Posts by joshua cude

TheGomp wrote:

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It is time now for very extreme and diligent refinements of the experiments and that is where trained observers can direct their absolutely essential and proper criticism.

Now is the time? 27 years after the first claim of nuclear heat from the Ni-H system, it becomes time for diligent refinements? A phenomenon that has revolutionary, positive implications for energy consumption waits 27 years to perform diligent measurements?

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The gaps and holes in the experiments are genuine, but quite understandable at this point.

I respectfully disagree. It is not understandable to me that someone would make such claims without filling in the gaps and holes first. Particularly, since they're not difficult to address. The field is 27 years old. Surely, a few weeks of diligent refinements would save everyone a lot of time.

When Roentgen discovered X-rays, he didn't make wild claims after his first observation. He wanted to be absolutely sure, so "In the following weeks he ate and slept in his laboratory as he investigated many properties of the new rays he temporarily termed "X-rays", ... Nearly two weeks after his discovery, he took the very first picture using X-rays of his wife Anna Bertha's hand. When she saw her skeleton she exclaimed "I have seen my death!" ... At one point while he was investigating the ability of various materials to stop the rays, Röntgen brought a small piece of lead into position while a discharge was occurring. Röntgen thus saw the first radiographic image, his own flickering ghostly skeleton on the barium platinocyanide screen. He later reported that it was at this point that he determined to continue his experiments in secrecy, because he feared for his professional reputation if his observations were in error." -- from Wikipedia

When he emerged, he was ready to publish and to demonstrate the effect unequivocally to anyone.

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Clearly if there is a LENR at all, it is an extremely subtle and delicate phenomenon to induce.

This experiment, if it represents LENR, suggests otherwise. Nickel wire heated in a hydrogen atmosphere produced radiation 3 consecutive times.

But the claim, like others, is not likely to survive scrutiny. As always, the effect is close to background, even though this measurement is a million times more sensitive than heat measurement.

Indeed, the fact that this impression that the phenomenon is subtle and delicate for a variety of different measurements that range in sensitivity by factors of a billion, suggest that it is much more likely that it does not exist. That no measurement is definitive, whether heat and helium are measured requiring nuclear reaction rates in the range of 10^11 per second, or for tritium, easily detectable for rates a million times lower, or for gamma rays and neutrons a thousand or a million times lower still, or for transmutations involving radioactive nuclides at least as low, would require nature conspiring to prevent discovery of the process, much as she seemed to conspire in the 19th century to prevent discovery of the rest frame of the ether, until Einstein showed it was superfluous.

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Constructive skepticism and relentless experimentation seem to be making progress.

Again, I disagree. The measurements under discussion here are far more primitive and preliminary than the many attempted measurements of radiation, tritium, neutrons, transmutations, and gamma rays over the years, and most of those with positive claims were primitive enough.

AlainCo wrote:

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This is why asking high energy radiation with heat is like asking horse manure as evidence to birds existence. This is also why it is a popular demand, since it is impossible to fulfil.

I was not asking that they be observed together. Only that claiming two independent unprecedented nuclear reactions that contrive to prevent discovery of their nature is far less likely than claiming a single one. Especially if one of them produces measurable radiation. Characterizing measurable radiation (particularly gamma rays at the level many times background) has been done with high sensitivity and specificity for more than 60 or 70 years. If after 27 years of studying cold fusion, one would hope it would be possible to say more than "we saw gamma rays".

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Excess heat is enough evidence, provided the observes are competent, this mean are chemist.

But so far the evidence for excess heat has not been considered good enough to conclude a nuclear origin by most competent scientists, including two DOE expert panels enlisted to examine the best evidence.

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even if He4/heat evidence in PdD is even better.

The same goes for the heat/He4 evidence, most of which after the crude claims by Miles in the early 90s, which were challenged in the literature, have not even passed the modest standard of peer review.

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You don't ask an expert in horse manure to analyse bird feather, so you don't ask a nuclear physicists to analyse a calorimetry paper, and reciprocally.

Nuclear physicist use calorimetry too.

