Re: Popular Mechanics August Issue - H-bombs and Cold Fusion

[daleboyce@charter.net]

Hi all,



I may be wrong, but I believe the Texas A&M group retracted their finding.

Yes they found a bunch of tritium, but it was already in some of the Pd

before they started. There were several hundred research groups around the

world that jumped into the game. Most with the idea of proving it wrong.



I was involved for about a year in one such group. I am pretty sure everyone

in out group expected to _not_ see cold fusion, but it is an important job

of scientists to shoot down bad science, especially when it becomes part of

the imagination of the public. I know I had a wager going against it being

real.



It should be noted though that some theoretical physicists had come up with

some hand waving ways to speed up the theoretical rate of cold fusion.  Yes

there is/was a theoretical rate based on quantum tunneling.  Much the same

as that in the theory of alpha decay.  Needless to say the rate calculated

was extraordinarily slow.



We took a different tactic than the Electrochemical cell people. We used

titanium powder surface alloyed with palladium. We then exposed this powder

under pressure, to a mixture of hydrogen and deuterium. Looking for the very

high energy gamma from H-D fussion, and later for this gamma in time

correlation to neutrons.



Early on there were a couple of exciting moments.  Our first experiement

used 7 grams of the powder. We expected the gas to slowly react with the

powder to form the metal hydride. The powder was in a steel "bomb" reaction

vessel that weighed 300 grams. Upon introducing the gas to the evacuated

bomb, the pressure gage didn't begin to rise.  However, the temperature on

the outside of the bomb shot to 100 C in under one minute. The hydrogen and

deuterium had reacted almost instantly to form the hydrides.



This is why any palladium that may have been near tritium could well be

expected to contain it..



The second "exciting" event came in the first  weeks of running the time

correlation of neutron and gamma events.  Our gamma ray background was

between ten and twenty events per day. Our neutron background was about two

counts per minute.A neutron event triggered a multichannel scalar with one

millisecond per channel resolution that looked at the neutron detectors. In

the meantime a computer would check the ROI for a new gamma event in the ROI

since the previous sweep.



One day checking the data there were 3 or four neutron events in a few tens

of milliseconds, and a gamma ray event.  The expected random rate for an

event like this was once in thirty years!



After many weeks of data collection, we found the problem.  A small fraction

of the time a neutron event would result in an after pulse in the neutron

detector. If memory serves in this detector it was alway 13 msec after the

initial pulse. If the afterpulse occurs in one of evey thousand events with

our background rate you might see three of these double events a day mixed

in with other real two neutron events in the sweep.  Now if the afterpulse

also results in an afterpulse you expect a triad of anomolous neutron pulses

once every couple of weeks, and so on.



Now if you get really unlucky and you get an accidental coincidence with a

gamma ray....  Well you spend an awefull lot of time taking data to show

that once you throw out all the neutrons separated by 13 milliseconds,

everthing is consistent with zero correlation between the neutrons and

neutrons and gammas.



I have pretty much stopped following the subject.  Last I heard there were

some die hards. I never did hear a good explanation of the energy anomaly

found in the electrochemical process. All I seem to remember is that unless

the electrolyte contained lithium the anomaly didn't appear.



Dale

daleboyce@charter.net





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