If You Were in Andrea Rossi’s Shoes, What Would You have Done? (Andy Kumar)

"“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
― Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers"

How did Max Planck know Mary Ugo?

Quote from ogfusionist

"“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
― Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers"

How did Max Planck know Mary Ugo?

Is Mary that old?.....

I asked a rhetorical question. We're all that old, and after Max encountered Mary the result was his profound statement. Proving that LENRs have been around for a long time.
Even then Max did hope that Mary would just go and not return.

"You know, if someone gave you a spare brain, it would be lonely. Really, that's the best you can do?"
Please answer your own question.

BTW LENR works, are you ROTFWL now?
You may have to find some other topic to satisfy your paranoid delusion depending how the aberration is entrenched in your brain.

Sorry, George even with my degree in abnormal psychology I can't offer you any help. The prognosis for paranoia is the worst than for the other mental illnesses. There is no cure.

Quote from backyardfusion

I have to say that while I'm fairly certain Rossi is conning us, maybe even conning himself to some extent, that if he wasn't I would consider him the most insufferably selfish person I've ever heard of. He's had a fair go; hell he's had 8 years or something to bring something to market in any form. But he hasn't. He is trying to file patents so broad that they would put the entire LENR market in a death lock before it even exists.
Now assuming that he's actually legit, as in 100% legitimate, then he has to give it up. Obviously he can't bring it to market. He needs more people, but no one is investing.

This E-Cat Reactor, if it really does have a COP of 8 is literally the most groundbreaking development in energy production ever.
When you've got a technology that has the potential to change the lives of everyone around the globe and advance every possible industry 35 years into the future and even turn spaceflight (electric propulsion and EM Drive) into an everyday event, Why the hell would you be worried about money? This guy needs an upper cut if what he has is real.
But I highly doubt it is.

I agree. I think there is something to LENR (just don't believe Rossi) and wish you a lot of luck with your experiments.

Quote from Longview

Nice video. Silly comment. Why is an atomic bomb necessary for igniting a thermonuclear device (H-bomb)? The latter is highly exothermic, as are many reactions that are not spontaneous. Since Mary / George is pretending to know some physics here, let me point our young scientist's attention to "activation energy". It is very appropriate in the discussion of LENR and other variations on CF..... Look at a nuclear reaction from the standpoint of the "curve of binding energy". Those reactions that will work (and accomplish work!) have negative binding energies, that is they give up energy on reaction. So fission works because the products are more thermodynamically stable than the reactants (U, Th, Pu etc), and fusion works similarly, that is the fused atoms (p, d, t, Li etc.) are able to give up energy to their environment ("negative delta H" in this context) to become He, Be etc. What keeps things from fissioning or fusioning at will? For fusion it is ctivation energy, which can be very high in the case of an H-bomb or in the "lab" as D-T as we have seen now for well over 50 years of well funded attempts to do "hot fusion in a bottle". Fission of course has the simplicity of neutron chain reactions, easy to moderate by dilution and to initiate by assembling enough suitable fissile material.But, activation energy is not an inherent trait of any reaction, nuclear or chemical. It can be "tunneled" under. The method is generally referred to as catalysis. Catalysis is done all the time at the chemical (electronic) level, the only requirement is that the overall series of reactions have a collective negative delta H, that is they give up energy or to put it simply "they can do work" , or put another way they can produce power over time that is kilowatt hours or watt seconds (also known as joules). Fusion of small atoms is generally exothermic, the only problem is the activation energy, the "barrier" in this case is mostly due to coulombic (like charge) repulsion, and in many chemical reactions the barrier is similar, but generally of a much lower absolute magnitude. However, the activation energies for many practical fusion reactions are measurably (by collisional physics) much lower than the exothermic work such a reaction can produce, so the relative magnitude is not unlike a good chemical reaction. The ratios for D-D and D-T are impressively good. Activation energy of a fusion reaction such as D-T, even without catalysis should be no more than 5% of the expected energy yield-- of course that is still a huge amount of energy to concentrate onto one pair of atomic nuclei. But there are ways to do this, as there are many known ways to bypass activation energy in chemistry, that is there are many types and configurations of catalysts. Before too long we will see that there are many ways to accomplish this for nuclear reactions as well. The key is funding, and as Planck pointed out long ago, http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/107032.Max_Planck“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

This is an illuminating comparison. Lets look at chemical catalysis. What is needed is something that can alter the electronic wavefunctions that bind atoms into molecules.

