MIT CLUB OF NORTHERN CALIFORNIA - Peter Hagelstein : Cold Fusion - Real, But Is It Ready?

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Cold fusion experiments produce little of the dangerous reaction products (neurons, gamma rays, or radioactive isotopes) that are seen in fission or traditional fusion reactions. Furthermore, the conditions necessary for cold fusion are modest compared to traditional hot fusion or fission, supporting much lower cost, high energy density implementations.

Anyone who supports the meme that the LENR reaction is a fusion reaction is not supporting the reality of LENR.

Quote from AlainCo

about fusion or not fusion, it is not hot fusion as in plasma or accelerator, but if you put D and He4 emerge with about 24MeV generated, and as long as no theory is confirmed, some kind of fusion (as pep ded fusion, or screened dd fusion) is a possibility.

anyone who is sure of how it happens is ... prematurely... sure.

https://websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/…r_112/lectures/notes8.pdf

The proton proton fusion reaction only happens inside stars. It starts at a temperature of 4,000,000 k. In other words, PP fusion is not possible at room temperature. Even inside the core of the sun, a proton will fusion once on the average of 14 billion years.

The reaction rate will depend on temperature and pressure. In the Sun, pressure is ~265 billion bar, so the reaction can proceed at 10-15 million K. The rate of reaction is actually very low, the center of the Sun only produces energy at rate of ~277 Watts per cubic meter. On Earth, we can not built a reactor with pressure this high, so higher temperature is needed. Different reactions such as starting with deuterium or tritium are used to avoid the need for the proton-proton reaction. Then fusion could be achieved in the ~100 million K range for example.

If the heat production capacity of the Sun is 277 Watts per cubic meter, how does a LENR reactor the size of a fuse at room temperature produce the same amount of heat?

This fusion nonsense is why science believes that belief in cold fusion is psychotic.

LENR is caused by a single reaction. We can not say that deutrium and protium reacted differently in LENR.

I'm still puzzling at the idea of a proton in the sun fusing once on average every 14 billion years, (IOW probably not even once, on average, since the solar system formed), being able to heat the sun at all.

Quote from Alan Smith

It would be very wrong to regard the sun as being a homogenous clump of matter. There are many mysteries about the sun, one of them being that the outer plasma envelope - the corona is much hotter than the surface. There are other puzzles, too. For example, it appears to have a hole in it - see below. So I think your question, though pertinent, is based on a flawed assumption.

https://www.newscientist.com/a…-the-suns-missing-matter/

Basically, the problem that science has with the Standard Solar Model (SSM) is that it is completely wrong. Parameters in that model just don't add up. In order for the PP fusion reaction to function, the ash produced by fusion should be far greater in heavy elements than it now appears to be. As it stands now, the ash that is measured by helioseismology implies that the temperature of the Sun's core is too low to produce the PP fusion reaction rates required to power the Sun.

When Science realizes that the Sun is powered by LENR, then the numbers generated by the new LENR based SSM will all balance out nicely.

Quote from AlainCo

I don't see anything in what you say that can exclude the collectively enhanced pep/ded/ped/tet/pet/det fusion proposed by Storms, or screening.

by the way only PdD experiments are widely replicated, producing mostly 4He, and seldom 3H.

modesty in that domain would help.

Science has worked the numbers to show that the forces required to fuse two protons together is far, far, far too great to be achieved at room temperature. Even a hot fusion reactor can not reach the energies needed to produce PP fusion. This is why hot fusion in any type of fusion reaction will always use deuterium. In a hot fusion reaction, PP fusion requires temperatures in the hundreds of millions of degrees.

Note that pp fusion does not occur at temperatures lower that 4 million K. The energy production rate goes as the 4th power of temperature. This rate is very low even as the temperature greatly increases. The energy density generated by PP fusion is too low to produce the densities seen in LENR reactors.

Anyone who thinks that LENR is real must disabuse themselves of the fusion illusion.

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Anyone who thinks that LENR is real must disabuse themselves of the fusion illusion.

So after permanent flooding LENR forums with all these nonsensical theories you're finally getting to this conclusion? You did stole at least five hours of my life... :-]

Quote from Zephir_AWT

So after permanent flooding LENR forums with all these nonsensical theories you're finally getting to this conclusion? You did stole at least five hours of my life... :-]

Those theories are even more defied, connected,, compelling, and predictive. And I was hoping to steal far more of your life...it is so very delicious.

I would like to suggest suggest that Dr. Hagelstein look at the 20 or so SEM micrographs of the LENR fuel that ME356 has revealed and formulate a theory about what behavior that those micrographs show.

One unexpected data that comes from the ME356 SEMs that might change Dr. Hadelstein's theories is that the LENR reaction was in full swing in those SEMs in an air environment without hydrogen present.

The same data was seen in the Lugano test when Rossi loaded the tube with fuel in air. Such an insight shoud tell Dr. Hadelstein a lot about the nature of the LENR reaction. Don't you think?

