Moving forward – this month of July could be unusually hot, to speak… Energy Independence Day could be upon us.
Several top researchers are now committed to a Mizuno replication and underway already. Even more are thinking seriously about parts of it - and there are literally dozens of crafty amateurs who want to make a big splash. Who knows what will happen by Fall? The only thing missing, sadly, is participation from DOE and the big labs (with the possible exception of Lawrence Berkeley.) Few of the researchers want to be identified at this time by name - but the explosion of interest in this experiment is like nothing we have seen in the field since the early days of the Rossi debacle. If this turns out to be another false alarm – LENR may never recover. Most of the pundits on this forum are willing to give benefit of the doubt to Mizuno, and take a wait-and-see attitude, despite similar claims from him in the past which did not pan out. Some of that tolerance is because of a realizable hope for an increase in the basic understanding of LENR even if the effect is not as robust as claimed. In contrast, Rossi disappeared from relevance with negative, decreased understanding. To that end, the one old lesson which is standing-out comes from a reanalysis of the original Widom Larsen work of 14 years ago. Admittedly, the big thing they got wrong was the ultra low momentum neutron but not the rest of it. That species now seems both imaginary and useless, but the two valuable insights which they got right are the surface plasmon interaction with protons and the need for framing a multi-step reaction to take the place of deuterium fusion. It is clear from Mizuno that his technique works with both protium and deuterium with no neutron activation, even after long runs at high power. Nuclear fusion is most unlikely, but not another kind of nuclear reaction. IMHO, the main thing which W&L overlooked is the “cluster” of many atoms as being the key to the multi-step process – and not some mysterious cold neutron. The cluster of many atoms bound together with borrowed electron energy can resonate with surface plasmons whereas the atoms themselves are much too small to couple. The energy which is released in a subsequent “Coulomb explosion” is then a type of nuclear binding energy modeled on QCD and the strong force. But at least nailing the surface plasmon step by W&L was a major advance… which was never capitalized on, and which Mizuno seems to have stumbled on in his experiment serendipitously. As they say in Sapporo (or was that Paris) “chance favors the prepared mind.” If this pre-analysis is even half-way on target, Mizuno switched from glow discharge to incandescent photon input power pretty much by trial and error, or even by accident or desperation; and he may not have realized at the time the importance of the palladium absorption anomaly in the red spectrum. I’m anticipating a red hot July …