There are many candidates here - it is easy for other molecules to get close enough to reactants for their electrons and nuclei to alter wavefunctions in the reactants. Another way of looking at this is to see that the potential barriers to reactions depend on the reaction pathway, and catalysts mediating new pathways with short-lived catalyst-bound intermediates can reduce this.

Now for nuclear. Here we need a [bf]nucleus[/bf] that acts to catalyse the reactions between two other nuclei. But here we have a problem.

For chemical reactions the electrons that bind nuclei neutralise the nuclear change and other molecules can get in close. The exact amount they can do this depends on solving the wave equations for the electrons (you can approximate this by thinking of shells) but as other nuclei and associated electron clouds change this by altering the potential everywhere and modifying wave functions the electron shell model breaks down (at least for outer electrons) and catalysis is possible in many ways which require numerical wave function calculations to determine. These are difficult to do, because you have electron probability and electric potential and a 3D grid of points throughout the interacting molecules as variables.

Anyway that explains why catalysis seems magical to chemists who do not do ab initio quantum calculations, and also why cataylsis works. The key parameter is the ratio between the intra-molecule distance and the molecular size - this is around 1.

The same idea explains why in general we cannot work out physical properties from a single molecule - intra-molecular forces are often very powerful - for example in solids - because atoms can get up close compared with the length scale of the molecule or atom individual wave functions.

The problem now is that the length scale of nuclear forces, and the size of a nucleus, is much much smaller than the distance scale of molecules. Intra-atomic distance in palladium is 390pm. With deuterium highly loaded (1 per Pd atom) we go down to about 300pm (think 3D geometry bicubic).

The size of a deuterium nucleus is 2fm. That is an amazing 100,000 X smaller than the distance between a D nucleus and any other nucleus in deuterated Palladium.

Now, various points made are true:

(1) reactions occur at lower energies than the barrier due to tunnelling
(2) there are various ways in which tunnelling can be enhanced

BUT - the point Longview makes, that catalysts for nuclear reactions should exist just as they do for chemical reactions, suffers from this 100,000 X problem. Basically nothing charged can get close enough to a nucleus to alter potential (electric or magnetic) significantly over the length scale of the nucleus and therefore change the nuclear wave functions.

The various things that can make nuclear reactions more or less likely to happen have been extensively studied - as you'd expect - both experimentally and theoretically. The two are in good agreement

I'm not saying every last detail is understood. But the reasons why nuclear reactions do NOT happen in your backyard except from unstable nuclei is well understood.

Quote from Thomas Clarke

This is an illuminating comparison. Lets look at chemical catalysis. What is needed is something that can alter the electronic wavefunctions that bind atoms into molecules.

There are many candidates here - it is easy for other molecules to get close enough to reactants for their electrons and nuclei to alter wavefunctions in the reactants. Another way of looking at this is to see that the potential barriers to reactions depend on the reaction pathway, and catalysts mediating new pathways with short-lived catalyst-bound intermediates can reduce this.

Now for nuclear. Here we need a [bf]nucleus[/bf] that acts to catalyse the reactions between two other nuclei. But here we have a problem.

For chemical reactions the electrons that bind nuclei neutralise the nuclear change and other molecules can get in close. The exact amount they can do this depends on solving the wave equations for the electrons (you can approximate this by thinking of shells) but as other nuclei and associated electron clouds change this by altering the potential everywhere and modifying wave functions the electron shell model breaks down (at least for outer electrons) and catalysis is possible in many ways which require numerical wave function calculations to determine. These are difficult to do, because you have electron probability and electric potential and a 3D grid of points throughout the interacting molecules as variables.

Anyway that explains why catalysis seems magical to chemists who do not do ab initio quantum calculations, and also why cataylsis works. The key parameter is the ratio between the intra-molecule distance and the molecular size - this is around 1.

The same idea explains why in general we cannot work out physical properties from a single molecule - intra-molecular forces are often very powerful - for example in solids - because atoms can get up close compared with the length scale of the molecule or atom individual wave functions.

