Posts by Longview

Quote from joshua cude

Essentially all scientists working in the energy field (or advocating alternative energy) have rejected cold fusion implicitly. These people include Stephen Hawking and Brian Cox, who advocate hot fusion research,

Quite a discouraging future we face from these media star "genii" who have conducted few if any experiments of note. But they "advocate hot fusion research", Cude contends.

After many billions of dollars of funding, and over half a century of promises that controlled [hot] fusion is but "20 years away".

So, another $100 billion or more, and another 60 years.....

But, in spite of its dismal history, hot fusion research remains a billion dollar a year "industry". One of many continuing legacies of the Cold War it would seem. One of those enterprises that military decision makers, DOD contractors, particle physicists and their lobbyists can continue to deceive the public and their politicians into "patriotically" supporting.

But not if a cold or cooler form of fusion were demonstrated.

Cude's role...?

Quote from joshua cude

Right. And McKubre published modest excess power of a few percent in the early 90s, claiming a high reproducibility. But then in 1989 he admitted that "with hindsight, we may now conclude that the presumption of repeatable excess heat production was premature, and that this has limited the progress achieved…”

What did you mean to write there? Surely "the early 90s" comes after 1989--- was that supposed to be 1999?

And your accusation that Abd's advocacy "is paid for". Seems far more likely that your advocacy is paid for, considering the financial stakes and the immense resources of many of those with strong vested interests in opposing research in CF / LENR.

You can out yourself and your funding, as Abd has done on an occasion or two.

Quote from s_grey

Longview:
LiOH + H2 -> LiH + H2O
Chemist technologist enlightened on this matter.
His words - a reaction to the 99.99% goes towards the oxide without hydride.

There are some missing pieces here. And please notice my / our equation makes no mention of oxygen or air presence. The temperature we may assume to be in the range of 1000 deg C, but in any case over 700 and probably no more than 1350. The pressure is probably unknown, but in a sealed system it can be quite high.... certainly very far from STP. Another issue may be the form of the oxide, Li2O2 exists and may be generated through calcination of the hydroxide, analogous to CaO (quicklime) from calcination of calcium carbonate or hydroxide, also there is an Li2O "suboxide" form that can form. Lithium peroxide, or LiO exists and is the production precursor of lithium oxide Li2O2 of commerce, or so I read.

But, in the presence of excess hot hydrogen and an absence of air / oxygen, the story is likely very different and results in (at least at working temperature and pressure) the production of Lithium hydride. An important issue not seen in ordinary process chemistry, may well be that one may have to assess the compounds present at working temperature, since the reaction can reverse as the temperature is lowered back down. That is where the LiO (Li2O2) may be seen since the water may have by then escaped and the hydrogen may well be missing then as well. Or, other components present may well react rather irreversibly with the water / steam and take it out of the reversed reaction.

Pressure may well favor the production of Li2O2, since its molar volume is considerably less than that of LiH. [Vm or molar volume = molecular weight divided by mass density: LiH is ~10.4, whereas lithium oxide Li2O is ~14.84]. But the peroxide monomolecular form LiO has an Vm of ~9.93, so while it is a good bet that this form is the stable oxide at high temperatures, it may not be at high pressures.

So it all depends on:

1) When and where the assessment of lithium species present are/is made.
2) The total redox environment of the reaction, not just the presence of the simple components in "our" equation (oxygen, nitrogen, iron, other transition metals, aluminum etc).
3) The presence of water / and partial pressure of steam is likely an important variable.
4) The partial pressure of hydrogen is surely crucial.
5) The pressures reached at working temperature.
6) Any air in the system will contribute to raising the oxygen partial pressure and hence will have dose-dependent effect on the "at temperature" product, as well as that on recooling. With air present, LiO / Li2O2 may well predominate.

Bottom line:
Best not to assume too much of the chemistry. Once again the "proof" may be in the pudding itself, so to speak.
Controlling or manipulating the above listed variables may have important effects on any outcome. Proceed with
caution.

Quote from axil

Holmlid has produced up to 12 billion kaons in his experiments from the excitation of metalized hydrogen using a single low power laser pulse. This is unambiguous proof that proton decay is occurring in LENR.

OK, Axil, great. But, I see a positron exiting the system (diagram that does not seem to paste out for me, proton on the left pion [kaon?] on the right with positron above). What is to become of the likely terrestrial annihilation gamma decay from that? Is this the reason W-L or others postulate a gamma shield? And what about quark conservation, if you will excuse my ignorance.