Moreover, when claiming an energy density a million times higher than gasoline, it hardly seems necessary to need expertise in calorimetry. There are many claims that cold fusion has already reached the stage of practical application. If that were true, anyone should be able to tell if it works. You don't need expertise in aerodynamics to know that airplanes can fly.

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Here the radioactivity evidences are intriguing, but to be honest NiH evidence today are far from the quality of PdD evidence from the 1990s.

The absence of any progress in the field, to which you admit here, is characteristic of pathological science.

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Jeff anyway have done a serious job, and he just need to add some cross-checking, like using shields, moving sensors, adding ambiance sensors...

I quite agree.

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Note that the theory of magic radioactive dust is reminding me an invisible unicorn joke.

Radioactive dust is no more magical than cold fusion.

Eric Walker wrote:

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I would have expected there to be inelastic collisions/Coulomb excitation from energetic alphas. Is this not really the case in practice?

Evidently not, which is why RTGs can be so easily shielded, and why Po-210 can be easily transported without setting of radiation alarms. In the case of Pu-238, the product of alpha decay (U-234) is sometimes formed in the excited state, and it relaxes producing low energy gammas at 42, 99, and 150 keV, and they in turn produce X-rays at 17 keV. These are easily shielded with a small amount of lead.

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A difficulty is that there is not as yet a "lab rat" experiment that can be run over and over in order to study it in minute detail by different labs. Once there is one, I suppose academic labs will make short work of most of the questions.

I understood this experiment was reproducible. If it's not, then yes, it is more difficult to characterize, but also less credible.

In any case, if they can produce it sometimes, they could at least be ready with some lead shielding to place next to the wire to see if the rate is affected. There is no delay involved here. The signal should immediately change and return when the lead is withdrawn. A far smaller effect (if any) would be observed with the same thickness of aluminum. Also, if they put 5 wires in, the probability of the effect, as well as the intensity should be expected to increase.

magicsound wrote:

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@Joshua We make no claim of excess heat resulting from radiation. We just observed the radiation and are now discussing it. Available sky survey data for cosmic rays shows no abnormal events during that period. Stray dust won't account for it, because no such source shows up in extensive survey of the local environment. If you have a more plausible explanation for it, please share the details.

If you have a plausible explanation involving nuclear reactions, please share the details,

I suspect it is some kind of artifact, but without additional experiments, I can't propose a detailed explanation involving artifacts.

Others think it is nuclear reactions within the wire caused by heat and the combination of nickel and hydrogen, but without additional experiments, no one can provide a detailed explanation involving nuclear reactions.

Artifacts of this type are quite common in measurements of radiation. Nuclear reactions in this context would involve revolutionary new science that is extremely rare.

Therefore, until better evidence is presented, an artifact of some kind is vastly more likely.

At the very least, the origin of the signal could be localized far better with some simple experiments using lead and aluminum shielding, with control experiments using other elements, or by using more wire to produce higher signal, and other simple and more sophisticated experiments.

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If the radiation is primarily high-energy beta (electrons), it would be thermalized in the reactor tube or air around the reactor. The apparent Brehmsstralung broad-band gamma spectrum we saw suggests this is a possible scenario.

The continuum observed by MFMP is consistent with beta emission, but the rate is too low by many orders of magnitude to account for the heat. Moreover, the radiation occurs allegedly only at the onset of excess heat in the MFMP narrative. So, again, there would have to be two different reactions or processes happening, both of which have eluded characterization for 27 years, and one of which produces easily measurable radiation. Even if characteristic x-rays are too low in energy for MFMP's equipment, surely Piantelli and Focardi, in university labs, could have done as well as scientists did in the 50s to characterize the radiation. They've had a lot of time.

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On the contrary - radiation disappears in the thermalization process.

I'm don't understand why that's "on the contrary".

The increased implausibility comes from the existence of *2* unlikely nuclear reactions, both somehow not allowing the discovery of their nature, even though one of them produces detectable radiation.

And only alpha emission could thermalize without being detected, and even that could be detected if you put the emitting wire right next to the detector.