The problem now is that the length scale of nuclear forces, and the size of a nucleus, is much much smaller than the distance scale of molecules. Intra-atomic distance in palladium is 390pm. With deuterium highly loaded (1 per Pd atom) we go down to about 300pm (think 3D geometry bicubic).

The size of a deuterium nucleus is 2fm. That is an amazing 100,000 X smaller than the distance between a D nucleus and any other nucleus in deuterated Palladium.

Now, various points made are true:

(1) reactions occur at lower energies than the barrier due to tunnelling
(2) there are various ways in which tunnelling can be enhanced

BUT - the point Longview makes, that catalysts for nuclear reactions should exist just as they do for chemical reactions, suffers from this 100,000 X problem. Basically nothing charged can get close enough to a nucleus to alter potential (electric or magnetic) significantly over the length scale of the nucleus and therefore change the nuclear wave functions.

The various things that can make nuclear reactions more or less likely to happen have been extensively studied - as you'd expect - both experimentally and theoretically. The two are in good agreement

I'm not saying every last detail is understood. But the reasons why nuclear reactions do NOT happen in your backyard except from unstable nuclei is well understood.

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I appreciate that you, Tom Clarke, were able to look beyond my rejoinder to the Mary / George error. Briefly, his / her error suggests a significant if only unconscious blindspot when it comes to this subject. But that should be expected from her / him... in view of the long and blinkered history there. Let me give one last blast in the George / Mary direction: a 14 year old is very likely an impressionable youth, and clearly the rants versus Rossi seem to have made an impression already-- not that I would defend Rossi's history, but I certainly would view the Yugo / Hody version, and citations, with considered skepticism. But that is not the issue, the issue was, as you Tom Clarke recognize, whether or not there is some fundamental impossibility in the physics and chemistry of CF / LENR. The Hody / Yugo "accidental" failure to even recognize that exothermicity is distinct from reaction spontaneity, is telling of the her / his prejudice, regardless of the claims George / Mary makes now to the contrary.

Let's return to the potential for nuclear catalysis. First, with some observations that may show what is known, or thought to be known about CF / LENR? I'll list here what I think are repeated, and somewhat general reports, often by more than one independent lab:

1. Protons and deuterons themselves do not often work as such (e.g. no acidic electrolytes). [one of several possible exceptions: Lipinski UGC]
2. Negative ions containing protium and especially deuterium are frequently reported to give over unity results.
3. Lithium is often present in some form in both the electrolytic / deuterium and in the furnace / hydrogen types.
4. "Pure" amorphous palladium, say 99.999 or 99.9999 % reportedly does not work.
5. Pure crystalline Pd does not work either.
6. Early Pd experiments with rhodium or other precious metal contamination did seem to be associated with over unity COP in electrolytic experiments.
7. Deliberate inclusion of "impurities" has repeatedly shown cases of improved performance.
8. Deliberate mechanical disruption of "the lattice" in electrode preparation has been reported to improve performance.
9. Inclusion of oxides in electrode formulations and in furnace catalysts seems a recurring theme, if not a given.

Now a couple of comments with respect to the "wave equation". I assume you studiously avoided calling out Schrödinger in this context. And rightly so, since the "wave equation" is, to my knowledge, only solved for multi atom molecules and higher atomic weights using approximations such as a Hartree-Fock. Such approximations of course will easily miss what is happening at the femtometer nuclear level and in fact Hartree-Fock assumes fixed nuclear position, a reasonable assumption when say 10s of picometers are the currency, but likely not when dealing with nuclei or with their positions / wave functions.

By the way, many who are broadly "chemists" use the "wave equation" and certainly its implications all the time, even biologists are known to, and certainly pharmacologists, cell physiologists, biochemists, enzymologists and even neuroscientists are among the crowd of fields where individual scientists are familiar with it, and modeling based on it.

The most "magical" language I have been reading here for what is simply catalysis has come from some who are apparently recently trained in quantum physics. I note you Thomas Clarke are not among those invoking "magic", and I would expect not to be included as well. I recall Bohr and Feynman's comments to the effect that no one really understands QM.