Thanks, Longview

Quote from Abd

To complete what I'm saying about neutrons, there isn't any "neutron bottle." You cannot hold free neutrons. You cannot spin them in a centrifuge. They are not repelled or attracted by anything other than nuclear forces (which then may pull them into a nucleus, but most matter is empty space, and the neutrons will just wander through it until they find a nucleus to join, if there are any suitable. If you were to somehow accelerate a piece of matter that a slow neutron was within, the acceleration would not affect the neutron, it would continue on its merry inertia way. Fast neutrons will bounce off of nuclei. Slow neutrons, not generally.

Since I have received only comments from Eric Walker and from Abd Lomax on this proposal, I hope here to keep it alive a bit longer. Abd [above] had likely initially misread my recent suggestion re detection of ULM neutrons. To clarify a bit further, since I consider Abd a worthy and an able critic: I don't propose to "generate" neutrons by centrifugation, store them or push them in a "bottle". I propose that the hypothesized neutrons be given an initial velocity of a hundred or so meters per second. The idea is simple, conduct an LENR reaction in a centrifuge whose peripheral or tangential valocity at speed will be 100 to 200 metes per second (I have such a centrifuge, BTW, with four buckets that can accommodate up perhaps 500 cc and 500 g of "cargo" in each bucket).

Any ultra low momentum (ULM) neutrons so generated may well be expected to escape outward from the centrifuge in a disc of emission at the tangential velocity of centrifuge rotor, scattered to some vectorial extent by the inherent or birth ULM velocity of say ~7 m/s. ULM neutrons are clearly predicted by at least one theory, that is Widom-Larsen, and may be present by implication in other theories or nascent theories, such as Brillouin, and/or by Lundin & Lifgren. In my tentative, and I believe low cost proposal, the ULM neutron directionality, the escape from the surface of lattice of the 100-200 m/s tangential velocity relative to the frame of the laboratory would make detection, characterization and quantification much more accessible compared to the current nearly complete "black box" situation-- that is surely serving no one well.

My goal is primarily to gain basic information. For example: can we thereby readily dispose of the ULM neutron and perhaps other neutron LENR theories?

I'll remind the readers that central to the W-L idea is a p⁺ + e* --> n^o, where e* is, in the W-L case at least, one form or another of heavy electron sufficient to make up the modest mass balance deficiency in such a reaction.

Eric Walker suggested that in his view the presence of such neutrons would create all sorts of products that are not detected. Fair enough, but how much do we really know about the behavior of ULM neutrons? I propose that there may be a low but finite activation barrier slowing or preventing ULM neutron absorption by high cross section nuclei, which otherwise would be classically expected to form the bulk of the neutron absorption cross-section.

I am not proposing to answer, or attempting to answer questions validly raised to the W-L-S idea that gamma emissions are absorbed or otherwise obviated by patches of superconductive heavy electrons-- or whatever else W-L-S have proposed in augmenting their theory to address the "no dead grad student" problem. That needs to be addressed separately.

s_grey wrote:

"Clarification: there is no pure lithium. There are lithium hydroxide.
When heated in a hydrogen atmosphere becomes oxide. It was his use of
the active mass of the mixture with a Ni-Mh battery. "

For what it may be worth, and assuming a likely bit of machine-based mis-translation above, the product of H2 reduction of lithium hydroxide is LiH, lithium hydride not lithium oxide.

LiOH + H2 --> LiH + H2O

@magicsound

While the suggestions you make are sincere, I have doubt about the efficacy. After all this is much like the Wikipedia vetting process. Anyone on the "wrong side" of some controversial issue such as "Cold Fusion" at Wikipedia will be familiar with the rather miserable failures there. So, at least, let's be careful what we wish for.

Quote from Abd

Essentially, it seems you want to create neutrons in an accelerating bucket. The feasible accelerations are, I suspect, way too low to generate a neutron flux. Those neutrons will still be absorbed nearly immediately, before the matrix forming them is accelerated away.

Yes, my notion is likely dependent on the neutron flux being very much a surface or very near surface phenomenon. Of course the path out of the bucket must be evacuated or at least very low cross-section to ULM or cool neutrons. Even the 150 m/s neutrons are very cold... if I understand the relationship that you reiterate, they need to see nothing until they register on a suitable target for their assessment by induced short lived radioisotopes in the stationary periphery of the centrifuge or further out.

