Posts by LeMoyne Castle

Quote from Andrea Calaon

My post on Edmund's page must have been "moderated", i.e. censored somehow because I have tried now to send the same comment without my webpage and I was prompted with a message saying that I had already sent an identical comment,

Andrea, I tried to copy your post from here to there and got the same result. I think it may require registration to post there (perhaps a privilege of membership?). I also tried to sign up for the email list: the site told me to expect a confirmation email which I could not find. I then sent a message realting this through the contact form there... Whatever the source of the delay, the confirmation email appeared in my spam folder overnight. So after confirming to the list this AM I tried to re-post and got the same 'Duplicate message' you did.

This is not exactly all OT. I can believe that Dr. Storms (or his publisher/publicity agent) wishes to keep both spam and pathoskeptics off what is a book related site, so our posts as new contributors may require hand confirmation, at least until some confidence has been built. There are many possible explanations for that not occurring: perhaps the moderator is busy working through your updated presentation. Perhaps they are just trying to prevent the thread from derailing. After subscribing and confirming, still no luck posting there so here is my comment intended for LENR Explained:

I appreciate the attempt to boil down the results from many disparate experiments to find what is common among them. The dual ideas that a theory might arise from your lists and theories can be tested against the lists indicates to me that this is a step along the proper path towards resolution of the cognitive dissonance that comes from nuclear reactions appearing in ordinarily stable material.

An initial comment and question regarding 1 and 2 on both lists. Between the need for special preprocessing to form the material (co-dep, nanoparticles or foams) and the usual delay in initiation of significant nuclear activity, there is the implication of self-organization at or just below the surface of the material. It seems that the reaction sites need not be individually durable. The delay of onset implies they are generated: the continuation of reactions may rely on regeneration of particular nuclear reaction sites. The question is how are all forms of discontinuity ruled out in item 1 of list 2? Could it be that the NAE is a broader organization of sites that preferentially re-creates similar dislocations in a correlated way?

Quote from axil

Yes, this transmutation result from Lugano is impossible to believe but it happened, If it weren’t for logic and the very detailed results of the Lugano experiment, what other answer could there be?

A much simpler explanation is that the ⁶²Ni particle went into the reactor as ⁶²Ni and was unchanged by the operation. Although I have no direct quote from Rossi, others here have stated that Rossi has used ⁶²Ni as 'fuel' (or more properly: substrate or catalyst within the fuel mix). The overall composition and lithium isotope distribution in the mass spectrometry results from the other speck of Lugano ash is much more interesting, but this is not the place for that discussion either. My apologies to Longview for more OT under the OP. The ghost of William of Occam insisted I reply here and now.

The perfect bar to learning from any (or every) situation is to already know what is going on. To my mind, theory should arise after new evidence to explain it, or more properly, to give it order or make sense of it by fitting a self-consistent model to the evidence. Scientific advance requires both types of evidence, those that the current best model predicts and those that the model doesn't. The first type confirms the model and the second defines the limits of its validity.
The requirement that there must be a single theory to explain all manner of nuclear transmutations seen in a variety of environments in a wide range of LENR experiments seems to be a symptom that dogmatic belief in theories and models as immutable laws has overtaken scientific inquiry and advance. And if this perfect single theory is required before tested and re-tested evidence is even accepted as just a hint of something different occurring, then it doesn't seem to be a symptom of dogmatism, it seems to be proof of it. Kinder, gentler descriptions might be that there are hidden assumptions at play or that models are being applied outside their range of validity when people reject reprodicible evidence as impossible or erroneous. But then I was raised by an experimental physicist...

Yet another Bell's Theorem test in a recent issue of Nature:
http://www.nature.com/nature/j…575/full/nature15759.html
They called it:: Death by experiment for local realism
The recent test noted above is very much like the original 1935 EPR thought experiment and has ramifications for quantum computing.
Personally I was satisfied by Alain Aspect's work over the past 30+ years.

@ Longview
I take your point about how the appearance of darkness maybe due to a fine grain size in the nickel powder. However, the fine grain size means more surface area and more oxygen bound in the surface monolayer (or thin layer at least). The point is that any of the other primary reactants in the sealed tube: Li, Al, H are willing and able to replace the surface Ni and pull the oxygen off. Seems clear to me that the 10% LiAlH₄ (whether weight or volume %) will react with all of the oxygen in the tube and do it exothermically. LiAlH4 is pyrophoric. In the context of heat generation this is more chemical heat to be subtracted when looking for excess/anomalous heat.

I also take the point that this is a critique of my explanation. Appearances can be deceiving in many cases: oxide layers on metals or water in clouds (liquid drops or snow?).

I return to emphasize my main point: Even if the vacuum furnace works by resistive heating, if the resistor is wrapped as a coil, it wil create inductive heating effects in the nickel. Took me a couple days before - smh! - inductive heating may well be the constant long term excess heat vs. the empty control tube. I like the elegance of the simultaneous control run. The experiment just needs an even more similar control.

Quote from robwoudenberg

This is not convincing at at all I regret to say.

