From: billphil@earthlink.net (Badwater Bill)
Newsgroups: rec.aviation.homebuilt
Subject: Re: BWB and Chemists
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 07:09:54 GMT

On Mon, 21 Aug 2000 21:37:00 GMT, po_krifka@my-deja.com wrote:

>In article <8ns3dd$8to$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>  svolich@my-deja.com wrote:
>> Maybe those chemists were on to something after all...
>
>[many 6 year old and older citings snipped]
>
>> shall I go on?
>
>  To what end?  All you have done is provide citings, the newest of
>which is 6 years old!  Are you trying to tell me that nothing
>else has happen since then?  If there was ANY merit to the cold
>fusion claims don't you think they would be vigorously persued by
>both the physics and chemist communities given the economic, not to
>mention the ecologic benifit?  The physics community didn't buy the
>"theory" and the chemists ran out of experiments searching for hard
>evidence to prove it.
>
>- Po -

Not only did it NOT work, Ponds and Fleishman were using sodium iodide
scintillation detectors for their gamma spectrometers instead of high
resolution germanium detectors to do the gamma ray spectra and
subsequent peak integration.  What they did was integrate the wrong
peak.  If I recall correctly they integrated a Bi-214 peak at about
2.2 MeV that was produced by radon progeny and not the nuclear
reaction they thought was the source of that gamma ray.  We looked
into it at the time in my lab and reproduced it completely.  Dr.
Robert Holloway (a damn chemist)  published it somewhere but we had
spectrometers that could de-convolute the two peaks, i.e. the  gamma
peak from the nuclear reaction and the Bismuth peak.  We saw miles of
space between them using germanium detectors but when we used Na I
(sodium iodide) the resolution was so poor both the peaks merged into
one photopeak and were indistinguishable.  You might wonder why we saw
any nuclear reaction photopeak at all.  I don't remember the reaction
but it had something to do with either absorbing a neutron and making
a 2.2 MeV gamma or fusing DT with Palladium and getting a neutron and
a gamma.  Whatever.  I just can't remember...but:  With our high
resolution germanium spectrometers, however, we did see this  peak
too, which confirms that there were neutrons in the palladium latice.
We even did the experiement with titanium instead of palladium and got
similar results since you can concentrate deuterium in those latices
at real high concentrations with no increase in pressure.  But, I'm
afraid the neutron source was not from fusion, it was from the normal
secondary cosmic radiation produced by the atmosphere, not fusion.
That photopeak in the spectrum was exactly in line with normal
measurements of the background neutron flux on the surface of the
Earth from cosmic secondaries.

I think too that when Ponds and Fleishman did their counting (acquired
their gamma spectra)  the radon levels were high in Utah.  We see this
all the time here.  When we've had high pressure for awhile the radon
stays underground building a concentration while decaying until
equilibrium is achieved and that equilibrium is a much higher
concentration than normal.  When you get a low pressure trough blow
through that "low" sucks out the radon-222 which quickly decays down
the chain to Bismuth-214 and makes that damn gamma out at 2.2 MeV.

I actually felt sort of sorry for those guys even though I hate
chemists simply because they are chemists.  They just didn't have a
clue that they had this radon interferrence and that was what they
were measuring.  It was because of the poor equipment more than
anything and the fact that they were chemists and not physicists.  Any
physicist would known instantly that you have a photopeak at 2.2 MeV
from radon decay in normal atmosphere.

Bill