http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=806&cpage=15#comment-723229 AR: “See you soon, my great Friend and Master Sergio! I will never forget our work together and that day in the Brasimone Nuclear facility.” This is a provocative comment. “That day” must have been a memorable breakthrough discovery for them, since it is mentioned so prominently- almost as a eulogy. Does anyone know the backstory of “that day in Brasimone”?
One wonders if something happened then which sheds any light on the HotCat operation, in particular. Brasimone, as best I can tell, is a facility for the study of a liquid fueled fission reactor (LFR). It is not clear how that could possibly relate to the ECat, or perhaps specifically to the HotCat. Maybe they were simply “borrowing” the support facilities for testing purposes. Anyone following Rossi’s story from the beginning may be justified in thinking that there was a major breakthrough in the past year. I wonder if this bit of eulogy relates to the HotCat breakthrough or not. FWIW – there is one detail worth mentioning about Brasimone … wrt a possible HotCat cross-connection … but it is a stretch… If you go to this page and see the diffusion bonding laboratory and other support facilities http://web.brasimone.enea.it/supunits/labindex.htm To my way of thinking this Lab fits in with one troubling detail in the progression from ECat -> HotCat … and that is the sealed steel tube surrounded by SiC tubes – which is where all the action is happening - in the advanced design. But basically it all goes back to there being no obvious precedent for moving from a typical conflat reactor, with hydrogen feed, to a sealed tube within a SiC tube, in which a hydride provides all the hydrogen that can be used. That seems to something that would never happen except by accident. And they have it all in this lab, all the details including ceramic tubes used for molten liquid and sputtering and diffusion bonding. Was the HotCat kind of an accident? OK – No doubt that this many not sound like much of a rationale for a real scientific breakthrough … unless you have done this kind of experiment, but the jump to a sealed tube, diffusion bonded - with no possibility of refilling it – and then place within ceramic enclosures - is so surprising at a fundamental level - that you have to ask yourself this: is it the result of some kind of unplanned or serendipitous happenstance? Could the Brasimone diffusion bonding lab be the place where an inadvertent discovery happened, leading to the HotCat configuration as it is now been demonstrated ? Well, admittedly, this is a stretch of the imagination, but possibly worth a mention (by default if nothing else) - because almost no other scenario fits into the developmental history very well. Not to mention… the smile of the Cheshire cat, out there in cyberspace… Jones
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