I should elaborate a little on the Pu-238 decay. The product of alpha decay (U-234) is formed 1/3 of the time in an excited state, and emits low energy gamma-rays, mostly at 42 keV (which in turn produces 17 keV X-rays from the uranium), but also at 99 and 150 keV. So, a small amount of lead is necessary to shield these low energy gammas.

But again, these are all dead easy not only to detect (without the lead), but to characterize in ridiculous detail.

Detailed measurement of these emissions from Pu-238 was published at least as early as 1954 (Phys Rev 94 (1954) 381). Here's the abstract:

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The alpha and gamma spectra of Pu-238 have been studied with an alpha-particle spectrograph and gamma- ray scintillation and proportional counters. Alpha groups of 5.495 (72 percent), 5.452 (28 percent), and 5.352 Mev (0.09 percent) and electromagnetic radiations of 17 (13 percent), 43.8 +/- 0.5 (0.038 percent), 99 +/- 2 (0.008 percent), and 150 +/- 2 kev (0.001 percent) were observed.

If, in the present experiment, the emissions persist for more than an hour after shut down, there is no reason, some 60 years after the above report, that the emissions can not be identified with similar specificity. It's been 27 years since Piantelli first claimed cold fusion from the Ni-H system. Even if the current crop of amateurs don't have the necessary instrumentation, Piantelli surely did or does. And yet his few claims of radiation measurement are not much more sophisticated, or more credible, than these recent results.

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so: heat with no to low radiation is not plausible?

In fact, heat with low radiation is used in radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Pu-238 decays almost exclusively by alpha decay, which is extremely easy to shield against. The alpha decay thermalizes in the fuel or in thin shielding and is used to make electricity, and little to nothing gets out.

But even this alpha decay is dead easy to detect if you want to detect it, and of course it has been exquisitely characterized. Far weaker alpha decay in your smoke detector can be detected with an inexpensive GM tube.

But the reaction that produces the heat (alpha decay) does not produce gammas.

If there are gammas produced, either directly by the heat producing reaction, or as secondary gammas from beta decay in the heat producing reaction, then the count rate would be unmistakeable, and dangerous.

So, a single extraordinary radiationless reaction associated with LENR, while extremely unlikely, is far more likely than two extraordinary reactions, both of which contrive to prevent the discovery of their nature, while one of them actually produces measurable radiation.

The likelihood that these alleged, very low level, emissions (that no one can characterize) are somehow associated with another unlikely reaction (that no one can characterize) that produces measurable heat is extremely remote.

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That would of course mean you had two independent physical quantities with extraordinary measurements and a theoretically predictable connection between the two. The history of LENR observations has avoided that - except for the highly contentious claims (leakage, result selection, etc) of He/excess heat correlation.

If the same reaction produces heat and radiation, then the radiation should be much more intense. Of course, some large fraction could be absorbed, but it's not plausible that in all the various reports of measured radiation, with wildly different geometries, with and without shielding, with detectors inside the cells, etc, that only a few parts in a billion get to the detectors.

The alternative is that there are at least two different reactions, neither of which anyone has been able to characterize in 27 years, even the one that produces measurable radiation. That seems inconceivable to me in a day and age when we can identify isotopes in the US produced at Fukushima 5 years ago at levels 3 orders of magnitude *below* background intensities (of K-40 e.g.).

Also, quickly pass the detector very near the reactor to see if the signal increases dramatically (as it should) before there is time to cause any heating. This would be especially interesting after the reactor is shut down, but the signal is still observed.

You can also do experiments with photographic film to detect shorter wavelength x-rays.

Good grief.

Radiation is not some mysterious entity that we should have to wonder if it's there or not. It's not 1895 anymore, and even then they were more systematic and effective at identifying the source with primitive electrometers.

If you can make this elevated GM signal come and go by the flick of a switch, then you are in a position to identify the source and the nature of the radioactivity, although the nature will require more than a GM tube.

Someone already recommended lead shields around the detector, but even better, place a cm or 2 of lead near the wire, but between the wire and the detector. The signal should decrease and increase as you move the lead in place and withdraw it. Compare what happens when you do it with the same thickness of aluminum (which will block em interference as effectively, but not gamma rays).

