There's two things that are different in this case — (1) I'm looking at the question of heavy screening of nuclei lighter than the actinides and seeing what kind of activity might be expected (if you really crank up the electron screening); and (2) we're supposing spontaneous fission rather than fission following upon neutron capture. Although the fragments may fall away from the line of stability, there are many branches that lead to stable daughters, so much will depend upon what the predicted rates look like.
The line of stable nuclei is bent all the way down to light nuclei (where fission is endothermic), so fission will always yield neutron rich nuclei. Even if some end up in stable nuclei, most will be radioactive with easily detected radiation. No radiation, no fission! And how does fission help you to explain reactions with Ni?
I'm not doing elemental analysis, per se. I'm attempting to do modeling of decay rates of isotopes of various elements under electron screening, and this is why I've been talking about elements such as "platinum" and "palladium". Really I'm talking about isotopes of these elements.
There are experimental papers where only elemental analysis was performed. What I meant was that these results may be unreliable.
Alpha decay arises by the same mechanism as spontaneous fission (tunneling through the Coulomb barrier), so it's natural to deal with both. Alpha decay is being used to look at the helium in LENR helium/heat experiments, and fission is being used to look at the heat. As Hermes suggests, perhaps it's all very unpromising!
Both alpha decay and fission are more complex than just barrier penetration! I agree with Hermes that fission is probably not the explanation for LENR.
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