jeff: Celani-Type Replication

    I'm hoping to get hold of a gamma spectrometer. I'll collect a dust sample, confirm the level of radioactivity with a GM detector and then get a gamma spectrum. Many of the Ra -> Pb decay path isotopes emit gammas. So it should not be too difficult to look for matches on some of the stronger gamma energies.

    Short of taking the device out of the airflow calorimeter (since heat measurements aren't being performed this shouldn't be a problem) and testing it in a different place where Radon contamination is almost certainly not an issue (i.e. not the basement), an improvised soft wall cleanroom could be used in order to prevent further issues on this regard.


    Well, I'll happily eat at least some of my words in regards to dust. Experiment trumps theory.
    I did not expect that the system would operate like a filter.


    Now, I wonder how or if this could relate to the MFMP Signal, since they had a different set up, without special airflow, and the low keV bump came and went within 4 hours (more or less) and without radon decay peaks out of the ordinary.


    Edit: Many gamma sensors (GM especially) have high voltage circuits. That would be a nuisance if daughter products are electrically attracted to the detector.

    • Official Post

    Good job to manage artifact.
    For radioprotection against radon, authorities just advise people to make good air flow in the room.
    I don't know if it is enough to prevent/reduce false positive.


    One possibility could be to make the experiment insulated from outside, but cooled.


    Do you think it would be possible to make the experiment with two aquariums (or one aquarium in a filled sink/bathtube) , where the experiment chamber is in a water bath.


    For good calorimetry temperature stabilized bath would be required, but without that it least you avoid contamination from ambient particles, while evacuating heat efficiently.
    If you add compensation heater inside you can even do calibration, and ensure isothermal flow calorimetry.
    Fan in the chamber and in the bath may reduce hotspots...


    Just a hobbyist idea, inspired by calorimetry setups. It may be much effort, and it seems you don't favor calorimetry for your initial test ?

    I have run both Rossi and Celani types of experiments, and have so far seen only null results. It is fairly easy to change out the innards of the cell to accommodate either Joule heated wire or Kanthal over alumina to heat a stainless steel capsule containing Ni, Al, Li. In both cases H2 and vacuum are controlled by the same set of valves and tubing. The quartz tube and associated feed-throughs remain the same. This is the first time I have made a concerted attempt to observe radiation. In the past the GM detector was placed near the cell and served a safety monitoring function only.

    I chose to look for radiation because, if detected, it provides much more information about the underlying processes than does a positive COP. It is only about a half hour procedure to reconfigure the apparatus to operate in the calorimeter mode.

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    When a "Good Scientist" sets up an experiment, he should test for all possibilities without prejudices of what the scientist is expecting. Discovering the unexpected is where new science comes from.


    Good scientists have to use judgement. For example - I don't suppose God will suddenly change the laws of physics to make my voltmeter read 2X normal in the middle of the experiment. It is possible - but very highly unlikely.


    People testing a sample for radiation don't think that a continuous 1000X background level measured at 10s intervals is derived from multiple high energy cosmic rays. It is possible - but highly unlikely. Or that it is from a single low intensity source which by chance happens to decay at 1000X the normal rate for a while. Again possible, but not likely.


    So, a good scientist performs observations with an open mind but with brains still inside and not on the floor. In this case neutrons are not excluded from consideration if the evidence warrants, and are more likely than the two examples above, but they are very low down the probability stakes. Just as well, for Jeff's health.

    Re dust. H-G posted (and various people highlighted) a link showing such levels of radiation from dust, so it should surprise no-one.


    Typically the high background levels do come from Radon emitted by granite collecting in basements etc. In this case you will be living in a high risk area geological for radon (which you can easily check). In fact you might want to check this, because there are things you should do to provide proper ventilation so as to reduce build-up for health reasons if that is the case.


    I'm not so sure why dust radioactivity should reduce after 6 hours. Obviously Radon decay happens all the time and is not affected by moving dust. The chain of decay products have varying half-lives, some of which are long - but no reason for overall radioactivity to change.