Use 5 wires at the same temperature and see if you get 5 times the signal.

As others have suggested, use controls with other metals or other gases. Yes, LENR could be happening everywhere, but surely not with the same intensity with completely different elements.

(And by the way, an exponential decay (if that's what it is) is characteristic of things other than radiation, such as capacitor discharge or thermal cooling.)

If these simple experiments show that indeed what you are seeing is coming from the wires, and only when they are heated, then it's time to get a gamma ray spectrometer. You can probably borrow one from a university physics department if you also borrow a graduate student to accompany it. Or better still, take the reactor to a university lab, and test it there. Then you will also have access to calibrated sources that you can place in the location of the wire, and see how the detector reacts to them and to the same shielding experiments.

This ain't rocket science. Freshman physics experiments measure lead half-thicknesses with similar strength sources. If you avail yourself of some existing expertise, you will either put this to bed quickly, or become world famous.

And as always, keep in mind that if the same reaction that produces radiation also produces measurable heat, then the corresponding decay rate will be a billion times higher than background -- not 10 times or less.

[ETA: Marie Curie found that isolated radium remained warmer to the touch than its surroundings. She died of aplastic anemia caused by exposure to radiation.]

Shane wrote:

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I detect some generational conflict that may possibly interfere with sound judgement. It seems the unorthodox presentation of a veritable "youngster", has aroused the Ivory Tower (since the theme for the day is Towers) custodians out of their tenured slumber.

Sure. That must be it. Because the skeptics have never criticized the stodgy Storms, or the well-coiffed and well-spoken McKubre. They willingly accepted pronouncements from the lettered Levi, the educated Essen, and the bookish Kullander.

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Look, it doesn't matter who claims gravity influences nuclear reaction rates, they're not gonna be taken seriously, no matter how much they crouch and growl as they say it.

axil wrote:

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Granted, Bob G will sharpen his analogy as discussion progresses.

Not a matter of sharpening. If he doesn't mean absolute mass (weight), then the Saturn analogy is wrong. He was talking about gravitational force, not nuclear binding. His comments in the forum bear that out.

Anyway, you shouldn't be making excuses for Greenyer -- he's not making them for you.

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LENR seems to want to minimise nuclear energy per nucleon.

You mean maximize the average nuclear binding energy per nucleon. And it's not LENR, it's nature. In an *exothermic* nuclear reaction, the *average* binding energy per nucleon increases.

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We can extract nuclear energy from Ni58 but not from Ni62.

But then why does he want to put Ni62 in the reactor?

And actually, you can get nuclear energy by reacting Ni62. If it captures a neutron or a proton, it will release energy as a gamma. That's because the *average* binding energy for Ni63 is higher than it is for [Ni62 + n]. That is BE(Ni63)/63 > BE(Ni62)/63.

Ni is the 7th or 8th lightest transition metal of the 30 or 40 elements so identified, so "it's because they're heavy" doesn't seem as important as other factors. Also, the gravitational force is about 10^36 times smaller than the Coulomb force between a proton and Ni-62 nucleus. Seems kind of too small to matter.

axil wrote:

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When Bob G says heavy, he means the most nuclear binding energy per nucleon. Ni62 has the most nuclear binding energy per nucleon of any element, In that sense, Ni62 is the heaviest element.

That doesn't fit with Bob G's saturn analogy though, where it is clear he is talking about the increased mass of the planet.

And the highest binding energy per nucleon means the lowest mass per nucleon. That is, Ni-62 is the lightest nuclide per unit nucleon.

Well, the elevated background continuum wasn't really convincing to me, but the animated gif on their web site started to tickle my confidence. And now, with Bob Greenyer making jazz hands just when the "huge" signal hits, it's truly undeniable. No one can maintain skepticism against *that* presentation. I'm a puddle of admiration.

axil quotes Rossi:

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Andrea Rossi

August 23rd, 2011 at 9:52 AM

Dear Erik Ander:

We produce gamma rays, and our energy comes from their thermalization.

Warm Regards,

A.R.

