me356: Celani Ni Wire replication

I'm curious to see more details on the experiment protocol and data (hopefully post calibrations have been performed and verification with other methods than using an Optris camera have been as well), but in general the latest claims/reports, assuming they are real, have quite some implications on where replication efforts should be going.

If in addition to elevated radiations like Jeff, me356 now also claims significant excess heat (1.5x, better than all previously known western Lugano replications and possibly better than the Lugano experiment itself) just by using several meters of Ni wire in a closed cell, what's the point of keeping experimenting with hazardous micro/nano Ni powder, hard to obtain LiAlH4 and reactive Li? This sounds easier, cheaper and safer to replicate. It apparently also requires much less time for anomalies to arise in both cases than what was previously often assumed to be needed.

With respect to Rossi's weight loss Mats Lewan said on vortex-l

Quote

Yes Axil,

I spoke to Holmlid, and one thing that he underlined was possible large amounts of muons from the reaction, and that muons were hard to detect. He said that that he suspected that also LENR reactions could have this effect, without LENR experimenters knowing it.

Like neutrons, very low energy muons could be hazardous. I have ask the experimenters many times to check for sub-atomic particle generation from LENR experiments. That means the experimenter must use a cloud chamber or a cell phone based particle detector.

We must understand what is coming out of these reactions at the least for safety sake.

me356's work is the main reason I signed up here.

https://www.quora.com/How-is-muon-radiation-measured

Quote

Any radiation detector that works on the principle of sensing the charge liberated in matter is going to detect muons directly. Geiger counters, ion chambers, scintillators, toy cloud chambers, and pocket dosimeters all work on this principle, and all respond to muons. In fact, all these detectors are very sensitive to muons: if a muon passes through or is absorbed in the detector, there is a very high probability that the signal it creates will be "counted" by the instrument. The question from a dosimetry standpoint is how to interpret this signal in terms of human health impact and that is what I will get to in Parts 2-3 below. Continuing briefly on the issues of muon detection, although the common types of electronic radiation detectors are sensitive to muons, they are not selective toward them. To selectively detect muons against a background that also contains alpha / beta / gamma radiations from terrestrial radioactive decay, one exploits facts such as the exceptional penetrating power of energetic muons (which barrel through with a mean energy at the Earth's surface of ~2-4 GeV, if we are talking about cosmogenic muons), or the particle's characteristic half-life (1.5 microseconds). One approach to detecting muons and only muons is to look for coincident signals in two or more detectors that are separated by shielding, a flight path of some length, or both. In large, dense detectors, there is a reasonable chance of stopping the muon and detecting subsequent decay in accordance with the 1.5-microsecond half life. Finally, neutron detectors also respond to cosmogenic muons. This is because the muon and its daughter radiations have enough energy to tear apart stable nuclei in spallation and photonuclear reactions with the liberation of neutrons. If you stack lead bricks around a neutron detector, the count rate rises rather substantially. Muon interactions in the lead are responsible for the secondary neutrons being generated. (This effect is generally a nuisance, a source of irregular background in low-level neutron counting work.)

2. Dosimetry of muons

Muons can kill. In principle, they--like all ionizing radiation--can rip apart the chemical bonds in the DNA in your cells, causing malignant cells to form and multiply, with the result that you die of cancer. (And in large enough doses, they could kill you by deterministic effects like acute radiation syndrome.) Radiation dosimetry is concerned with calculating the risk of such outcomes. Typically, radiation detectors used for dosimetry measure the electric charge released in the detector material by the radiation. This measurement then must be used to calculate a dosimetric quantity of interest. Sometimes we are concerned simply with absorbed dose, which is the amount of energy the radiation is depositing in our bodies on a mass basis, and energy released in matter is related to charge released in matter in an uncomplicated way. However, the risk of death by cancer is related to a concept called effective dose--the deposited-energy-per-mass dose weighted by a biological factor that accounts for how the particular radiation interacts in the body. The weighting factor depends on the type of radiation, its energy spectrum, and how densely it ionizes material in its path. Muons are interesting in this regard, because they are like little explosive-tipped artillery shells. They cause some damage passing through your meat, but they do more damage if they are stopped within your meat and "explode" (undergo decay, usually to an electron that carries off a substantial fraction of the rest mass energy of the muon as its own kinetic energy.) What this means for effective dose calculation is that the biological weighting factor is HIGH for slower muons that are more likely to stop in your meat, but not too different from the weighting factor for radioactive decay gamma rays at the high energies that we normally experience in the cosmogenic muon flux at Earth's surface. Dosimetric instruments that are designed to measure dose from gamma rays are therefore ballpark-accurate in measuring dose from muons. A well-made, calibrated, properly-used dosimeter that reads in effective dose units like rem or Sievert has some quantitative credibility when measuring cosmogenic muon radiation.

