Sam M. Austin & George F. Bertsch, "Halo Nuclei," Scientific American, June, 1995, pp 90-95,
The sub-title: "Nuclei having excess neutrons or protons teeter on the edges of nuclear stability, known as "drip lines." Like many holier-than-thou personalities, are the halo-endowed also drips ? Punage aside, over two-thirds of natural nickel is the isotope Ni-58. There is a boundary line that shows up on a graph of the periodic table, suggesting the stability of isotopes which vary from it are going to be marginally unstable, and it is called the drip line. A "halo" is descriptive of some nuclei above the drip line, which will express a much larger apparent radius than normal - orders of magnitude larger in some cases. These nuclei will have a few neutrons or protons that can be located well beyond the normal radius, and would appear to exhibit a halo, if they could be seen. There is a QM probability of some of these neutrons getting to the edge of strong-force influence, especially under the stress of hydrogen (or any charge) incursion into the "Coulomb well". Of possible interest for LENR, and the Mills --> Rossi range of experiments covering the past 19 years, is the nearly one percent of natural nickel known as Ni-64 which has 6 extra neutrons. These neutrons make the nucleus over 10% heavier than the majority isotope. This isotope could possibly be a previously unrecognized "fuel" for the claims of LENR in nickel, and possibly even some of the excess seen in Mills' experiments, assuming that he missed something. However - and the implication which is to be put forward here: nickel LENR is as unpredictable as palladium - possibly even more unpredictable up until the Arata nickel alloy was developed. Could that past unpredictability be related to a natural variation in the natural content of Ni-64, and does the nanopowder alloy with zirconia solve the problem ? BTW - this Ni-64 isotope spans Ni-63 in the range of natural stability. Ni-63 is an unstable beta emitter with a fairly short half-life. If 'heavy nickel' loses a neutron somehow from an expanded halo - and goes to Ni-63, and decays all in one step - it will give up a fast ~67 keV electron and no gamma, other than secondary and transmute to the most abundant isotope of copper. This energy level is low for a nuclear reaction, and it leaves little tell-tale trace of transmutation, since copper so ubiquitous - but it means that nickel, on a per pound basis, has several hundred times more energy per atom than is found in hydrogen combustion - since about one percent of it will have about 67 KeV than the average is over 600 eV per atom. Most curiously, for looking at a few cosmology references, there is known to be an overabundance of the neutron-rich stable isotope Ni-64 in meteorites. What does that imply? Well, some nickel mines, such as famous Sudbury mines in Canada exploit the impact sites of ancient meteorite impact. Other sources do not. Can that source of nickel then influence the outcome of an experiment based on the content of Ni-64 ? Dunno. But I love hypotheses which are falsifiable - as it this one. If a side by side experiment involving nickel cathodes - one of which is enriched in Ni-64 and the other is normal or depleted - show a significant variation in energy release favoring heavy nickel, then that is a prima facie case for the hypothesis that LENR part of the energy release is a result of non-fusion beta decay. Another test would be to look for copper as the transmutation product. Once again, although this sounds suspiciously like Widom-Larsen theory it is far removed from what they are claiming, and in fact the beta decay itself would be the driver for real deuterium fusion as a secondary step in LENR. This would be a two step process, where indeed the main energy comes from deuterium fusion, but the "driver" for that fusion is in situ beta decay. BTW the effective mass of the beta particle (fast electron) could be in the range of a muon on occasion due to the velocity - and it could well turn out that this the type of reaction is actually based on "(substitute) muon catalyzed deuterium fusion." Jones
