Experimental evidence to date for He / excess heat correlation in LENR experiments to have nuclear mechanism

Quote from Hermes

I appreciate Lomax that you don't like clear cut nuclear evidence from light hydrogen experiments. Perhaps you have or can find criticism of the experiment?

I'm offended at the suggestion that I dislike "clear cut evidence" of any kind. What would be more correct would be that I'm working on what is most solidly establshed, with many confirmations, not isolated reports. There are reports of what appears to be clear cut, but unconformed. Huizenga was totally impressed with Miles, in the second edition of his book (1993), but simply expected that Miles would not be confirmed.

When there are a lot of people looking, they find all kinds of stuff, including artifacts. Science progresses by following up and confirming. Otherwise the report sits as unconfirmed, and it might sit that way forever.

(True disconfirmation reproduces the original results and then demonstrates with controlled experiment that it was artifact. This may or may not be possible.) I am looking at the paper cited.

Okay, that report by Bush and Eagleton, a conference paper, claims correlation of radiation and excess heat, but, in fact, a single coincidence does not establish correlation. Heat was measured in one experiment and then a series of possible transmutations, weakly established, were summed to create a value close to that experimental result. One cathode was monitored for radioactivity after the experiment, showing it.

Bottom line, this is not the FP Heat Effect. It is alleged LENR, but not clearly established as such. This seems to be one result that might have been worth following up on. I don't know that this was ever done.

In helium synthesis, the reaction rate to produce measurable heat is, as I recall, about 10^11 per second. Here a peak count rate is compared to less than 3 x 10^7 counts per day.

it has been a fairly common finding that electrolytic cathodes, stored with X-ray film, create a radioautograph. The count rate that will do that is not very high. Here, 245 counts per second were observed. Tritium is known to be a common product, at roughly a million times down from helium. Tritium would produce beta radiation. X-rays are reported, there are many reports.

No levels are high. And that was the point, not that there was "no radiation." A more accurate statement is that with the FP Heat Effect, significant charged particle radiation is below 20 keV, the "Hagelstein limit." In discussing the heat/helium ratio, the question would be energy leakage through radiation that leaves the cell. Low energy x-rays that would be detected in the Bush and Eagleton cathode would not leave the cell. But this is not he FP experiment, and, again, may be quite different.

With the FP experiment, the lack of an identified ash other than helium, and the lack of significant radiation that would escape the cell, and an assumption that the fuel is deuterium, leads to a prediction of a heat/helium ratio of 23.8 MeV. It's that simple. And it is testable, has already been tested and confirmed in a variety of experiments, and is being and will be confirmed (or disconfirmed, of course) with increased precision.

A ratio different from 23.8 MeV/4He would indicate the involvement of other reactions or products (neutrinos, for example, could leak energy but be very difficult to detect). If the correlation remains strong, it remains strong as "nuclear evidence."

Confirmed, this establishes *one set of conditions* that set up the conversion of deuterium to helium, which most of us would call "fusion. It is obviously unlikely to e a characteristic of hydrogen reactions, for example. It does not prove that other results were valid.

Quote from Hermes

LENR is not magic. It has to be consistent with the laws of physics.

I will quibble a bit with this, but I sympathize. We will not accept the violation of known and established principles of physics or any science without very strong and confirmed evidence.

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You can't just wave your hands and say we only get helium when deuterons get sufficiently close to each other. Hot or cold, they will produce standard hot fusion products. This is what we observe with muon catalysed fusion too. If we get helium and we don't get neutrons and tritium then there must be another mechanism [working] which explains why. Please don't call it hot fusion.

Right.

Remarkably, this was missed by many of the early skeptics, who simply assumed that if it was nuclear, it was fusion and if it was fusion, it was d-d fusion and, of course that was an f-level impossibility and would have produced copious neutrons and then, if somehow the branching ratio was warped drastically to make helium, where are the gammas?

Reading those comments now, 27 years later, it is remarkable, the unexamined assumption. It is easy to understand, in fact, I mean, what else could it be? Turns out there are indeed other possibilities

It's difficult to investigate and nothing so far has been conclusively demonstrated. I will say that deuterium is being converted to helium, but that's about it. How and why, if I had a time machine I could probably tell you. I do think it will eventually be understood.

Quote from Wyttenbach

Thus to my understanding classical LENR is fully contained in a close NAE which confines products and radiation.

Quote from Wyttenbach

Hermes wrote:

Please: Just read the old post's of Peter Ekstrom!

D-D is the main path of hot-fusion. D-T is a very rare subbranch.

All people working in dying conventional fusion physics don't like to hear this..sorry!

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"Branch" refers to outcome, not reactants.

D-D fusion generally goes one of two branches: D+D -> T + proton, or D+D -> 3He + neutron. The very rare branch is D+D -> 4He + gamma.

Wyttenbach's comment has nothing to do with what Hermes wrote. The distinction between hot and cold fusion is incident energy. Storms causes substantial confusion by called muon-catalyzed fusion "hot fusion," when it takes place at close to absolute zero, experimentally. He calls it that because the products are those of hot fusion, and he's right about that.

