I wrote: Something had to be coming out of the reactor the entire time. It had to be > coming out at a flow rate large enough to deliver lots of heat to those > thermocouples. >
We also know from Lewan's log that he measured the flow rate at the time when the flow rate was lowest. He measured 0.9 ml/s. It had to be higher for the entire rest of the run. We know this because it was delivering the lowest amount of heat to the thermocouples at that time. He just happened to measure it when the power was down to around 3 kW nominally, which was the lowest it got during the self-sustaining event. However badly placed the thermocouples were, they reflected the actual temperature in a linear fashion. They had to; the temperature of the fluid coming into the heat exchanger hardly varied. It was ~103°C, plus or minus a tad. A fixed bias will not produce random variations. When the outlet thermocouple temperature rose, that definitely meant the temperature rose; the only thing disputed is how much it actually rose. There is no doubt it was a the lowest point right when Lewan measured 0.9 ml/s. Since the temperature was stable at ~103°C, that means pressure did not vary much. Steam from boiling water does not get any hotter at one pressure setting. As the power goes up you get more coming out of the reactor. The flow rate increases. That's the only way the cooling loop output thermocouple could get hotter. So the flow was greater than 0.9 ml/s the whole time. I suppose it was ~8 ml/s on average, as Rossi claimed. - Jed