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Yes, I know Rossi has claimed gamma rays. But if we are to simply believe Rossi, then there would be no skeptics.

The question was why none of the measurements in the "independent" reports show radiation of any kind? Even when holes were drilled in the shielding. And even in the Lugano experiment where there was no shielding.

Bob Higgins wrote:

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Piantelli was seriously burned on his arm by radiation emitted from a window on his reactor at one point.

He got burned, and he couldn't report a quantitative measure? Sounds fishy. In fact, a radiation burn in university lab would have been big news.

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Celani is a skilled nuclear researcher. I trust his report.

The doubt arises from the nature of the measurement, not the measurer. It was anecdotal, and brief. Which is to say not systematic, repeatable, and unequivocally connected to the experiment.

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Celani's detector was NaI, which is a more efficient scintillator.

It's not more efficient than NaI, and Mauro Villa used 2 NaI detectors in the same experiment in much closer proximity to the reactor. Bianchini used a NaI detector for the Lugano experiment also.

In any case, Celani claimed a huge surge far above background. All the detectors were efficient enough to detect background, and therefore would be able to detect a surge far above background.

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In the Oct 6, 2011 test of Rossi's reactor a 2" NaI detector was used. I don't recall what was measured or if it was reported. That reactor was surrounded internally by 5cm of lead.

But in the Jan 2011 experiment Villa drilled 1 cm holes in the lead and placed the NaI detectors just outside the holes. And in the Levi 2013 and Lugano tests there was no lead shielding.

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This is a bunch of lead and Rossi is no fool. He put it there because he was seeing emissions and didn't want to be shut down by the regulatory agencies. Rossi is careful to have radiations checked and reported only on reactors he has carefully shielded - his product opportunity relies on that.

Again, there were holes drilled in the lead in Jan 2011, and there was clearly no lead in Lugano.

It's possible Rossi used lead to get people to think there was radiation.

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The MFMP test was perhaps the least shielded measurement Ni-H spectrum ever taken because the mass/cm^2 between the fuel and the scintillator was VERY small compared to most test setups historically checked. It is even less than Rossi's original, unshielded eCats.

I don't believe that. The Jan 2011 experiment with the holes drilled and the detectors much closer represent a more sensitive measure.

The Lugano experiment had no more shielding than yours, and Bianchini used NaI, GM, and 16 TLDs, and according to the report, "The active probes and the TLD positions was chosen to be at the closest position accessible by operators around the support frame."

Bob Higgins:

Do you have any thoughts on the complete absence of radiation observed from ecats by any person tasked with measuring it since 2011? The only report of radiation is anecdotal and completely non-quantitative from Celani, and that might have been caused by a person passing by with a calibrant, or recent thyroid treatment, or a malfunction.

1. In the Jan 15, 2011 demo (the one Celani saw his burst), Bianchini used an organic scintillator sensitive from 23 keV to 7 MeV, and reported "no evidence ... of meaningful differences in the measured values compared to the background...."

2. In the same experiment, Mauro Villa used 2 NaI scintillators and measured the radiation at close range through two 1-cm holes drilled in the shielding. He reported "no gamma radiation above the background level in the energy region > 200 keV has been observed, neither in single counting, not in coincidence" (By the way, the steps taken to characterize the counter and geometry using gamma sources is quite impressive.)

3. In Levi2013, Bianchini's report is "available on request", but the conclusions are "The measurements performed did not detect any significant differences in exposure and CPM (Counts per Minute), with respect to instrument and ambient background, which may be imputed to the operation of the E-Cat prototypes”.

4. Bianchini writes an appendix for the Lugano report, for which he used a NaI scintillator detector sensitive from 50 keV to 2 MeV, with a rate meter alarm and connection to a pc logger, a neutron detector, a GM tube, and 16 thermoluminescent dosimeters. Measurements were made before, during, and after, and no radiation above background was detected.