Muon-catalyzed fusion tells us much about what cold fusion probably is not.

Quote from Hermes

Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
that report by Bush and Eagleton, a conference paper, claims correlation of radiation and excess heat, but, in fact, a single coincidence does not establish correlation.

I agree. What it does establish there was a significant production of gammas of unknown energy which decayed over time. This is far better evidence than any meausurement of stable helium of a nuclear phenomenon.

"A nuclear phenomenon." This thinking took LENR down many confusing paths. Yes, that finding is interesting, as I wrote, but does this have anything to do with cold fusion? It got completely ridiculous with work that showed CR-39 tracks in the head space of an electrolytic cell. Oriani claimed reproducibility, but his data did not show any variation of results with electrolytic current, and the controls were not matched. Kowalski et al attempted to confirm, and with Oriani's cooperation, could not.

The problem commonly is post hoc analysis. We did this and we find this pattern in it. Great. That's exploration. Now go do it again. Same pattern? You may be onto something. But often in these experiments "same pattern" actually is only "we saw something we can't explain other than by Theory X."

When you look for weird stuff, you find it. Then what?

If that work had shown that the level of radiation was correlated with the level of heat shown in the electrolysis preceding it, I'd be more interested. If this were clearly shown to indicate a specific reaction, even more interested. Otherwise this was an anomaly among very many of them. And then we run into the file drawer effect, or, at least, the possibility of a plausible claim of that effect.

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This is a cheap experiment to repeat, and if properly instrumented would give direct information regarding the underlying gamma emitter(s). This in turn would probably allow identification of the reaction(s).

Great. So repeat it!

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In a previous post I mentioned I found 3 issues with the Bush & Eagleton paper. The first was that the authors appeared to be unaware that natural rubidium is radio-active! A gamma measurement at least should have been made. My initial feelings were to ignore the paper without further consideration. But subsequently I looked up the 87Rb with NUDAT and found that there are no gammas accompanying the beta decay. So I had been wrong.

Control experiments. Correlations, i.e, results the same experiment repeated many times., perhaps with a single variable, or a natural variable. (In heat/helium work, the unreliability of the heat effect itself creates a single variable, the reaction, and then there are two possible effects to be examined for correlation. As well as others.

Many experiments allowed temperature to vary. That creates confusing data. I prefer to see supplemental heat that is then varied to maintain temperature, and this is a measure of excess power, how much the supplemental heat is backed off to keep the temperature constant. We think the reaction rate varies directly with temperature, and so supplemental heat experiments run close to boiling are likely to show stronger results (Storms reports this).

SRI did extensive systematic work. Most work in the field, though, has been exploratory, and always trying to find the magic way to get "better" results. My ontology suggests this is not powerful. Work with what already exists.

And heat/helium fits that. We don't need "better reactions." Just what has already been done.

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Lomax my remark on your likes is not offensive, at least not intended to be. Is it not the case you remain unconvinced about the light hydrogen anomalies notwithstanding countless independent verifications in the literature (far more than Q/4He results)?

The offense is subtle and common among pseudoskeptics. Mind-reading. I don't trade in "conviction." What I do is to note that NiH reactions are not as broadly confirmed as PdD. And that's just a fact. Until PdD is accepted by the mainstream, I'm not going to push NiH. Personally, let's put it this way: I am less convinced about NiH than about PdD. My general sense, though, is that it is likely some reactions are taking place.

The field is actually vast and could absorb billions of dollars in research. My goal is to see that this is applied efficiently, rather than scattershot. That will require setting aside some findings to confirm others. For a time. Eventually, my hope would be that every alley is explored and mapped.

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The problem as I see it, is that your objectives are sociological to demonstrate some historical claim in order to convince people. This is not science which, in contrast attempts to understand a phenomenon

This is black and white thinking and is ontologically naive. My goal is to encourage genuine scientific study, i.e., confirmation/disconfirmation, which then creates data upon which understanding may be based.

The plan I developed is actually being followed. It is not merely "historical." In all science, we use history as the body of data on which we based understanding. The goal of science, though, is not exactly understanding, it is prediction. If we can predict results, we may think we understand a phenomenon. "Understanding" is brain chemistry, it is not objective. When we believe we understand, we may shut down inquiry, that's the danger of understanding.

But, obviously, understanding is quite useful!

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This is why it is perfectly appropriate to speak of likes / dislikes.

Based on your fantasy of how I think.

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So long as the science is ignored we shall never make progress.

But that's my point, often.

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Maybe you will tell us that we will never have the resources to do the right science unless we convince the establishment. And I answer why not do good science, cheaply, AND convince the establishment with clear nuclear evidence at the same time?

I would never say never.

If you can do what you suggest, do it! Do realize that thousands of people have been trying to do this for about 27 years. What I found in the data this effort generated is "clear nuclear evidence," that was not circumstantial and that was not the file drawer effect. It's already been confirmed. Yet the sociological conditions, the way that science is done and seen socially, have not allowed this information to penetrate the world-view of decision-makers. You call them "the establishment." Okay, the establishment. The human establishment. The way that society operates, real world.

