Account of Thermacore 1996 Runaway Incident (Jones Beene, Vortex-l)

Given my experience with Nickel and Hydrogen, I believe this report. All you guys have to do NOW, is explain it...
Replication is a dangerous (foolish) pursuit until after this has been explained and can be understood.
Suggestion = Hydrinos!

I suggest you read Piantelli & Focardi paper September 1999 that reported 360 neutrons counted per minute as measured by 3He neutron detectors and also indirectly by 197Au foil being activated. The main danger is invisible radiation.

Quote from Hank Mills

Was the reactor vessel in this test spherical? I've long wondered if that might be the best way to guarantee results if there are secondary emission products that might be wasted if they hit the walls of the reactor. Instead of a long and skinny reactor,…

Read Rossi's patent, which says to spread the fuel out as thinly as possible between big heat sinks (so as to AVOID thermal runaways).

Hi all

I asked this else where:

Does any one know if the Dewer vessel was Chrome plated?

My reasons for asking are the place Chromium has in hydrogen embrittlement and its use along with Nickel in T ray detection.

Kind Regards walker

Quote from Walker

My reasons for asking are the place Chromium has in hydrogen embrittlement and its use along with Nickel in T ray detection.

Most steel contain Cr! At least enough for supporting a LENR catalytic reaction.

Yes, and Saint George slayed a dragon.

Now, could someone please mount the same horse and slay the same dragon? No? Children stories, then...

Notice this portion, from Moraitis:

"Has
Piantelli ever provided a mathematical model for the replacement of a
shell electron by a hydride anion? One might expect that such a process
would release energy (independent of a subsequent fusion event). Perhaps
this could explain why there is sometimes radiation and sometimes not,
even if excess heat is produced."

Longview comments and conjectures, inviting critical input:

To me, anyway, there is a fascinating possibility of an orbital proton, perhaps under narrowly constrained conditions. This could lead to what could be analogous to muonic fusion, that is a muon with 207 times the mass of the electron, orbits 207 times closer to the nucleus than does an electron and hence greatly increases the cross section for fusion events (well demonstrated, not controversial, largely accepted by conventional dogmatists). What about a proton orbiting a strong 1s bond? Can it persist long enough for the fusion to occur, where this time the orbital diameter is about 1/1836 of an electronic orbital? And what about aromatic (relatively non-reactive C-C=C-C=C ring structures in "buckyballs" etc.) structures of even greater strength / non-reactivity? Can such protonic orbitals be set to persist by oscillating EM fields of particular resonant frequencies?

So asked another way, is it possible that say a carbon-carbon or nickel-nickel 1s orbital is strong enough to endure such stress for long enough to allow a collapse to a fusion event? I would presume the product might be a neutronic adduct. Of course we have the difficulty of empirical evidence of 2n, 4n etc. being observed or at least reported to be observed. Can that be reconciled with any protonic orbital idea, and if so, how so?

Is there a possibility of an orbitsphere where a neutron is held by it's magnetic moment, (rather than a proton in a peculiar state) in a special circumstance? What if the neutron and an electron were to share an orbitsphere?
Just wondering out loud...

But where would such a neutron come from.... I'm open to the idea, just don't quite see the source.

On the mark Longview. In view of the Thermocore incident, I think the only safe way to proceed for a large mass experiment is a government sponsored experiment on the nuclear testing areas out West. Appropriate radiation detectors would quickly determine what is going on. All remote control, of course.

I deliberately use only very small masses of nickel. That is very interesting that me356 is using a large mass. That suggests that a minimum mass perhaps is required to go "critical" , just as in a normal reactor. Alternatively, maybe the heat just couldn't escape and it was not a nuclear critical reaction.

Here is a little mystery for everyone: long ago, when I worked as a civilian scientist for the US Navy, one of my bosses, a PhD, said that it was his belief that hydrogen cylinders were filled with nickel to absorb more gas. These were ordinary steel high pressure gas cylinders. Maybe he was misinformed. Or, maybe the nickel was more coarse. I don't know.

Upon further thought, perhaps this is an explanation for the Thermocore incident.

LENR experiments have consistently shown that it is movement of hydrogen that seems to be associated with heat production. If so, perhaps the nickel that Thermocore used, already had a hydrogen content and the long term vacuum treatment was removing the hypothetical hydrogen. There is the hydrogen flux for you.

On another matter, all the sceptics here on this forum and indeed everywhere, fail to explain all the meltdown incidents. That alone is sufficient to demonstrate the falsity of their scepticism.

@Longview,
If it is not possible, it does not matter where the neutron might come from. I am sort of working backwards here.
A neutron easily defeats the Coulomb barrier.
A neutron and an electron can defeat the exclusion principle... If there is an element that can accept them in equivalent orbitspheres, even if for different reasons.

I am attempting to subvert the impossible by changing the problem. Maybe the ideas go nowhere. But doing the impossible is not possible by definition.