If the LENR process is generating ULM neutrons, and if it is confined to the surface of the generating substrate matrix, then nearly half of the neutrons would be disposed to exit the matrix with minimal chance at nuclear encounter before being accelerated away.

Quote from Eric Walker

"I also propose that the issue of ULM neutron hypotheses is important enough to merit at least some attention. Such hypotheses seem to persist due, at least in part, to their perceived relative untestability."

My impression is that it is the opposite of this in the case with Widom-Larsen. The implications would be so apparent and so counter to what is actually observed that the theory has already effectively been tested on many occasions. (As such, it seems unlikely that another test would put to rest the original W-L claims.)

I have not spent the time to familiarize myself with their replies to the following implications and would be interested in hearing what they would be from anyone who is more familiar with the work:

Neutron activation would be expected; not just activation lasting days, but also radionuclides with half-lives on the order of years, thousands of years, and millions of years, would be created. Free neutrons are indiscriminate in the radionuclides they create.
Even if the neutrons start out nearly stationary, a significant fraction would be expected to thermalize (attain thermal energies) by reflecting off of lattice sites and then escape the apparatus.

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OK, I like the ideas Eric, and they seem decisive. Perhaps something may be missed there, even though it sounds credible to my nuclear naivete.

Possible issue: are ULM neutrons truly indiscriminate in creating products? I suspect W-L-S view the process as somehow biased against long lived isotopes... easy in, easy out so to speak. The time to neutron absorption in W-L hypothesis is extremely short.... or so they claim. Is their an activation energy at low ambient cold neutron absorption that is missed or hidden with hotter neutrons?

Why harp on W-L?

Simple theory, at least some of W-L is.... which has attracted a lot of adherents.... admittedly not among the "experts"..... but once those expert folks are without the senatorial robes (that is from their possible failure to recognize reality), they begin to look a lot like the rest of the peasants :-).

@Abd

Thanks Abd, for at least addressing this proposal. As you read at least part of my notion, you should also note that I discounted "centrifuging" in the sense of g-force gradients. Instead I am proposing that any ULM neutron would be created (that is an LENR "cell of origin" is IN one or more of the centrifuge buckets) with a tangential velocity, and through inertia receive a trajectory tangential to the circle of the bucket and an effective velocity equal to that of the neutron source and its bucket. Of course such would carry any such neutron away from the bucket.... Such a mechanism would take even the slowest of ULM neutrons out of the W-L hypothetical context and provide sufficient tangential velocity and a defined disc of vectors to allow such (if present) to impact suitable targets on or through the safety wall of the centrifuge.

So for example there are relatively simple centrifuges that could readily impart 100 to 200 meter per second tangential velocity relative to a stationary target, to neutrons or aggregates thereof. The temperature of such neutrons would still be cryogenic. But, by separating such hypothetical neutrons from the immediate context claimed by W-L, I imagine that experiments such as this might easily dispose of, or refine, hypothetical ULM neutron ideas.

Reiterating, I am not looking at neutrons as "centrifugeable" per se, but am suggesting that they can receive tangential velocity of their rotating source, whatever that is relative to a fixed target on the stationary periphery of the centrifuge.

I also propose that the issue of ULM neutron hypotheses is important enough to merit at least some attention. Such hypotheses seem to persist due, at least in part, to their perceived relative untestability.

@Branzell

I appreciate that you believe something or other about this subject. Simple analogies and similes are not going to convince many experimentalists.

We also should remember that coherent phonon/boson interactions may explain superconductivity. And then what about high temperature superconductivity?

And why would I mention superconductivity? Meissner effect? The parallel may be more than a coincidence-- or perhaps not.....

But I am not here to defend W-L. or any other theory for that matter.

@Branzell

I suspect that W, L and S may have an answer prepared for that critique.... but I appreciate you pointing it out, and thanks for the reference. I suppose that their coherent plasmonic "Fermi sea" might be invoked to provide an ultra massive Faraday screen against even gammas--- with sufficient extent to thermalize multi-MeV photons.

As that particular part of W-L-S theory is supposed to provide an explanation for the lack of observed gammas--- I understand that this implication of W-L theory is a somewhat later development.