Is there a synthesis here: What happens to the "real" orbitals (electronic, protonic and nuclear), whether of theory or in fact when a (varying?) voltage gradient of 3 X 10^9 V/m-- that is 1 volt taken across 300 pm--- is superimposed on a catalytic surface (various temperatures and/or pressures) in the presence of lithium ions, deuterium ( - or +) ions, a noble / transition metal surface conjoined with an electrically insulating refractory substrate?

[And that is without invoking Nernst pressure which has been claimed by experienced electrochemists, perhaps controversially, to be truly immense.]

Why impurities? Why surfaces? Why electrostatic gradients (metal-oxide junctions)? Why negative ions?

Impurities can disrupt orbital regularity. Surfaces provide an abundance of disrupted orbitals leading to transient anomalous reactivity. Electrostatic (and time varying) gradients of billions of volts per meter can provide fields that may to some extent overcome coulombic gradients. But if not, then negative ions, properly oriented may shield accompanying protons / deuterons from "seeing" their like charged opponents until it is "too late", and under conditions perhaps yet poorly understood, only after the strong force may have taken precedence.

But, in any case, the nucleons, electrons, atoms and molecules know how to do the calculations, even if the problem is "difficult to do" for modelers. This emphasizes the importance of following empirical efforts carefully and not become overly prescriptive with our models.

I am not saying that any of the above provides all or even part of the real story. But, I think there are enough questions unanswered to justify a lot more work... even though as you indicate, that such things may "have been extensively studied". To argue from an 80-year old equation that remains generally insoluble, that no more attention need be given to nuclear catalysis.... would be a serious error. Perhaps you may agree.

Longview, well expressed post. Although trying to change a pathological skeptics' view on LENR is impossible. The rest of us admit that a nickel surface presenting the correct interatomic spacing will initiate hydrogen fusion with correct thermal input. The experiment has been replicated so let's move on. Hopefully the one suffering from paranoia will remain behind for awhile and then catch up to become useful again as a skeptic debating new LENR results.

Mentioned in your post, "I recall Bohr and Feynman's comments to the effect that no one really understands QM." That is understandable with the realization that understanding QM is beyond every ones mental capacity. Try dwelling on the subject of quantum entanglement as a starter.

Quote

I am not saying that any of the above provides all or even part of the real story. But, I think there are enough questions unanswered to justify a lot more work... even though as you indicate, that such things may "have been extensively studied". To argue from an 80-year old equation that remains generally insoluble, that no more attention need be given to nuclear catalysis.... would be a serious error. Perhaps you may agree.

I'm open to suggestions for how nuclear reactions could be catalysed. My view that this is extremely unlikely comes from the argument I made above which can be stated in more detail. Where therefore I don't agree is that there is evidence (that has been presented to me) to the contrary.

Both you and ogfusion cite experimental evidence. While there are in all areas of science experimental results not fully understood, the apparent evidence for LENR is remarkably weak. Consider: the extraordinary and easily measurable LENR+ claims of Rossi in fact, when independently tested, turn out to be a well understood measurement error. Defkalion's demo another such error due to a flow meter that is inaccurate at low flow rates. There is no experimental evidence that stands up to scrutiny, although there is much that appears strong when not carefully scrutinsed, as for example the Lugano results appeared strong. I'm very willing to check anything else that seems strong - it would be great if LENR existed - but so far the 20 year history is of claims that turn out to be mismeasurement. The claims I know about are all remarkable for the fact that they are not easily measurable and rely on error-prone methods of estimating excess heat.

MFMP have their hearts in the right place, and they started with apparently strong results from Celani - which turned out to vanish when well measured. MFMP usefully discovered a neglected cause of apparent positive results there. Similarly those equally strong results from Mizumo. We are left with very weak results that no-one believes like those of Miles.

Isotopic change is also interesting. There have been Japanese claims of strange element transformation. Notable that they have no relation to what is claimed going on elsewhere, and that the levels detected are very very low, and that no non-natural isotopes are detected. Otherwise we have the LENR+ claims of Rossi and now replications. Rossi's "independent" results are totally inconsistent with any mechanism except mishandling - deliberate or mistake - with Ni62 substituted. We know that Rossi was using Ni62 BTW, and that no check could be made against such mishandling by Rossi, so no conspiracy is needed for this hypothesis. The claims from replications are of null isotopic change except for MFMP's recent tests. They are interesting and I'm willing to bet now that they will show no isotopic change. Real isotopic change from this would be interesting and worth further investigation although still it would point to some novel fractionation mechanism rather than nuclear transformation unless there were corroborating evidence.

