Posted By: AbdEasy-peasy. No contradiction. Contradiction only appears under some interpretations. Discard those.

Neat! "Just remember anything I happen to say that turns out to be right and discard the rest".

It explains why you type so much.

Thing is, I'd like to discard the wrong bits before having to read them. Normally, that's the writer's job.

Posted By: maryyugoI'm confused. Is Legendre an uber-administrator?

(Apologies, folks - just getting caught up here. It will be a while 'till I actually make it back to this page.)

Why would you say/ask that, MY? Like several others (yourself included, IIRC) I was a basic admin - more like a part-time shopkeeper - around here, some time ago.

But it's been a couple of years at least, since I've held anything above an A-Class Poster's License.

Posted By: E-Man@legendre Abd called you this in one of his posts on his vanity site newvortex

Finding Abd in Moletrap is the epitome of irony.

Made my day!

Posted By: terry1094Finding Abd in Moletrap is the epitome of irony.

Well there's so little going on in his little spot on the internet...and he calls moletrap a dying forum.

That said, he did manage to drag Angus over there...which perhaps was his goal over here (not angus specifically but new people to talk about something other than how diet pepsi is responsible for the diseases of man.)

Posted By: AngusI wonder if it might work in reverse to drag people over here where it's much more fun

Abd totally wants to be here. He was spending more time here than on his vanity site. Talking to yourself just isn't that interesting.

Posted By: hairykrishna

Posted By: Abd

Posted By: hairykrishnaSimple conservation of momentum rules out d+d->4He.

That's a naive expectation, but a very reasonable one. Those who are working on d+d theories are physicists, generally. They know about conservation of momentum, and so do I. If you want a description of how they are attempting to deal with the problem, I could give that, and it would simply irritate more people, and for little benefit.

To make it explicit, if we get He-4 from d+d, what actually happens is that we get He-4*, a nuclear excited state. This energy is not released yet. If the excited state could be maintained, no energy would be found. If energy is found, it must be released, and the He-4 state is *highly* unstable, it's considered, and that release is immediate, as a single gamma photon with 23.8 MeV. The helium nucleus recoils, conserving momentum. Most of the energy is carried by the gamma, which is penetrating radiation, most of the energy would leave the cells, only a little would show up as heat. The experimental evidence is that all, or nearly all, of the energy ends up as heat.

A naive expectation?

[the text above was quoted from hairykrishna but an end quote tag was misplaced, so some of it appeared to be a new post with old repeated material. Because this was noticed, I am fixing it with this note.]

Harry proceeds to demonstrate that. I wrote that the expectation was "reasonable." He thinks it conclusive. That''s naive.

The excited He-4 intermediate state doesn't work as an explanation. You can't have a an excited state of He with 23.8MeV of energy, unless you're substantially re-writing nuclear physics. As you point out detecting a >20MeV gamma ray would be fairly trivial anyway.

Yes, it would be trivial. Therefore it is not emitted. Now, I'm no expert on hot fusion and the internal nuclear processes involved, but my understanding is that with normal hot fusion, the nucleus never settles, almost all the reactions result in tritium/proton or He-3/neutron. A very small number of reactions result in He-4 plus a gamma. To emit the single gamma, there must be a single nucleus, i.e., He-4. The gamma is emittted by He-4*. The question is the lifetime of He-4. It is, in normal hot fusion, extremely short. Harry is effectively claiming that the excited state doesn't exist, but such states do exist, and are necessary. Where he is correct is that, normally, such states must emit the gamma, very rapidly.

But are there more stable nuclear isomers of He-4. Probably not, but it is not *impossible,* as a halo state. That possibility is much greater with Be-8, which definitely has a finite and measurable lifetime.

If you know this proposed mechanism is nonsense why have you written about it at length? I little self-editing amongst your storm of typing wouldn't go amiss.

You are cheerfully invited to pleasure yourself. If you don't want to discuss this, please don't discuss this.

"Nonsense" is a pseudoskeptical term, used as used above. There are serious physicists, who know the standard theory far better than I, who are considering the possibility of d-d fusion. It has *not* been ruled out. It is merely very unlikely, in my view. Until we know the actual mechanism for cold fusion, it's on the table.

What is the highest energy CF cell anyone has ever run? I don't want to trawl through the literature.

That's a question of little interest to me. There are no *confirmed* results that are "reliable." I.e, nobody knows how to precisely control them. To me, the scientific issue is resolved, not by high-energy results, but by sufficiently accurate measurements of heat and the production rate of helium, showing the correlation, and that's been multiply confirmed. That's enough for the *science.* It's totally inadequate for commercial applications, and I do not claim that cold fusion is ready for commercial application, and it may be a long time before it is, if ever.

That depends on the mechanism, which we don't know!

Many cold fusion results are reported as excess power rather than as energy (i.e, the integral of power). In a chemistry, high power levels are of interest, because there are limits to power density, and cold fusion routinely exceeds those limits. But that requires an extensive knowledge of chemistry, which physicists often lack. Personally, I've found it frustrating to see energy balance ignored in many experiments. The electrochemical approach of Pons and Fleischmann is vulnerable to accusations of being some sort of battery, and in order to achieve the high loading, electrolysis is continued for months in their approach. So the total energy in is *huge*. But most of that energy has escaped as evolved deuterium, it's highly inefficient. This problem does not apply to gas-loaded deuterium, where no electrolysis is used and where the only complication is the heat of formation of palladium deuteride.