Earth is more mysterious than SUN. It can be fused. You burn H you get H2O, water droplet will form. Heat binds nor separates. Thus in the process some parts of the so called atom will be lost/decay.

Quote from axil

The same data was seen in the Lugano test when Rossi loaded the tube with fuel in air. Such an insight shoud tell Dr. Hadelstein a lot about the nature of the LENR reaction. Don't you think?

That tells you the calorimetry did not work! It tells you the experiment was a meaningless failure. What else could it tell you?!?

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I'm still puzzling at the idea of a proton in the sun fusing once on average every 14 billion years

The low entropy of crystals is the key. Try to calculate the probability that three or more atoms align along a single line inside hot chaotic plasma, so that the projections of their nuclei overlap mutually. Try to compare it with probability of such aligning within common crystal lattice.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

The low entropy of crystals is the key. Try to calculate the probability that three or more atoms align along a single line inside hot chaotic plasma, so that the projections of their nuclei overlap mutually. Try to compare it with probability of such aligning within common crystal lattice.

OK..... But if the sun runs on P-P fusion (in theory), then one fusion every 14 billion years (roughly the age of the universe) does not make a sun.

One should calculate it first for to understand this value. One fusion per 14 billions years means, that 14 billions of hydrogen atoms will fuse each year, 4.4×10¹⁷ atoms will merge each second. And one gram of hydrogen contains 6.022×10²³ of hydrogen atoms and it has volume of six microliters inside Sun core. Each microliter therefore fuses millions of protons each second, which could generate the heat in range of few watts per cubic meter. Every compost pile is more powerful source of heat, than the core of Sun.

I just like, how the main source of energy for terrestrial life runs with power density, which is consistent with both seeming age of Universe at its elementary scale or heat density production within living organisms itself.

Each proton might fusion once in 14 Ga. Makes more sense.

Much better than "Even inside the core of the sun, a proton will fusion once on the average of 14 billion years."

I guess I was a bit too preoccupied with other things to work out the meaning rather than the face value statement.

Quote from Paradigmnoia

OK..... But if the sun runs on P-P fusion (in theory), then one fusion every 14 billion years (roughly the age of the universe) does not make a sun.

I suspect a missing parameter or several here. Should not that p-p cross section be multiplied by the immense number of protons in the Sun's core? Density and mean free path? Density and number of potentially interacting nucleons? Temperature and mean velocity? The 276.5 W/m³ is in almost exclusively from the core that is within 0.30 of the solar radius, and said power density itself a mean value, if I recall it correctly. The modest temperature outward from the surface is due to the core energy flux flowing outward stochastically to ultimately interact with the surface and coronal plasma. It is a surface to volume problem writ on a huge scale. The energy of a compressed core at about the level of "a well turned compost heap" must be for the core only, that energy (taken as the product of 277 W times a huge volume, takes enormous time to work its way to the surface though processes such as radiation, conduction, convection and phonon / photon handoffs. Ultimately the surface must irradiate or otherwise blow off this immense energy, but the surface area is also immense and provides large area dissipation path for energy produced mainly from the core--- hence the relatively low surface temperature and relatively low emission rate of a megajoule or so per square meter (water boiling can match that dissipation rate, IIRC).

From the NASA fact sheet for the Sun:

Central pressure: 2.477 X 10¹¹ bar

Central temperature: 1.571 X 10⁷ kelvin

Central density: 1.622 X 10⁵ kg / m³

Surface emission: 10⁶ J/m²s

Using the "never to be trusted for controversial information" online encyclopedia, we can see that: Beyond the core, which is generally considered to be about 0.25 of the solar radius, there is very little fusion energy produced. However in the core and particularly deep in the core the confinement, collisional frequency and energy of collisions is sufficient to give a core average of over 10³⁸ p-p reactions per second-- vanishingly small for any two nucleons taken as a pair, but I welcome corrections to my hunch that this is mostly due to the immense number of potentially reacting nucleons, and perhaps to a lessor extent to some approximation of the Lawson Criterion.

Preliminary calculations, welcoming corrections, of course:

Since the core has something on the order of 2 X 10³⁰ kg mass, and on average the core is around 50% hydrogen ("34%" at the center, "90.9%" near the surface), we can expect the one missing population parameter to give a multiplier of 6 X 10²³ nuclei per mole X 1000 g per kg X 10³⁰ as above, at 50% H. The product there would be

6 X 10⁵⁶ protons and/or deuterons, or "Np". Since 14 million years is about 6.2 X 10²¹ seconds, we can infer that 6 X 10⁵⁶ / 6.2 X 10²¹ is about 10³⁵ , suggesting A) that we are close to a simple understanding of the p-p fusion rate in the sun's core, and that B) the confinement parameter (>250 billion bar) and the temperature (10 to 15 million K) together might easily provide the missing factor of a thousand by analogy if not identity with Lawson parameters.