3. Your risk of being killed by muons (muicide)

Let's consider an average person living at sea level. Googling "muon flux at sea level" returns a number of reasonably-authoritative sources putting this quantity at 1/(cm^2 min) = 0.017/(cm^2 s) = 170/(m^2 s). The mean energy is in the range of 2-4 GeV; this is important because I am about to make an assumption that there are few muons below 0.1 GeV in this spectrum. (Muons of <0.1 GeV energy, as mentioned above, tend to decay within your body and cause more damage, so their weighting factor is higher.) The other piece of information we need is a flux-to-equivalent-dose conversion for muons in the energy environs of one GeV. This datum can also be found trivially using teh Google, on p. 55 of The Dosimetry of Ionizing Radiation, Vol. 3 by Gerard Meurant: 40 fSv m^2. Multiplying the flux by the the conversion factor, we get an effective dose rate at sea level due to muons: 40*170 = 6800 fSv/s = 0.21 mSv/year. A dose of 1 Sv confers a 5% excesschance of fatal cancer. Multiplying 0.21 mSv by 5% gives us a 0.001% excess chance of fatal cancer per year due to muons in the environment. Generally, your chance of kicking the bucket due to cancer as opposed to some other cause is about 25%, so the 0.001% excess is an absolute chance of 2.7E-6, and there is our answer: about one person in 370,000 will bite the big one due to muon exposure received in the course of one year. This is broadly about as risky as driving 100 miles. But, unless you want to live your life under a glacier, in a mine shaft, or in a submarine, there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide from these little extraterrestrial bullets. All you can do is sit back and bewail your unfortunate lot in life, destined to die some day--perhaps done in by the flying remains of some ancient supernova.

Display More

@axil: probably a tad off-topic but still interesting, given that it might be related to the anomalous radiation emission of amateur LENR experiments.

Holmlid observed a muon signal in the several MeV range, which I think would be considered "slow" given that those reaching sea level from cosmic radiation are in the 2-4 GeV range on average.

A magnetized iron shield is highly promising for bending muons away from working areas. This method of shielding would be very effective for low kinetic energy muons that can be easily diverted magnetically.

Another way to deflect and capture escaping muons is to place the experiment between charged plates. Perhaps you could even measure an electric current as they are captured.

It is foolish to ignore the complete understanding of LENR in every detail before a LENR product is developed. For example, if LENR produces muons in vast numbers as Holmlid has shown, designing a Quark XCat is quizzical.

Rossi may need to discard his Quark factory and worse, his Quark design and start from scratch to meet safety requirements. Rossi really needs to discover what kind of animal he is trying to tame. If he doesn't, that animal might bite him bad. LENR may be moving way to fast for its own good.

For last few months I have made many of these reactors, all with the similar design, different size, ... And each one generated excess heat.
Calibrations and post-calibrations and all kinds of measurements were done with expensive equipments so there is not a big room for an errors.

Because of possibility to fill the hydrogen on demand, I have studied the behavior. Depending on the previous condition excess heat slowly appeared in a few minutes. After venting the hydrogen out the excess heat still remains, altough it will slightly drop (immediately) and then it takes at least one hour to return back to the calibration data.

Personally I am convinced that all kinds of radiation is present, but fortunately the reactor is running always in a special building with nobody present and controlled remotely.
Possible, but extremely low neutron radiation was measured (during 8 hour period) when the reactor was off for a few days. But "background" neutron radiation can't be excluded.

Measuring temperature with thermocouple is not possible, because of unknown interference. Measurement not possible in <10cm distance from the core. This kind of issue is not present with other reactors that are not giving excess heat but can produce much more intense EM because of the heater coil.

The results should be considered only in informative way, not to convince anybody. I believe that much more interesting results will be presented soon with all the details.

We haven't read much about your experiments in the past few months. What happened?

During this time I have tried to develop the best reactor design that is easy to build, cheap, reliable, safe and fully useable practically.
I have probably found solutions for all the problems. Now my focus is on the COP.

I have found answers for how to increase COP significantly, but the problem is neutron radiation. Then the experiment is not safe anymore.
Personally I am afraid that in the wrong hands it can be used for a wrong things.

Only by knowing the risks one can avoid them in time. The cat is out of the bag anyway; if this can be made with off-the shelf materials, components and equipment it's only a matter of time before ways to make it more dangerous are inadvertently found or found on purpose, especially if many people work on it at once. Regulators will have a hard time trying to figure out possible ways to prevent widespread usage of homemade nuclear reactors.

If emission of MeV-energy range muons is taking place like Leif Holmlid observed, then neutron emission is already indirectly occurring, as it's a possible outcome of muon capture.

Jeff recently may have observed that just after using a long nanostructured Ni wire in a low pressure (5 Torr) hydrogen environment.