@Paradigmnoia

Yes, I guess that is the whole beauty of neutronic hypotheses, that is the coulomb barrier is not an issue. It is also the "attraction" so-to-speak of the electron assisted models. I wonder what the modeling programs say about such mechanisms-- if they were suitably encoded in the parameters. Recall Storms' NAE, which in its most advanced and likely actual form is a "crack" that is a place where say p-e-p-e-p-e-p-e-p and be confined to align in parallel with an electrostatic potential (vector potential?).... can that stack up and oscillating field stimulation or one or another stress lead to some sort of fusion such as local neutron production? I know dimensional constraints are a big deal in thermodynamic modeling, look at all the effort that is made to understand the stochastic (probabilistic) behavior of reactants leading to strange fractions such as 3/5 and so on. It shows me that constraining dimensions of mobility can and could change reaction stochastics dramatically. The surface reactivity is often exactly what promotes chemical reactions in catalysis. I know a favorite "nit pick" is that the application of catalysis to nuclear is unproven or unworkable or way out of scale by say 10^6. I am not sure of that, particularly if electrons are major actors. Besides, who says nuclei don't see electronic (chemical) effects? Both Mossbauer and beta decay and its possible contextual variability suggest otherwise.

Well, maybe I'm reaching too far there, and maybe it does not mean much. Welcoming criticism!

Longview

Quote from Hank Mills

If this experiment was to be repeated, I hope it would be tested multiple times with a wide array of different nickel powder types, particle sizes, different levels of cleaning, and hydrogenation. My thinking is that very good cleaning of carbonyl…

When you buy what's called "carbonyl" nickel powder, it's actually >99.5% pure nickel with a surface layer of nickel oxide that you are buying, made using the carbonyl process (developed by Mond in 1890's for extraction & purification of nickel metal). Hydrogenation (at ~10 Bar and up to ~350C) is then able to reduce the oxide layer: NiO + H2 > Ni + H2O. The water released can be collected and measured to determine the degree of nickel porosity.

This was the kind of macro-porous nickel that experienced temperature runaways from 200C to well over 1000C in <20 seconds, once or twice a week.

N.B. Nickel carbonyl is actually an extremely toxic vapor, but it reacts quickly at ambient conditions with air and moisture to form the oxide.

>>Hank, So many questions!...

Chemists know that if you want interesting reactions to occur with nickel then the oxide needs to be reduced to pure nickel metal. Pure nickel metal absorbs hydrogen on to (or into?) its surface, creating highly reactive sites that can catalyze a variety of chemical reactions. Rossi says he's using nickel. I am assuming he means nickel metal.

Deoxidizing (i.e. reducing) nickel oxide is a pretty routine chemical process. However, it's best done under positive H2 pressure (15-25 Bar) and by starting at low temperature (~180C) and raising that temperature up by about 20C per hour until you reach ~380C and then soak there for a further 8 hours (approx). With flushing of course to remove the H2O produced (& condensed and measured) and provision of more pure Hydrogen as required. Electrolytic grade hydrogen required (with zero ppm CO+CO2) or else the active nickel sites will be contaminated with carbonyl ligands.

OTOH, what little knowledge I have concerning Lithium and LiAlH4 is all derived from a variety of Wikipedia articles and the references. Very interesting.

My first-hand experience was of very rapid temperature runaways (to >>1,000 degrees C) leading to damaged thermo-couples and clumps of fused nickel metal. Nickel melts at 1445C. These temperature "excursions" (once or twice a week) in the laboratory I was supervising in 1972/73 were a damn nuisance!

The temperature required for LENR to happen seems to vary enormously depending upon the experimental set-up circumstances! My own particular experience with nickel and hydrogen inclines me towards believing a Rossi-type reactor (as per the photograph included in Mat Lewan's book) will actually work.

The nuclear reaction of high-energy protons with lithium is well known to science (since 1932). It produces high-energy alpha particles. What seems to be NOT so well known to science is what happens to Hydrogen inside Nickel. How does nickel "catalyze" conversion of hydrogen atoms into high-energy protons?

@Alan Smith: Rossi never claimed using iron either, but the 2009 TOF-SIMS analyses that were given to Krivit in 2011 seem to be mostly showing iron or more broadly speaking something similar in composition to a typical Fischer-Tropsch catalyst with very little Ni. The logarithmic scale can be misleading. It's possible these were showing only a very limited portion of the "fuel", but I find that unlikely, given published results by others (Holmlid) using similar catalysts. I also wrote a thread about this in the past.

Rossi LENR might have not always been Ni/Ni+Li.

I have also suggested a variant of the ferrosilicon-sodium hydroxide reaction as an alternate hydrogen path. The iron is sort of a place holder in the standard reaction formula, but could participate, especially at higher temperatures. The reaction can be modified using a variety of different metals and alkalis. And water could possibly be left out for a weaker version at higher temperatures (the hydroxides being sufficient or maybe more hydroxide added by another substitution), in which case the reaction could act as a getter for oxygen while releasing hydrogen.

See this for a primer: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ese3.94/pdf