    If, for example, Radon gas were released over time from dust not otherwise highly active that would make sense. The loosely-bound Radon would dissipate and (maybe) the main measured radioactivity comes direct from Radon or a chain of short-lived decay products from it. No doubt somone will know.


    So the exact mechanism remains a mystery but I expect Jeff is right, but remain open to something a bit more complex.


    Radon decontamination guide.
    Jeff - given the high level of dust contamination you might want to follow this. You'd need to measure levels to see how necessary this is, or get somone else to do so, and follow this guide:
    http://www.ukradon.org/information/reducelevels
    The preventative work is not so difficult.


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    Here is what I believe is happening but I will not be able to prove it until gamma spectrometer measurements become available. Radon and its decay products may be entering the basement and sticking to dust particles. Most of the time the dust is fairly dilute, but under certain conditions (fans, filters) the dust can become concentrated. That would account for the monotonically increasing radiation levels observed in the airflow calorimeter. Dust was being pulled into the chamber at a faster rate than the Rn decay products were decaying. Once the fan was turned off no new Rn entered the chamber (or furnace air filter) and the radiation level returned to normal. The tricky part is that the half lives of Rn decay products have half lives measured in minutes, so 6 hours is many half lives. That would explain the apparent "activation" that I reported earlier. It was most likely radioactive dust with short lived isotopes of Po, Bi, Pb that I was observing. Look up the Rn decay diagram; half lives and decay products are listed. It would also explain why testing of dust on the floor and in a vacuum cleaner not used for weeks would return background levels.

    Ecco. Good idea Regarding the Clean room/Softwall enclosure.


    As a further improvement I suppose filling it with inert gas or dry nitrogen would be out of the question but maybe keeping it under slightly positive pressure or venting it with filtered maybe dry air might help keep the dust from coming in some how.


    It might help capture any released gasses and particles from the experiment too. Maybe if Helium is generated and escaping maybe it will collect at the top of the tent and be detectable there. (I understand that Helium can leak even easier than molecular H2). Maybe it would be interesting to make an analysis of any collected helium and hydrogen isotopes too.


    (Hopefully the tent does not float away though due to the heat, Hydrogen and helium ;))


    Maybe we get different activated particles inside the tent than on the outside too. maybe those inside have to come from reactions with particles generated there.


    It may also be a reasonably good additional particle shield to those out side protecting from emissions from the experiment and activated particles in the surrounding environment.


    Maybe does not need to be so big, just big enough to enclose the experiment. Not the user as well?

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    I'm not so sure why dust radioactivity should reduce after 6 hours. Obviously Radon decay happens all the time and is not affected by moving dust. The chain of decay products have varying half-lives, some of which are long - but no reason for overall radioactivity to change.


    Radon, being a gas is not collected with dust. But when it decays, the "radon progeny" are solids, and they stick to dust in the air. It's the inhalation of the dust that is mainly responsible for the health hazard. When the dust is collected in a filter or on a surface it is less exposed (per unit mass) to radon in the air, and so the activity should be expected to decrease.


    The progeny represents a chain of reaction products ending on Pb-206, with a wide range of half-lives, some 28 minutes, some 20 minutes, some 8 minutes, some days or years. Since it's a sequential decay with around 8 steps on average, it's not unreasonable to expect a decrease on a multi-hour time scale, depending on which of the nuclides emit the gammas.


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    If, for example, Radon gas were released over time from dust not otherwise highly active that would make sense.


    I don't think it's this. Radon comes from radium, almost exclusively, and that's found in minerals in the earth. It's when radium decays that the radon escapes into the air, and then *its* products end up in the dust.

    There is a type of vacuum cleaner that filters out the incoming dust through a container of water then mops up the leftovers with a fine particulate filter. Perhaps you can set up a similar water filter to clean the dust from the air going into your chamber. I would assume you only need to clean out the dust from the experiment chamber/area.