All skeptics need, to get interested, is experimental results that cohere. For example, excess heat correlating with He in D+D claimed fusion, or excess heat correlating with Ni conversion in the latest stuff. What however we get is erratic claims of excess heat which do not bear scrutiny and also do not correlate with isotopic chnage. The Lugano 98% Ni62 could not - if correct - be true because it would correspond to massive excess heat, larger even than the erroneous COP=3 and much larger than the correct COP ~ 1.

Now I'm going to comment on Longview's ideas about QM. I have two criticisms.

(1) It is a great mistake to confuse "insoluble except in approximation" with "intractable". Quantum gravity is (until recently) intractable. Solid state physics has quantum descriptions that are analytically insoluble, but well able to be solved numerically given appropriate approximations. That is no more than any large-scale physical problem where numerical solutions are needed. The numbers coming out of good modern numerical techniques match experimental results very well.

(2) It is a worse mistake to think that because an accurate solution cannot be made to equations, that they cannot be bounded. For example, the movements of a ball in a pin-ball machine are inherently unpredicatble due to chaotic amplification of initial uncertainty - but the fact that its trajectory stays within the machine can still be precisely calculated as a bound on its possible position.

Let us now get to the meat of it. What are the possible ways in which nuclear reactions could be catalysed?

(a) electric field. true, this does have some effect. It is just that the effect is very small compared with the potential barrier to fusion or in fact anything interesting. 1EV/m? That is a small field even compared with the fields that constrain outer electrons - it is much smaller than the fields that exist near to nuclei and are dominated by the nuclear charge. We can do the maths and work out the perturbation. As Longview says exact solution is difficult - but bounding any perturbation is much easier and possible analytically. This work has been done - nuclear physicists are interested in how nuclear reactions can be changed by electric and magnetic fields there are results both experimental and theoretical. None of these indicate any chance of fusion.

I remain open to some way in which electric fields could do this but you need higher fields than exist in solid-state lattices.

(b) Negative ions can shield protons. This is a minimal effect. Work has been done on electron shielding and it helps a tiny bit, but fundamental QM principles, easily calculated as bounds, show that you just can't squeeze electrons tight enough to shield the nuclear field once you get near enough. There are many papers on the quantitative effect of such shielding. None which show anything that can make fusion happen. (Read carefully!).

If the theoretical grounds for LENR (e.g. one of the above mechanisms) were not so weak quantitatively many more people would be interested in it. Those two methods can be calculated, and don't stack up. It is free for anyone to write a paper arguing they do. None such exist that correctly argue this, and I've looked at a few attempts. A correct argument would be big news and get published seriously, attracting much other interest. Those CERN guys would like to find easier ways to get fusion off the ground. In fact there are a number of candidates in terms of liners that help ICF along. There are (arguably) clever tricks for other hot fusion attempts. People are interested in this stuff, and have done a lot of work on it.

Finally -
Should there be some catalytic way to enhance lattice-based fusion it would be the easiest part of the LENR mechanism. The really extraordinary part is how, after nuclear reactions have occured, somehow:
** radioactive or unnatural nuclei are never products
** high energy particles are never generated

When you understand the energy levels from fusion and the fact that reactions never balance it is really difficult to see how you could deal with that extra localised high energy, as Hagelstein has pointed out. Wise men, when the amount of hand waving and special pleading needed to justify an argument gets to high level, bail out. It does not make such special pleading impossible, just it gets very very unlikely.

On the other hand, no high energy products, no radioactive nuclei, is exactly what the "no LENR" hypothesis predicts.

Quote from Thomas Clarke

Many of these problems arise when good calorimetry is not in place. I agree that is certainly still a major issue with the Ni "furnace" efforts, in many cases. When you critique "20 year history" are you also saying this of McKubre's work? And Storms? You mention Mizuno, although you seem to place that in the context of Ni furnace efforts.... are there the same flaws in all of those as well? I suspect you over generalize your adverse case. By definition, you exclude any evidence to the contrary when you state "there is no experimental evidence that stands up...'. It cannot be quite so clear, although I understand your position. It appears that you begin with the assumption that CF / LENR cannot work.

