify and shorten--- if it doesn't work, then we can return to your original protocol.

As you may have guessed, I don't mind writing thousands of words--- at what is it 284 posts here now? And they typically aren't exactly brief as well-- more than a couple of times I have hit the 10,000 character limit. I'm glad it is not 140 characters, I go crazy under those limits....

Longview

Quote from Longview

Relax, let the rest of us do the work. Just please recall as much as you can about the whole process, the meltdown etc.

And of course we now have gone through a mess of possibilities with nickel itself being transmuted by addition of proton(s), and remaining nickel by beta decay in some cases. Another is the transmutation up to copper or zinc or higher without beta decay. Additionally we have the famous or infamous Widom-Larsen type reactions giving ultra low momentum neutrons that are presumed to rapidly join nearby nuclei. That would simply move the isotopic mass number up without changing the nickel chemical identity.

Perhaps Thomas Clarke can tell us how unlikely or impossible any of those are. And the good thing about him, is he will likely give a credible reasons why or why not.

Longview

As you may have guessed, I don't mind writing thousands of words--- at what is it 284 posts here now? And they typically aren't exactly brief as well-- more than a couple of times I have hit the 10,000 character limit. I'm glad it is not 140 characters, I go crazy under those limits....

Longview

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Quote from ogfusionist

Now I'm even more confused. I thought the classic stellar reaction (our sun for example) was simply a fusion reaction with helium as the product. I don't mean to imply that nature is simple only that it does things the simplest way. I recall that transmutation has been reported by some researchers though.

My recollection of the process is simply that the gas train I'd set up to check on the reduction of nickelous oxide in hydrogen showed an unusual sudden increase in temperature at 830C. with a thermocouple imbedded in the reactor referenced to a thermocouple on the exterior. It's so simple to simply repeat the experiment, we must be approaching at least 1000 words on the subject by now. Just when I'd decided that this was just a bad dream someone mentioned that others had replicated the process.

Now I suspect that Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann University of Utah chemists had by chance used palladium with impurities that fused and later selected much purer Pd as followup and weren't able to replicate.

I have quoted below from the "Never to be trusted for controversial information, famous online encyclopedia". I hope it does not seem that I am trying to confuse you or anyone else. The piece below gives some of the story, here attributed to Hans Bethe, by the way a good guy in many ways it seems.

"
Even so, it was unclear how proton–proton fusion might proceed, because the most obvious product, helium-2 (diproton), is unstable and immediately dissociates back into a pair of protons. In 1939, Hans Bethe proposed that one of the protons could beta decay into a neutron via the weak interaction during the brief moment of fusion, making deuterium the initial product in the chain. This idea was part of the body of work in stellar nucleosynthesis for which Bethe won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics. [end quote]
"
[Longview continues] It could continue all the way to helium, if the reaction were D + H or D + D, but the concentrations would not initially be high enough to make it a significant source of heat, it seems to me. To get to helium you have to first have deuterium. I don't think the 1 part in 6400 natural D level would contribute enough to give a meltdown on its way to small yield of He. But, that is not a quantitative comment, just a hunch. The full stellar process starts with H + H fusion then goes on as you indicate to give either He 3 or He 4. My presumption is that, if it happens at all, it is partial for a NiO Fiberfrax reactor, but even if it goes on, it will still yield up a positron at the "diproton" stage.

And of course, I leave open the possibility that it is strictly nickel transmutation. Certainly that has been suggested for other nickel catalyzed LENR processes.

OK, but there are at least a couple of problematic fusion steps to helium, but only one problematic fusion step and a rapid, spontaneous beta + decay to deuterium.

But, at this point I don't think it's important exactly how it might occur.

The important thing is your unbiased observation and report of a very unexpected result-- together with the relative ease of trying to replicate it.

I'm going to check on my Fiberfrax very soon... I hope it is near as expected.

With the right combination of solvents and/or adjustments to pH and/or redox conditions I am sure one can get to atomic sizes in solution thereby avoiding the milling to suspension. Of course that may well be basic research, but the whole LENR thing is anyway. As I mentioned, the creation of atomic nickel and then oxidizing (partially?) with oxygens already on the ceramic fibers could get very close to what you specify through a different and likely much quicker and perhaps less demanding route.