Bob Higgins wrote:

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I would like to know the nuclear basis for this statement. If the floor dust is that radioactive where Alan lives, I think it would be a dangerous place to call home. The amount of energy detected in the GS5.2 experiment would have been plenty to set off radiation alarms at most facilities that handle radioactive materials and monitor for radiation in the hallways. Such contaminating materials (radioisotopes) display a gamma line spectrum when detectable and are identifiable by this line - this was not seen. Radon and its daughters are very hard to detect via gamma because all of the decay chain emit alpha or beta.

The high energy broadband spectrum measured in GS5.2 had plenty of signal-to-noise and no evidence of radioisotope lines, making it a unique signal. The fact that the signal showed in only a few of the 24 integrations, and never while the reactor was inactive, provides further correlation of the signal to the reactor activity. The lead cave around the NaI scintillator limited the field of view of the detector to a small solid angle that did not include much more than the active LENR test cell. All of these combine to make your explanation for the signal source to be essentially null.

The much more likely explanation is that the gamma signal came from the active reactor....While not enough radiant flux was measured in GS5.2 to have created measurable excess heat, this radiation signal is a clear indication of the onset of some type of LENR.

You seem to have a double standard for your evidence.

Unable to conceive of an artifact that could explain the observation, you rule out artifacts, or at least judge their possibility as highly unlikely.

Unable to conceive of a nuclear reaction or a mechanism for such a nuclear reaction (only betas up to 1 MeV and no characteristic gammas) does not deter you at all from claiming that a nuclear reaction (associated with LENR in the reactor) is nevertheless much more likely.

And yet, the sort of signal observed in spectrum 7 has essentially the same profile as the background signal, only a factor of 5 higher. I think it would be difficult to account for the background continuum, and yet it is there, and it is not an indication of nuclear reactions in the cell. So, a factor of 5 excursion in a 4 hour period, amounting to an average of 20 counts per second, could also have an unknown origin that is not associated with LENR in the cell. Especially considering any LENR reaction that produces heat would have to occur at a rate some billion times higher.

Excursions like this, or anomalies in measurement of radiation are not at all uncommon at the level of a few times background. It's impossible remotely to find a specific artifact to explain what you saw, but they happen. Sometimes, it's just some kind of electrical glitch, as when Jones et al. claimed neutrons from LENR, and later retracted, or probably when Prelas claimed a strong neutron signal back in the early 90s. His subsequent attempts to reproduce with SKINR funding have failed. Sometimes it's a change (temporary) in shielding or, someone carries a set of gamma spectroscopy calibrants in the vicinity, or sometimes the discrimination level varies a little, and sometimes software can produce a scale change.

I'm not saying any of these are particularly plausible, only that the alternative is particularly implausible. LENR would represent a once-in-a-century revolution. So, between common artifact and revolutionary breakthrough, simple reasoning should suggest that artifact is many times more likely.

The correlation -- that an anomalous rate was not observed when the reactor was "inactive" -- is not significant. Isn't it true that most of the integrations taken when it was active produced no anomaly, and that there were many more of them. So this is statistically meaningless.

And because of this sort of reasoning, careful scientists who see such an anomaly, would never announce a revolution to the world, even tentatively, until at least the simplest and most obvious checks have been made.

The most obvious of course is to see it again, but at least as necessary is to run the spectrometer for a similar length of time (preferably much longer) with the reactor fired up without fuel (since electrical anomalies may be related to powering the reactor).

And GM tubes are cheap enough that you could have half a dozen situated around the reactor to look for a correlated event. As you say, the energy extends out to an MeV, so there should be no difficulty detecting them with GM tubes. (By the way, what have you found from your analysis of the GMC-320 data?)

And as others have suggested, try to reproduce that signal with known sources placed at the reactor position. Get a strong beta emitter and put it near similar materials and see if you can reproduce the data.

Or as I said before, look for characteristic x-rays with a lower energy detector, or add suitable elements that produce higher energy x-rays.

Still better, wait for it to happen again, and while it's happening, put some shielding around the reactor and see if it stops, and comes back when the shielding is lifted.

I seriously don't believe a reputable nuclear scientist would make a claim as has been made here without being able to generate the signal at will and to perform simple and unambiguous tests on it. You say it's a clear indication of LENR. It's the furthest thing from clear to me.