    Or just use the output of the vacuum cleaner if you can find one.

    I made measurements without running any equipment that uses fans and found that rad levels did not rise above the 0.03 mr/hr which had been established as a background level. So as long as none of the equipment concentrates dust, it should be possible to perform rad measurements down to background. As a final experiment I removed the cell from the calorimeter chamber and heated the Ni wire with the cell set on the table on a ceramic tile. No radiation above background was observed at the voltage levels previously tested. I think this makes a fairly strong case for the hypothesis of accumulated radioactive dust. But best most persuasive proof would be to obtain gamma spectra from the dust.

    This MFMP burst is a one time thing that occurs at the start of the excess heat generation phase of the LENR reaction. It is a change of state between what had been to what will be. In order to understand this burst, we must understand what this phase change is.


    I say that this phase change is from a state of quantum decoherence to a state of coherence, This might mark the beginning of the formation of a Bose condensate.


    This BEC formation corresponds to the reduction in the resistance in the wire during the experiment. I recommend that the wire resistance is monitored just before and then after the gamma burst.


    This can be checked experimentally. When the Bose condensate is formed, hit the reactor with a HUGE magnetic field to destroy the BEC. Use a capacitor bank discharge through a coil. This will cause the release of stored energy in the BEC as it comes apart.


    The destruction of the BEC is called a Bosenova.

    Alan and Mark have been kind enough to lend me a cooled CdTe gamma spectrometer for a few days. With it I was able to calibrate from a known source and then measure the spectrum of dust captured by running the basement furnace fan. Some qualitative conclusions. Most of the radiation I could measure consists of betas. A few seconds from a 1 uC Co57 source was sufficient to generate ~100 samples in some channels. By contrast, it took over 10 minutes to get sufficient events to construct a usable spectrum from the dust. So the gamma emanation levels from dust are relatively low.


    But the dust still registers >5 mrem/hr with a GM detector, so the CdTe detector must not be capturing most of the events. To differentiate between radiation types I placed three different absorbers between the air filter and a GM pancake detector: 0.15 mm Al, 0.9 mm Pb and 17.5 mm Pb. The Al had almost no effect on radiation levels, so it's not alphas. 0.25 mm Pb stopped almost all radiation, so it could be betas or low energy gammas, but the CdTe detector did not detect high gamma rates in the 10-100 KeV range. A 661 KeV Cs137 source produced gammas that easily went through the 0.15 mm Pb, but no through 17.5 mm of Pb. So by the process of elimination it would appear that most of the radiation from the dust is betas.


    Using a sufficiently long acquisition time it was still possible to get a repeatable 10-130 KeV gamma spectrum from the dust. I'm still evaluating the data to determine the isotopic species that would produce the observed spectrum. BTW, the CdTe detector has excellent resolution, coming close to a LN2 cooled Si or Ge detector. The only limitation is imposed by the detector's small size which precludes accurate measurement much above 100 KeV due to the fact that the high energy gammas exit the detector before losing their full energy. I'll publish the isotopic results once I match gamma energies to isotopes.

    @jeff


    Nice work.
    Do you still have the detector?
    A neat test would be to put the detector facing (not behind) the thick Pb at a small distance and slight angle, and the same side of the Pb facing the sky.
    You might see some increased xray hits at 78 keV from Pb being hit by cosmic gammas.
    Just wondering...

    The production of beta is an assumption that might not be valid. It could be that the LENR reaction in the wire is producing Exotic Neutral Particles(ENP) that become airborne and float in the air in the lab space. When the blower filters the air, these ENP a captured in the filter and continue to produce the LENR reaction inside the filter. The radiation could be x-rays that are still being produced by the LENR reaction going on inside the air filter.


    Place a film on the filter for 24 hours and see if we see any tracks from the betas. Or use a cloud chamber with a magnetic field to visualize the circular paths that the beta particles are taking in the magnetic field. It could be that only gammas are being produced by the LENR reaction. If you see straight particle paths, it could be muons.

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