On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 11:29 PM, Mark Iverson-ZeroPoint < zeropo...@charter.net> wrote:
> Sure, the US went off the gold standard decades ago (a mistake in my > opinion), but where does money get invested when currencies weaken… > precious metals. You do realize that we’re not just talking transmutation > of two or three elements… the LENR tests which looked for transmuted > elements found many… some over ten different elements, and I’m not counting > isotopes as separate elements. LENR would most likely have a very > disruptive impact on that market… which has advantages as well as > disadvans… a lot of those metals are used in technologies like integrated > circuits and special alloys for aircraft, and the price will come down, > which is good for the consumer. > Yeah -- I've taken a look at some of the NAA and SIMS spectra. The isotopes are all over the map. If the data are taken at face value, it looks like whatever you put on the nickel or palladium surface could potentially be modified significantly. It's interesting on some level to think that you could generate isotopes using a controlled process of some kind, and being able to do this would no doubt be valuable for scientific and technological applications. But there are three considerations that give me pause, here. The first two are related to evidence and the third to safety. First, a lot of the spectra in the papers are small and hard to read and don't give you clear error bars, so it's difficult to get a sense of how much above error the shifts are at the end of the experiment. Some papers give this level of detail, which is helpful to have. But in any event the following slides give a good overview of some of the subtleties involved in this kind of measurement: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/ApicellaMmassspectr.pdf. Second, I don't have a good sense of what the difference between a genuine shift in isotopes, on one hand, and contamination of some kind, on the other, would look like. The question legitimately arises whether there are simply impurities in the hydrogen gas or heavy water that are glomming onto the cathode. I imagine there are some people who could look at the spectra and immediately get a sense of the difference. A third concern relates to safety. The possibility has already been brought up that if these experiments emit gamma rays (I've read several papers that indicate that they do under certain circumstances), then it's likely that any devices would be regulated. It's fine to create regulations, but since such devices involve components that you can purchase over the Internet and assemble at home, there's only so much you can do to keep any emerging technology under control. What if you could take something like uranium-238, which is relatively abundant, add sufficient neutrons to it and then let it alpha and beta decay to uranium-235? This is the kind of thing that happens in the course of r-process nucleosynthesis, which seems like it might be similar to what is going on in LENR. This chart suggests that if you can get something into the actinide series, you're well on your way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Radioactive_decay_chains_diagram.svg I can only imagine that there are complications here and there, including losing relatively unstable isotopes before they can accumulate. But the larger point is that the discovery of LENR, if it is real, might have negative implications as well as positive ones.