Absorption of hydrogen is an exothermic process which is not taken into account in the report.
Looking to the heat production they measured, 20 Watt (2KWh over 100 hours period) seems very likely caused…

Besides the hydride infiltration there are two other possible sources of excess heat:
1) chemical action of the LiAlH₄ on the air in the tube and the nickel powder's oxide layer, and
2) if the oven works by inductive heating then it would directly heat the Ni powder as well. In this case, it wold be no surprise to find the nickel filled tube hotter than the oven.

I would expect the first to fade over time and that may actually be visible in the results - so this isn't a stopper on its own. Would have been nice to have a better idea of the mass so the reader could try to do the correction their own self. The metal was clearly reduced in the process: it changed from dark powder to shiny foam.

Of course, if the oven is not inductive then the second conern is not so much of an issue.
Either way, it would be nice to see a control/comparison tube that is filled with just the nickel powder and no hydrogen. Or even just a nickel rod.
A control sample that is more closely identical would make the simple use of temperature difference in identical conditions more convincing.

In reply to Eric Walker's previous post --
Swedish scientists claim LENR explanation break-through

Eric, I agree that multiple paths are possible - perhaps even likely.
Fission by stimulated emission has always seemed a more likely LENR candidate than fusion.
The IAEA data pages show cross-sections that could form a potentially significant alpha decay path starting with ⁵⁸NI -- https://www-nds.iaea.org/relnsd/NdsEnsdf/neutroncs.html
I think NiMH systems could easily have a significant path (>10%) that goes:
⁵⁸Ni + n -> ⁵⁹Ni
⁵⁹Ni + n -> ⁵⁶Fe + ⁴He
and the process may repeat to get down to Cr or beyond to Ti.
By stepping between stable isotopes and stepping over Co (and Cr), this alpha path avoids gamma emissions as well.

Really need more thorough analysis of the fuel and ash to get a better picture of the beginning and end composition to shed more light on what is going on in these reactors.
Difficult and expensive sure, but a drop in the bucket compared to expenditures on the super-collider and Sysiphean hot fusion boondogglery ...

Everyone thinks any ⁴He must come from D+D but ⁿM + n -> ^n-3M' + ⁴He (where M and M' are successively lighter metals) seems much more plausible to me.
Heck, even splitting the ⁷Li seems more likely than fusing it, even with its tiny neutron cross-section. If you get the neutron proton in then ⁸Be immediately goes to two alphas.

[edited to add reply at top and remove failed HTML escapes]

A few comments on the paper in the OP:
1. Thermal neutrons == no Coulomb barrier and low reaction input energy. I like the idea. The cross-sections for all the isotopes of Ni from 58 to 62 are significant. Their main idea for LENR is plausible.
2. The assumption that the nickel hydride is neutral (p. 7) almost made me quit reading. Seems more reasonable to assume that the lattice is positively charged and the surface has the conduction electrons collected on it, especially under inductive heating. However, I'm not sure what other terms or factors would appear in the force equations - maybe they have a fair first order approximation going.
3. There is no bridge between the wave effect that they state as primary actor and the particle effects that they would have it generate. Complementarity is not addressed, much less satisfied. Gotta deal with wave-particle duality.
4. I want to see more about the opposing forces that tear the neutrons free. The mechanism is described as spalling which occurs in the macroscopic world when something is struck and chips fly off. The neutrons are the spall (the chips) - What delivers the blow?
5. The authors simply state that the Ni nuclei are the radiators that are the attractor in their model, yet they are also neutral and left inert in the description. In the E-Cat and in this scenario the Ni is being inductively heated above its Curie temperature so it is paramagnetic - its magnetic dipole oscillates with the magnetic induction field so I'm OK with it being the 'hot' radiative attractor. However, this oscillation would be in outer shell electron orbitals and not the nucleus itself. I could speculate more on this but I think I may have already supplied more description about the source of the attractive force than the paper did. Seems the charge independent attraction would have double the frequency and a phase shift from the E-M force from the nickel's induced magnetic dipole oscillation...

Now with all that said, again, I really like the basic idea of transmutation by thermal neutron capture. Just don't see the bridge from the field/wave effects to the neutron particle generation. The paper left me unsatisfied but definitely wanting more. Will read this one again and more carefully.

One safety note I have to throw in: If neutron capture is the primary LENR action, then cobalt impurities are dangerous. The thermal neutron cross section of ⁵⁹Co (natural abundance = 100%) is orders of magnitude higher than any of the nickel isotopes. One must take care in producing ⁶⁰Co which decays with hard gammas. Sitting one floor above an unshielded ⁶⁰Co gamma source seems to be a greater concern than having a thermal neutron source in your basement. Switching off the power would stop the neutrons, but not the activated cobalt's gammas.
On the other hand - salting the fuel with some cobalt and looking for the corresponding ⁶⁰Co gammas could provide verification of thermal neutron production and capture.
So, on the gripping hand - their main thesis of neutron capture is testable!
[N.B. corrected for mis-remember of ⁵⁸Co vs. ⁵⁹Co cross-sections]

Quote from barty

Water? Where? I don't see any water?

From the OP:
Alan adds "I have the reactor mounted and ready for initial
temp/pressure testing. It's loaded with 0.1 ml of water. I expect the
thermocouple wire plastic insulation will melt."

Interesting that just a bit of water is added.

PS: Can see in the last picture that the wires are separated - seems likely this is to prevent the thermocouple signal from shorting out.