Congratulations me !
Are you planning to do an experiment live for all of us?
and will you release the data (and calibration data)?

Quote from Ecco

Only by knowing the risks one can avoid them in time. The cat is out of the bag anyway; if this can be made with off-the shelf materials, components and equipment it's only a matter of time before ways to make it more dangerous are inadvertently found or found on purpose, especially if many people work on it at once. Regulators will have a hard time trying to figure out possible ways to prevent widespread usage of homemade nuclear reactors.

If emission of MeV-energy range muons is taking place like Leif Holmlid observed, then neutron emission is already indirectly occurring, as it's a possible outcome of muon capture.

Jeff recently may have observed that just after using a long nanostructured Ni wire in a low pressure (5 Torr) hydrogen environment.

Something very strange is happening. In the Holmlid experiments, even though fusion is occurring, where vast numbers of molecular fragments are produced moving at a goodly fraction of the speed of light, there are few if any neutrons appearing. The fusion in Holmlid's world is not hot fusion as he claims but something else, something strange and alien. Even when these high speed fragments hit structure, this impact energy is removed to the far field.

My best guess is that the energy of the fusion is moved to somewhere else and stored. Yes. elements are transformed but without that energy localized from this transformation, there is no follow on collateral damage, no neutrons and gamma rays. Most of the time energy is moved in a dark mode to some other place in the far field, but sometimes in fits and starts energy stays local.

Learning how this movement of energy behaves is a huge challenge in the future of LENR research. This unpredictability makes the situation dangerous. When you think you are safe and protected, you are not. Learning how to control this strangeness is not easy but required.

@axil: Holmlid explains it this way. The extremely large density of what he calls ultra-dense deuterium (metallized hydrogen in your words) prevents neutrons and most likely also gamma radiation from escaping, provided that the thickness of this layer is large enough. If this layer is depleted or thinned out for any reason, D-D fusion products can be observed. Here's an excerpt from http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhydene.2015.06.116 (emphasis mine):

This appears to be a separate phenomenon/effect than muon emission. Furthermore, direct DD fusion products should only be expected when using deuterium, not protium, and they do not appear to be the primary reason for the excess heat / output energy observed. This is an excerpt from http://scitation.aip.org/conte…si/86/8/10.1063/1.4928109 :

I think the calorimetric experiment he's referring about here is the one described in the following open access paper: http://scitation.aip.org/conte…dva/5/8/10.1063/1.4928572

@Ecco

Thanks for your research, it is appreciated.

fusing deuterium with itself has two branches that occur with nearly equal probability:

D + D→ T+ 1H
D + D→ 3He+ n

Where is the tritium? Every Deuterium fusion produces a neutron no matter how they are layered. It does not matter what the length of the mean free path is between fusion reactions, a neutron is always produced in DD fusion that produces 3He. If there are enough fusions, you get a fusion bomb blast. Nowhere did I ever hear that DD fusion produces mesons or muons; if Holmlid claims this, he should define what reaction he is talking about, not wave his hands. Excuse me if I sound like Cude.

If Holmlid is claiming to produce 4He, he needs tritium and he still gets a neutron.

D + T → 4He + n

Holmlid's fusion is not hot fusion. Hot fusion produces tons of neutrons; Holmlid has none.

If neutrons hit reactor structure, then there is a large amount of nuclear activation and resulting radioactivity from unstable isotopes.

@axil: (where is Tritium?) it looks like he explains it in http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijms.2014.10.004 but to be honest I have little idea if he's actually correct or not, so your mileage may vary. From the abstract:

Quote

[...] T emission is not observed, as expected due to the large reaction rate for T + D.

This might or might not apply to the reaction occurring without laser induction (i.e. "spontaneously" as defined in one of his most recent papers), which would be more similar to how typical LENR experiments are performed.

EDIT: (after seeing your EDIT) in the open access paper on calorimetric measurements he performed last year, Holmlid reiterates before concluding:

Quote

[...] However, the number of neutrons detected is small, possibly since they are retained by the very dense D(0) layer.

I guess it's possible he's wrong on the exact nature of the reaction, especially since the fate of most of the neutrons produced by the fusion reaction he observes seems to mostly be his speculation. After all, in the beginning he does acknowledge that:

Quote

The nuclear processes taking place in the D(0) material are probably not only ordinary D+D fusion.

If you ask me, I don't know what could be actually happening here. I've been interested in Holmlid's work primarily because of the usage of off-the-shelf catalysts to obtain the reaction, similarly to how nanostructured materials resembling real-world heterogeneous catalysts often are in many gas-loaded LENR experiments - as in Celani's case.

Given that the rest energy of a muon is ~207x that of an electron, yielding a value of ~105 MeV, I would be interested in understanding how muons could be created by any nuclear process involving lighter elements.

Jeff