So, restricting myself to analyses of *energy* reported, I'll report some snippets.

Energetics Technologies reported a 14 hour period of high heat output from a foil that was at or under 50 microns thick, and 7 x 80 mm. The integrated input energy was 40 kJ and the integrated output heat energy was 1.14 MJ. This was reported by Mckubre et al in "Replication of Condensed Matter Heat Production" in the American Chemical Society's Low Energy Nuclear Reaction Sourcebook, vol. 1, Oxford University Press, 2008.

That paper reported on replications of the ET approach at SRI and at ENEA (the Italian nuclear energy agency). McKubre, supported by DARPA, ran 23 cells, and 14 showed maximum excess power of 5% or more. One was at 300%. The highest actual power level was in a different experiment, with 15% max XP, that was 2.095 W.

Note that in SRI experiments, "XP" is not total power output; rather XP = Total measured power, minus input power, plus energy storage if not at equilibrium. Across the 23 cells, 14 showed excess energy (output energy minus input energy) ranging from 65 kJ to 553 kJ.

ENEA's replication were not reported for all cells, a common lacuna in cold fusion work, I've argued strenuously against the practice of only reporting "successful" cells. There were six cells reported showing XP. One, with an input power of a milliwatt, resulted in 7 W of power for 600 seconds.

To electrochemists, all these results are high significant. Electrochemist, professionals, world-class in their fields, have long been seeing results in these experiments that they cannot ascribe to chemistry. Non-chemists dismiss the reports and say "you must be making some mistake." These are non-experts in a field telling the experts that they are wrong.

From gas loading experiments, Arata reported that a 5-gram sample of palladium black, loaded with deuterium, produced 50 MJ in 800 hours. Arata's work in general shows low-level heat over very long periods of time. In recent work, a 7 gram sample of nanoparticle palladium produced, with a modestly insulated cell, 4 degrees of temperature elevation for 3000 minutes. That was after an initial heat burst from the heat of formation of palladium deuteride; the cell was double-walled, and the temperature of the lining was elevated by 2 degrees in this period, thus demonstrating heat flow. The output was stable ,still, at 3000 minutes, with no sign of decline. At that point, Arata sent his cells for helium measurement. I have, unfortunately, been unable to find any report of his helium measurements, nor does he show calibrations indicating how much heat the elevated temperature represents. However, he does show results with hydrogen controls, which don't show the extended temperature rise, only the burst of heat from hydride formation.

I would, myself, be unconvinced by the heat evidence, though I know that chemists have gone over this work with a fine-tooth comb, and hence the evidence for a nuclear reaction is quite strong. It was not the heat reports -- they are *profuse*, that led me to the fusion conclusion, it was heat/helium.

That helium is being produced, accompanied by anomalous energy consistent with the deuterium fusion value (which will appear regardless of specific reaction mechanism, as long as the energy or products do not escape), is evidence that not only confirms the heat measurements as being reasonably accurate, but also shows a nuclear process.

This is an unchallenged experimental result that has been confirmed by a dozen research groups, see the Storms review, "Status of cold fusion (2010)," Naturwissenschaften. Hence, for me, this is established science, whether or not it's "widely accepted."

Now, if someone doubts those results and gets off their comfortable duff, and actually attempts to falsify it, and succeeds, that would change everything for me. I would assume that such work would identify the mysterious heat artifact, then, that has fooled hundreds of researchers around the world, as well as how helium could be correlated without being produced.

If you are looking, however, for scientific confirmation of some commercial practicality, it doesn't exist. And that's the *only* reason one would need to see large energy production values.

*Obviously* cold fusion researchers have done everything they could to increase reliability, and that ET replication by SRI and ENEA is one of the most consistent replications so far. SRI ran 15 cells on-site (the others were run with SRI participation at ET), and 11 of those cells showed XP of 5% or more. That's considered quite good in the field.

Gas loading apparently produces more consistent results, but they have been typically low-energy for PdD. I do not have an opinion on recent NiH results except for the obvious: they are unconfirmed and the reports are not reliable.

This situation seems likely to continue until and unless the mechanism is identified and the specific conditions that allow that mechanism to operate are known. At that point, engineering the effect may become much more possible. But it is not a slam-dunk.

There are reports of *very high* energy release, such as the original Pons and Fleischmann melt-down/vaporization in 1984, but not under well-controlled conditions.

Posted By: AbdTo me, the scientific issue is resolved, not by high-energy results, but by sufficiently accurate measurements of heat and the production rate of helium, showing the correlation, and that's been multiply confirmed.

*Yawn* As a rule of thumb - You can't freely exchange strength of effect with replication.

N-rays
Phlogiston
Polywater

So Apd doesn't have time to refine his posts to make them shorter. But he sure does have time to make them longer.

Posted By: Abd
Now, I'm no expert on hot fusion and the internal nuclear processes involved, but my understanding is that with normal hot fusion, the nucleus never settles, almost all the reactions result in tritium/proton or He-3/neutron. A very small number of reactions result in He-4 plus a gamma. To emit the single gamma, there must be a single nucleus, i.e., He-4. The gamma is emittted by He-4*. The question is the lifetime of He-4. It is, in normal hot fusion, extremely short. Harry is effectively claiming that the excited state doesn't exist, but such states do exist, and are necessary. Where he is correct is that, normally, such states must emit the gamma, very rapidly.

No. What I said was that an excited state of He4 with 23.8MeV doesn't exist. This is ~10MeV greater than the binding energy of He.