In any case that additional or corollary theory could also be a window of disconfirmation of the gamma blocking theory-- but here I guess, having no expertise to offer.

Crucial tests whose outcomes can disprove a theory are universal in science. All leading theories should be subjected to such efforts, regardless of the field of science in which they reside. Good science does not need dogma, it operatively needs such tests against leading theories (or read transient dogmas of the era). Such tests are done all the time in well-funded science closer to public consensus and outside of the "reputation trap". In my opinion, doing such tests is also important to clearing away the theoretical jungle presently in place in CF / LENR. Simple and inexpensive tests are a key presently... considering the reality of very low available funding. The p + e* --> n idea in W-L seems to be a readily accessible and lower cost window.... no neutrons near the tangential velocity of the centrifuged "generator", no W-L.... Or conversely, neutrons found, W-L survives to fight another day.

Before one criticizes W-L (Widom-Larsen) and W-L-S (add Srivastava) theories, one should be willing to conduct simple dispositive experiments that could easily trash such ideas. For example, and I have mentioned this before, the presence of Ultra Low Momentum (UlM) neutrons is essential to the W-L and W-L-S theoretical constructs, as I read it anyway. So why are not researchers putting the W-L key idea to experimental confirmation/disconfirmation? Funding is likely the answer. But it is really quite simple to look at this, at least in my conception:

ULM neutrons can be classified and detected by use of centrifugation... not for artificial g-forces, but simply to give these "slow particles" enough tangential velocity to make them vectorial (specific direction and added velocity) sufficient to impact suitable targets that can then be examined radiometrically for the isotopes generated. Such a scheme can easily include charged plates to deflect protons or electrons from the output. Mass classification, as a bonus, could identify tetrahedral 4N entities as well or other transient neutronic products.

@Thomas Clarke

Many have been observed. The number of actual nuclides and transitions is immense, compared to the "Chart of the Nuclides". Look at the Firestone compendia:

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/…productCd-0471356336.html

@Branzell

The Chart of the Nuclides is a very small subset of the known isotopic states and paths. Look at the Firestone compendia, for example.

Alain,

What do you mean "Anyway I can exclude that the question is CO2"?

Certainly, the short term risk of methane leakage and/or co-production (drilling, hydraulic fracturing, natural gas transport, processing, refining, along with feed lots etc.) is likely a strong forcer of warming today. But the half life of methane in the atmosphere is much shorter.... ultimately CO2 will become a much more insistent issue if carbon combustion remains "cheap".

Carbon (CO2) capture is something that could be done. There are ways to reform CO2 into other useful products, at least in theory. Disposal of CO2 is believed to be possible, although the geologic time scale for such deposition into (for example) alkaline sub-surface brines, and their ultimate capacity is in question. Injection of CO2 into subducting lithosphere has a nice theoretical sound to it, ultimately placing it in a strongly reducing hot and high pressure environment where the reduced product could be geologic carbon or hydrocarbons such as methane.

As for "immorality".... that is a strong term that I too have seen. Ruining the planet that gave rise to us seems stupid, even criminal by some standards. But, those who willfully do so, may not be judged at all, since human history may be rewritten or even erased by the survivors.... if there are any sentient enough to write.

Surely high COP LENR, if and when perfected, as for any energy source, will be used for good and for ill. The planet saving aspect is that it would enable powered exploration and colonization deeper in space. Even if the colonists themselves are advanced robots of some sort. At least that transcendent intelligence might have the wisdom to preserve the Earth as something of a museum of how biology developed into technology and beyond.

Dwarakesh Babu

I suspect you are commuting the means for the end. I have not met, heard or read any environmentalist opposed to LENR because it might lower their "profits" from the task of saving the biosphere.

Chennai may be great for software. But, it looks, at least in this case, not so great for atmospheric science or other aspects of non-sustainable uses of Earth resources to the apparent single end of more short-term "benefits" to human consumers.

Mats, your linkout to the Nature article gives me this error:

Internal Server Error (500)The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

@axil

I suspect this has been mentioned before: a binary or ternary alloy does not have the melting point of its constituents, nor is the actual alloyed melting point a simple intermediate value. Eutectic and other variations from simple expectation are seen. Further boiling points are not necessarily as simple as might be imagined. Binary and ternary azeotrope behavior once again emphasizes further differences, including those in condensed matter and gas phase interaction.

Thanks HG, and again thanks Padam73.