On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 2:56 PM, Jones Beene <[email protected]> wrote:
The answer to that could lie in induced radioactivity. Mills is > fully-invested in a non-nuclear explanation for thermal gain, so he tends > to avoid anything nuclear. He avoids all talk of nuclear energy like the > plague. Potassium is slightly radioactive, but it cannot be induced to emit > at a higher level. If rubidium, due to having such a high percentage of > unstable isotopes, is amenable, then it would spoil the “non-nuclear” sales > pitch. Or maybe it is simply the high cost and low availability. Who knows. I don't know whether Mills is avoiding disclosing testing done with rubidium or not. But I suspect that if he is still using potassium, he is seeing induced beta decay of the potassium, and that it is not more complex than this. There was an interesting paper from the early 1990's, if I remember correctly, in which a group was doing light water electrolysis with potassium and finding calcium. They noted that the experiment was similar to one of Mills or perhaps Thermacore. The group proposed proton capture in their own case, but I suspect the calcium came from induced beta decay of the potassium. Eric