I suspect it is likely easy to pick on specific situations and in retrospect criticize one or another of the ad hoc and/or poorly funded efforts that any worker may have produced over the years. And thereby tar with the same brush anything else they may have produced in a more studied and cautious and perhaps more well-funded manner. Fortunately, most of us posting here, and a wider number of informed members of the general public are reaching a tipping point where "over unity" is not so widely regarded as a disreputable mistake...Longview

The Japanese transmutation claims are from Mitsubishi researchers, they are the subject of patent applications and are not so strange here at the Forum.

It does seem very odd to have such a high percentage conversion to Ni62, although something similar may have been reported subsequently. We need to remember the sampling of the Lugano reactor has since been noted as "a scraping from the deposits on the inside wall".

Have you the numbers in MeV for say some sort of "tetra neutron" absorption by Ni58? And, is that an impressive number or not? I see no decay emission for any step down between Ni62 and Ni58 in my admittedly brief "Table of the Isotopes" from the CRC Handbook. I notice the position of Ni on the curve of binding energy does not seem likely to give a high per nucleon yield-- but the macroscopic view of that curve at Ni may be ininformative. What is the actual predicted yield of such fusion(s)?

I notice you are not mentioning Pd deuterium systems, which I did also mention prominently, since those are the ones that have endured over 25 years of scrutiny and are now much more well understood. It is relatively easy to be dismissive about the attempts to replicate Rossi's presumed and actual claims. Since Rossi has never been forthcoming with details, since he has been associated with questionable and energy-related promotions in the past, and since the possible "replications" so far have been based on incomplete or ad hoc information.... it is lttle surprise that the results have been modest to non-existent (and that might even apply to Rossi's work, we don't really know. However there are many enthusiastic "replicators" now, and a growing body of empirical findings through which these new Ni, Li protium efforts can, and are being refined.

Your focus on a COP of "1.07" may come, if I am not mistaken, from your own recalculations. Let's look at that for a brief moment. If one says "10%" error, that may actually apply only to the excess heat component of the calculation, so the one sigma or two sigma (I don't know the quality of the "10%" result may be 1.06 to 1.08 or even 1.065 to 1.075 depending on what your "10%" means. So if either of the latter actually constitute the measured situation, then given the crude nature of the efforts, we might well expect that something "in there" might be working with little or no benefit of any thorough engineering or physics inspired optimization. If so, a very modest over-unity number is not to be ignored because of its smallness. If well measured in a properly insulated and more calorimetrically precise context it might be considerably larger. Once any kind of reproducible over unity phenomenon is repeatably observed, then it can be mechanistically studied and the essentials can be distilled into a much higher performance device. Earlier, some of that sort of work had been, and continues to be done with Pd deuterium electrolysis, under the very sparse funding over the last 3 decades (perhaps $50 million total, but in no case more than twice that for the whole field, a handful of corporations and perhaps 8 nation state fundings-- US, GB, India, Japan, France, Russia, Israel, and?). Relatively speaking, the "furnace" efforts with Ni, Li and protium are surely just beginning....Longview.

OK, I am glad I am not making either of those mistakes.... Longview

This is why I specifically included metal insulator junctions. Here are where field strengths should be enormous. It is where numerous quantum anomalies are already known to occur. That is high temperature superconductivity, electron emissions in vacuo, "heavy" electrons, AND several reports with respect to palladium electrodes (for example calcium oxide enhancements), and by deduction may be a factor in some of the more promising Ni, protium, furnace results since alumina and nickel melting are coexisting in some of these experiments....Longview

We need to suspect this is minimal "by definition" again, unfortunately.... Longview

It surely is minimal in a "collisional" physics environment. Perhaps not so in some lattice constrained and transition metal partially filled d-orbital context, particularly near metal oxide boundaries....Longview

[by definition again, I suspect, since the judge and jury in that context is... Thomas Clarke... Longview]

[So as the blinders come off, they will even try LENR because of their new insights...Longview].