The problem is "old work." The problem is that some of this work was never "properly published." It was debated in the journals (notably with Jones), and Miles -- Storm's opinion -- defended his work successfully. But the real defense would be in confirmations. This was considered important and public agencies paid SRI to investigate. SRI confirmed. But this wasn't published in "proper" journals. And SRI M4, the most precise experiment, was one experiment with certain flaws, mostly in presentation. (i.e., McKubre made a mistake in the figure he used for head space, corrected it, and Krivit raked him over the coals for "changing data." But McKubre DGAF, he presents what he has. He's a professional. Bottom line, it would be in order to repeat with increased precision. The same thing with ENEA, Violante (Apicella et al). They confirmed heat/helium. But it was only three experiments and only one used anodic reversal, the one with the least heat. This experiment was noteworthy because they did not exclude ambient helium, so "leakage" is not an issue. This was increase over ambient.

Originally skeptics requested helium above ambient, that would convince them. Then they moved to ten times ambient, that would be enough. What do they need, rising party balloons?

Generating that much helium requires generating high energy. It's not easy, and we don't necessarily have the technology to do it yet. The plan I developed works with what we have, not what we might want or think useful.

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Back in 1927 Friedrich Paneth and Kurt Peters claimed helium nucleosynthesis from hydrogen, but they later retracted the result and suggested that the measured helium was from the environment. Such possible artifacts (and other issues) continue to cast suspicion on helium measurements today. In contrast massive radio-activity is incontrovertible evidence of a nuclear source. I cannot explain this any more clearly! Dismissing this result as an isolated conference paper without good reason seems bizarre. But maybe you have a good reason, (as I thought I did). If so, what is it?

The problem is that the core reaction, the best known, the FP Heat Effect, heat seen with electrolysis using palladium cathodes in heavy water, appears to not produce such radiation *at substantial levels.* Around this is a penumbra of similar experiments. Co-deposition, for example, same materials basically, has been shown to generate neutrons, the SPAWAR results are clear. But unconfirmed. If you want to do a SPAWAR experiment, I have the materials for about $100. You'd need to supply a power supply, and some other miscellany, easy. This uses a gold wire cathode substrate and with LR-115 radiation detector films. I used that because it's much easier to image and interpret. (LR-115 is a beautiful material, under-utilized.)

The levels of radiation seen in the paper you pointed to were not substantial. This is a secondary effect of whatever happened in the cell. Yes, it shows "nuclear," I agree. But nuclear what? Contamination? To find out takes additional work, study, care. Once again, correlation, correlation, correlation.

is there a repeatable radiation effect? (Little or no repeatability was shown. This was simply an incident report. Those are valuable, but it's dangerous to place much interpretive weight on them.)

If the effect is repeatable, then, are there correlations? (with cell temperature, with electrolytic current or net input energy, with other conditions and controls, with measured excess heat?)

Quote from Wyttenbach

Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

So neutron count is around 0.5/event. (kinetic hot fusion of free/loosely coupled particles)

Yes. However, this also happens with muon-catalyzed fusion, the particles are chemically bound. So plasma fusion and MCF, the same results. Many theories fail to consider this.

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Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

That's the problem in sono-fusion. The incident energy is very high. But it is not a single D flying onto a target, which is well known from literature. In sono-fusion a ultra thin, one dimensional, strongly correlated stream of Deuterium moves onto a target.

It's hot fusion. By the way, hot fusion with condensed matter targets is known to generate higher rates. "Ultra thin" on the nuclear scale is meaningless. That "stream" is plasma, hitting a cold target. So the incident energies are high, this is hot fusion. How hot?

I'll repeat this: hot fusion rates in a mixed environment (condensed matter plus high energy incident particles) are different, apparently much higher. Do remember that most hot fusion is still by tunneling. The Coulomb barrier is not actually overcome. It's just closer, so the tunneling rate becomes significant.

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The same problem occurs also with the Holmlid experiment. The incident energy is very high, even higher than in ITER...

Holmlid is unconfirmed. I've discussed this with him, a little. He doesn't care. He just keeps pumping out more and more work based on his prior publications.

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I seems that in a strongly correlated environment energy can be mediated.

Again, though, this is not clearly cold fusion.

May be we should define a LENR reaction as following: Nuclear reaction in a mediating (strongly corelated) environment (=NRME).

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==> and forget about the incident energy.

You may forget anything you like. We won't. The field is called CMNS. Condensed matter, which implies low relative energies. LENR, low-energy nuclear reactions, referring to incident energy. LANR, referring to lattice-assisted, and lattice does not exist in a plasma. (Then there is crossover, as you point out, plasma hitting a condensed matter target).

However, the vast variety of possibilities confuses, until a uniting key is found. If we can unlock one mystery, it is likely that this key will open, or partly open, other doors.