IEC + Lattice fusion

[Richard Hull]

I have talked about this for years. Let's face it lattice fusion is just a derivative of cold fusion morphed into CANR and then into LENR and now the far more acceptable Lattice confined fusion.

Those who have been here for many years know of our discussions. I have also talked privately at some length with Frank Sanns over the years related to this subject. We have long noted a form of Beam on Target fusion (BOT) via the shells of our spherical fusors with the deuterium (hydrogen) entering the lattice of the metal shell. The issue is that you get hydrogen out of the lattice via thermally heating it. Hydrogen in most metals enters a metal lattice via either a rather gentle electrolysis (cold) or, in extreme cases, to the detriment of hydrogen powered rockets via cryogenic cooling. This leads to destructive hydrogen embrittlement of the storage tanks, (long known and studied).

The electrolysis loading of deuterium and fusion claims goes back to packing a palladium cathode in a wet cell. (1989 Cold Fusion)

The key is to load a metal lattice with deuterium atoms. How to we load an anode (shell) of our fusors with deuterium?? It is to be remembered that in a fusor there are numerous high speed neutrals and all neutrals are doomed to hit the shell. Thus anode loading (counter intuitive). Velocity space makes it happen in our fusors.

In this URL, Astral is doing this combo IEC/Lattice induced fusion, long discussed here. They are, like us, after neutrons via Deuterium fusion.
Watch this video and see how they are approaching this, not for power but the neutron production. (medical isotope production.
The really wise among us will listen to the guy near the end noting that they are getting 10e4 n/s, but this will change when they actively cool the anode.

We have already recorded increased fusion when we actively cool our anodes. Our anodes are not in any way ideal for lattice absorption of deuterium. However, we know we get BOT fusion in any fusor at any and all temperatures via lattice fusion under bombardment.
As IBM's motto exhorts,..... THINK!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtfUeip4vyA&t=34s

Key stuff is from 13 minutes to 16 minutes in......... use the drag bar at the bottom early on to see their setup throughout and avoid the chatter.

Please excuse the well known dweeb who does such things of this nature. He is all excited about medical isotope production. Look and listen carefully and critically to the Astral folks.

Imagine a solid copper shell internally plated with a thick palladium layer cooled in LN2 doing IEC fusion. Frank and I have been talking this sort of thing for a long time. Use the neutral bombarded and loaded anode to boost velocity space fusion!!

Yes, talk is cheap, but palladium plating a copper sphere and cooling it with LN2 is quite an expensive and complex construction dream project for the average amateur.

Richard Hull

[Emma Black]

The amusingly tiny neuron yield was the first thing I noticed when watching the video. I did some quick research on Astral when this video came out a while back, as they are UK based. Whist I will remain open minded, their website and the CEO's previous company Arkenlight do not fill me with confidence.

There are a lot of buzzwords going on, plus I wonder if the "well known dweeb" was paid to make the video.

Arkenlight's thing was the "diamond betavoltaic battery" also covered by the same dweeb, which seems suspicious to me especially as this is not mentioned at all in the fusion video (the ceo left the now possibly defunct company which made the shown demo neutron generators over 10 years ago). I don't need to point out to anyone how niche a market there would be for such a device, even though they do exist. The previous video's claims that these could power cell phones and laptops is plainly ridiculous.

It has been discussed here before that there will still be significant efficacy loss from the metal atoms in any hydride and that gas, liquid or solid (deuterium or heavy water) should show far better performance in terms of neutron yield.

If going to the bother of cooling everything down with liquid nitrogen, why not cool a metal plate and use it to keep a target of heavy water frozen solid and aim an ion beam into that? The papers I’ve read detailing such arrangements are generally talking about much more intense ion beams from cyclotrons and the like with ions of many Mev, but I wonder could the same principles be applied to a fusor.

In addition why do most neutron generator BOT type systems (at least the ones I have read about) seem to use cooled titanium, either on its own or as a thin layer backed with something with low hydrogen diffusivity (copper or silver) rather than something with a higher affinity for hydrogen i.e. palladium, yttrium or even uranium as a target? Is this simply due to cost or due to the desorption temperature? Titanium I believe starts around 200C, Pd 100c and but others are higher.

[Alexander Ziemecki]

Hello Richard,

I recently came across this article (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 0190908156) while researching a quantum mechanical fusion model. Is this what you're talking about?

[Liam David]

Astral seems to be using a bog-standard glow discharge fusor with a 3D printed titanium cathode. They claim 1e12 n/s for D/T which translates to ~1e10 D/D. With 200 kV and some 100mA that might be possible, but there's no evidence of cooling so that titanium is about worthless. I don't buy any of it. They might be getting ~1e7 D/D (not in the video). The 3rd person listed on their about page, and also the one manning the controls near the end of the video, Mahmoud Bakr, sounded familiar from my literature reviews. Indeed, he's published a number of studies on IEC and titanium, including https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10 ... ccess=true and https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pop/article/28 ... d-cathodes. He's used T in some experiments so he might Astral's point of access. Buzz words galore.

[Richard Hull]

Bakr mentioned "when we are able to cool the anode" My guess is they are not yet cooling the anode as noted in the video. For us, this just confirms, as we have noted, cooling the shell, anode, boosts fusion via wall loading provided you choose your shell metal well.

Astral, as all others, will fail in a niche market. We could care less. we just want the neutrons.

Richard Hull

[Emma Black]

I mentioned in my previous post on this thread about the nuclear diamond battery, with its sky high claims. It seems recently that there has been a bit of an update to the company NDB. Unusually it seems they are being sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission for fraud.

How things started:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWwKqSzakYU

How it's going:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M5MF6KE-jY

[Richard Hull]

Great follow up on the nuclear diamond battery fiasco! Now, How many fusion startups will be held to this standard? Unfortunately, they use a certain amount to build kit that functions After a fashion!! This leads to supposedly an honest effort on the part of possible hucksters to collect cash and work towards a goal that even the meanest intelligence understands it is doomed to failure of claimed efforts of power generational fusion. Thus, any attempt to recover investment money is covered in a failure due to a physical attempt having been done.

Books can be kept such that reasonable salaries to professionals and other expenses involved in the effort are bullet proof. People have done work and have been paid for it in a speculative failure, leaving the investors without legal recourse to recover funds that were invested in a speculative venture to start with.

The hopes and dreams of investors are smashed and many have been enriched in failure.

The world knows that 50 million will not do power ready fusion and these new super well funded start ups in the 100million to 1 billion investments will not succeed either. After the tens of billions spent on ITER when it fails, will this be the end of fusion efforts?? No! There are sheep to be shorn and there will always be someone to sheer them. High end, professional hucksterism will not be quashed.

Richard Hull