[quote]Finally -
Should there be some catalytic way to enhance lattice-based fusion it would be the easiest part of the LENR mechanism. The really extraordinary part is how, after nuclear reactions have occured, somehow: [a couple of worn out Huizenga "miracles" snipped]

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Little or no comment here may be necessary. We know there are differences from collisional physics and what has been reported numerous times over decades in CF / LENR efforts.

FreethinkerLENR2 here has just observed anomalous radiation counts. He has made efforts to block them, apparently only lead suffices. Blocking does show they come from his Parkhomov-like apparatus (with the modification of pre-baking the nickel powder). That will be an interesting story and should be repeatable, since there are several other high quality efforts along the same lines and these workers can communicate with one another and with their "public".... (unlike the days of suppressive editing during say the early 90s)...Longview.

"Both you and ogfusion cite experimental evidence."

Following the F&P electrochemical report, I constructed a NiO reactor and recorded hydrogen fusion. This was over 50 years ago.
The experiment was done following the F&P electrochemical report that was publicized. The resulting gammas were primarily in the IR region with little harmful ionizing radiation. Nanoscale hydrogen fusion (LENR) is easily initiated under laboratory conditions.

"Both you and ogfusion cite experimental evidence. While there are in all areas of science experimental results not fully understood, the apparent evidence for LENR is remarkably weak."

The evidence for LENR is certainly not weak for me. A sudden meltdown of the reactor when the Veriac used in the experiment had insufficient power for a catastrophic melt is convincing proof. The reaction suddenly going ballistic is strong evidenced for nanoscale hydrogen fusion. Also the low increase in count rate from the adjacent GMC indicated low ionizing radiation.

Quote from Mary Yugo

So why are you not by now a very wealthy Nobel laureate? And did you mean 5 rather than 50 years ago??

Or perhaps the intended wording was "Before" rather than "Following". I know that ogfusionist has said something to that effect on several occasions past.

As I understand the ogfusionist "device", it was not intended to accomplish a "meltdown", but that is what he has repeatedly stated happened. I have questioned whether this was simply reaching the melting point of borosilicate glass, also very near 830 deg C, but that suggestion has been rebuffed a couple of times including at least once in which the container was said to be fused quartz or another high temperature equivalent, e.g. Vycor. As I have understood the story, the meltdown was simply a curiosity that sat on his desk (Varian Associates?) for many years and only became the subject of "warm fusion" speculation with the advent of F & P. I don't know if ogfusionist maintains there were replications of aspects of the device by him. I have deduced that he may have seen the effect in some context and decided to more formally test it.... resulting in the melted device on the desktop and later its residence in a storage cabinet after retirement. He has confirmed that he is nearing 90 years of age... if so, he is doing a lot better than my mother who is near the same age.

"So why are you not by now a very wealthy Nobel laureate? And did you mean 5 rather than 50 years ago??[/quote]"

I meant the time that F&P were publicized. Actually many moons ago.

George, I doubt that wealth and fame have much significance for us at this point. Pondering the concept of an infinite spiritual consciousness is more like it. What other spirits will we encounter?

BTW, what's the purpose of the black-knight-satellite?

"As I understand the ogfusionist "device", it was not intended to accomplish a "meltdown", but that is what he has repeatedly stated happened. I have questioned whether this was simply reaching the melting point of borosilicate glass, also very near 830 deg C, but that suggestion has been rebuffed a couple of times including at least once in which the container was said to be fused quartz or another high temperature equivalent, e.g. Vicor. As I have understood the story, the meltdown was simply a curiosity that sat on his desk (Varian Associates?) for many years and only became the subject of "warm fusion" speculation with the advent of F & P. I don't know if ogfusionist maintains there were replications of aspects of the device by him. I have deduced that he may have seen the effect in some context and decided to more formally test it.... resulting in the melted device on the desktop and later its residence in a storage cabinet after retirement. He has confirmed that he is nearing 90 years of age... if so, he is doing a lot better than my mother who is near the same age."

Longview, well summarized and accurate review of my career. My employer was Varian Associates for 55 years. Truly felt like an associate at work. The brothers were great as employers.
Hope your mothers health is fine, it's what's really important.
To complete the picture, two brief jobs after college graduation, one with U-235 reactor fuel enrichment company and then to my primary interest related to my inventions dealing with hydrogen. While in college and afterwards my research has always been related to hydrogen metal surface catalysis.