This is Curt Edstrom's report of his efforts to find a thermal anomaly in Ni-H, notably mentioning Ikegami and liquid lithium. Liquid lithium seems to be a topic of current interest in LENR, due to the major experimental efforts of Ikegami and others over the years - and another aspect of the "Swedish connection" to LENR.
http://www.ecat-thenewfire.com/File1.pdf I have the same interpretation of Ikegami's work with a proton beam as does Edstrom. Ikegami finds a massive 10^11 increase in reaction rate of a fairly low energy beam, achieving breakeven condition; but only so long as the lithium is precisely at the melting point. If the temperature is much in excess of this - the rate of reaction falls by a factor of 10,000:1 and is nowhere near breakeven. That need for maintaining a temperature at the melting point of lithium does not make much sense from a physics perspective, but nevertheless this is one interpretation of several extremely well done experiments. The lesson of this finding applied to the "dogbone genre", assuming Ikegami is correct - is that this reaction could be adapted IF: 1) LiAl4 is avoided - since the alloy will not release lithium easily. OTOH at its melting point, the same result could take place. 2) Use lithium in a form which will release lithium metal at low temperature (many choices for that including the metal itself) 3) Lithium metal melts at 181 C - so run the reactor at precisely this temperature using temperature feedback from the thermocouple to keep a constant temperature level and sampling many times per second. 4) A proton "beam" (of natural sort) will appear when protons are accelerated from various hydrides - having found a Rydberg "hole" equal or greater than 54.4 eV. 5) Notably iron has two such IP levels - and helium one - and since the ash (end product) is a perfect fit for 54.4 eV - this indicates the possibility of positive feedback which needs to be carefully controlled. The main problem with this suggestion is that the reaction should produce two alpha particles, which accelerate at high speed on beryllium-8 fission, which should cause secondary x-ray radiation as they thermalize, which is not seen. However, if helium is detected at all - in the ash of a low-temp-dogbone, then Ikegami could become the new savior of LENR.
