NASA Lattice Fusion -Relocated Thread FS

It may be difficult to separate "theory" from "application," but let''s see if this helps facilitate the discussion.
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Richard Hull
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NASA Lattice Fusion -Relocated Thread FS

Post by Richard Hull »

Wow! On Christmas day in this thread I threw out an old friend of mine mostly as a hope of what was once of great interest to me. Fusion in the solid state (CANR) chemically assisted nuclear reactions. (LENR) low energy nuclear reactions. Names given long after the 1989 cold fusion confusion to the concept of lattice locked deuterium atoms self-fusioning within the lattice.

As if by luck, in voyaging through multiple You Tube videos of theories of earth's formation, I noticed to the right of this is a listing of what you tube thinks is pretty to someone it sees as a likely candidate for similar videos. Due to my large number of past searches on fusion, it belched out a fusion fast ball but 6 days old! I clicked the new NASA work video posted 20 Dec. 2020, and as if prescient of my Christmas day post above, I was stunned by it.

It seems NASA is hot on the trail of fusion in the solid state based on recent experiments with Erbium metal loaded deuterium in which genuine fusion has been detected! No not hot fusion and not power fusion, but a form of cold fusion, LENR, CANR fusion. I recognized in an instant that this kind of thing was reported in the late 90's by a number of researchers who clung onto LENR by their finger nails, working with almost no budget and much much humor and ire directed at them by their peers. Finally, by the mid-2000's all such efforts ceased as no one wanted to play with a dead duck. My earliest posts here, 20 years ago, talked of it, but I decided, in the long run, to "lay low" as I was talking "proper fusion", "accepted fusion" that amateur could do and replicate. CANR, LENR and my interest in it waned with the diminishing published articles around it.

Apparently some upstart at NASA was reading some old Journals, Yes Virginia, a number of scholarly Journals did publish well done work on CANR, LENR as these latter two monikers for CF we more acceptable. Anyway, it sparked enough interest for NASA to monkey around with it. This time instead of palladium, Titanium and Nickel as LENR focused on in the past, they chose Erbium. I wonder if they pulled a really good mixed team in on this work? That is, a team with a few top flite people in their field to do this work. Pons and Fleishman were just electrochemists. What did they know about all the disciplines that might be called in to the fray? Many later researchers were often lone wolves who did good work in their fields, but lacked the Manhattan project like team of the best of the best needed to bring this issue to the mat.

While the 6 day old video at the URL below is not detailed beyond a certain level, there is probably a paper out there on this work. A paper good enough to spark this video. I saw all the old trails taken by those from 1989 until the early 2000's imaged and talked about. They even recognized that NASA's effort smacks of the first efforts by Pons and Fleishman.

The fusion discussed is multi-processed. High energy gammas produced by bremsstrahlung radiation created by a high energy electron bombardment on the loaded Erbium cause fusion within the lattice and then the fusion released neutron (due to the Oppenheimer-Phillips reaction), at 2.45 MeV strips other neutrons creating super high energy protons which also do fusion or strip lattice neutrons and so on. It sounds complex, but what apparently ensues is a form of chain reaction fusion within the solid state as long as the electron bombardment takes place on the target metal. The ancient fusion saw rears it ugly head here. this ugliness is that sure, we are doing fusion, novel fusion, once poo-poo'd fusion, but...... will the beam of 2.5 MeV electrons needed to make this all happen within the loaded erbium lattice be sufficient to put out more fusion energy than is put into it. Doubtful, as the experimenters are still alive to tell the tail thus, no runaway fusion chain reaction, but enough to create detectable neutrons from the Erbium target.

The question I now have is the one that killed CF there should be traces of hydrogen, tritium and 3He locked within the Erbium lattice if real fusion is taking place and not just stripped neutrons from deuterium atoms in the lattice. The spectrum looks perfect for fusion energy neutrons, admittedly, Pons and Fleishman had no such instrumentation, just calorimetric mild heating as they loaded the palladium. Heating that went on after loading ended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZcAnqCscIw

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Dennis P Brown
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Re: NASA Lattice Fusion

Post by Dennis P Brown »

Certainly Pons and Fleishman simply released ordinary chemical energy in their work.

But fusion using ions is still a possiblity. I've talked to experts and they feel that ion beam fusion might result in net energy - current accelerator tech can produce a beam at about 20% efficiency. This is certainly better than most lasers.

The orginal work was abandoned by Los Alamos in the early eighties for reasons that, while not clear, mostly had to do with cost to scale up at the time. Then add on that it wasn't useful for weapons development and that makes sense.
Dan Knapp
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Re: NASA Lattice Fusion

Post by Dan Knapp »

The NASA erbium fusion papers were published in April in Physical Review C:
https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/1 ... 101.044609
https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/1 ... 101.044610
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Re: NASA Lattice Fusion -Relocated Thread FS

Post by Richard Hull »

I have perused the paper. It seems the crux of their work involves the beneficial electron screening in a metal lattice and the net result of this is the assumption based on mathematical proofs that the neutrons freed during the Oppenheimer-Phillips reaction are far better at inducing fusion within the lattice than fast or energetic heavy particles like deuterons, protons or alpha particles.

Like all fusion work, this needs more work and investigation which, surprisingly, always lay in the future.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Re: NASA Lattice Fusion -Relocated Thread FS

Post by Frank Sanns »

I have a hard time believing that this work was not done decades ago at neutron sources around the world. Clearly this would have been investigated at LANSCE or such.
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
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Re: NASA Lattice Fusion -Relocated Thread FS

Post by Richard Hull »

I witnessed the hot fusion people have a quick dabble in 89-90 and not finding anything, poo-poo'd it vehemently and constantly in every Journal who would publish their disdain. This drumbeat against such work resulted in beating 90% of the researchers out of the field by 95-96. EPRI did a lot of research in it all through the 90's.

The Hot fusion folks had their interests to protect and were highly successful at it. The workers that remained concentrated on the idea that something was indeed going on in the loaded metal lattice and those papers did get attention. The work basically went to Japan almost in its entirety. The Russians also looked into the matter.

However, all the work that I am aware of was electro-chemical in nature. No one bombarded a loaded lattice that I am aware of. The idea of using light particle, electron, bombardment above 5 MeV, to generate gammas via bremsstrahlung which can have range in the lattice to Oppenheimer-Phillips the hell out of deuterons, freeing up high energy neutrons which could move like gammas all through the lattice to do fusion is rather inspired. Complex and lossy, perhaps, but very novel indeed.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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