My bad, Eric. And I need to set the record straight on this important detail - since Randell Mills did find tritium - over twenty years ago - and before he decided to distance himself from LENR !
Once again, America's Newton shoots himself in the foot ! Too bad. Ed Storms, whose memory is much better than mine, reminds me of this important detail - and it is from a rather famous article in Fusion Technology : Mills & Kneizys, "Excess heat production by the electrolysis of an aqueous potassium carbonate electrolyte and the implications for cold fusion" Fusion Technology 20, 65 (1991) Randy admits in print that they detected a significant amount of tritium but not enough to explain the heat. The estimated amount is not clear. Tritium measurement is easy, and it is so sensitive that very few atoms are required to reveal much more than background, which then looks like a large amount, and consequently it is hard to arrive at an accurate energy balance. But the fact that this admission comes from Mills himself, is important in many ways. And the lack of mention of nuclear reactions thereafter (after 1991) is itself damning in retrospect as it will be interpreted as intent to deceive. Lawyers should take note (this is for the other Randy). This appearance of tritium from a light water reaction also bolsters Ed's case for a (preliminary) round of deuterium forming reactions, which would be needed to supply the required level of deuterium, so that statistically we do not depend on the natural paucity ... but it also leaves the Thermacore story (apparent null result) unexplainable, and even more mysterious. In the end, there is little doubt than QM tunneling provides a mechanism for some amount of tritium to show up with light water alone. Since 3H is so easy to measure with certainty, due to its short half-life and known beta decay spectrum - even a few atoms are not be easily hidden. But it gets more complicated from there on. The next question is how much energy is really carried away by the neutrino, when hydrogen fuses into deuterium, or is there another route ? Can the net thermal gain be explained without "redundant ground states" or is that too part of the setup for allowing lots of hydrogen to fuse into deuterium? It just gets curiouser and curiouser... Jones
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