From: Eric Walker David Roberson wrote:
Jones makes a good argument that it is unlikely to eliminate all of the gammas and I suspect he is correct. The argument, which says that even if you obtain 99.99999 percent efficiency, you would still see a large number of gammas for the levels of power observed, is a good one, for it narrows down the possibilities significantly.… must we then discount years of research stating unequivocally that there has been 4He evolution. If the PdD guys did years of shoddy work, who is there to trust? Eric, This is not a fair characterization from a technical standpoint. We can trust the calorimetry – which is the more important detail by far. In the early days (early nineties) it was not easy to distinguish D2 from 4He except in a handful of Labs with sophisticated equipment and procedure. Both gases are essentially the same mass, 4.002602 vs 4.028204 and the small difference in helium is masked by the massive disproportion in the expected volume of the two following the typical cold fusion experiment, so that helium looks to be at the noise level in every deuterium experiment, regardless of excess heat, even when none is being made. Note: helium is ubiquitous, and is especially problematic in the processing and enrichment of deuterium tanked gas by the supplier. Four nines purity from a gas supplier is not good enough. Was this tested for every experiment? It is a sophisticated undertaking in 2014 to do this measurement accurately from start to finish. Helium is rare but ubiquitous — 5.2 ppm by volume in the atmosphere on average, as it is continuously created within the earth from alpha decay; but in Labs where liquid or tanked helium is used in an enclosed space, which is most Labs, Helium can be found naturally at 50 ppm and up - way up! … and variable from day to day and even hour to hour. No one can afford to do hourly recalibration. In the experiment being analyzed, the expected ratio of helium to “pure” D, assuming it really is pure from the supplier, can actually be less than the Lab ratio ! How do you calibrate away this intrinsic error and be comfortable with the results? A quadrupole mass spectrometer (QMS) is the standard apparatus for gas analysis, however, conventional 4He analysis is not accurate with the normal apparatus, since deuterium would normally be included in an overwhelming disproportion in the sample gas - and enrichment is not possible at a low gas inventory from sampling the electrodes; and again, this is especially true when liquid helium or tanked helium is used in the Lab in question. Is there any large Lab on earth that does not have a high natural helium concentration? In short, a large peak of D2 masks a tiny peak of 4He unless the two are in fairly similar proportions - and there are few ways to change this when the experiment only produces a few million helium atoms (from fusion) which is mixed with a million times more deuterium as the starting gas, which gas itself already has helium contaminants at a rate that is not very different from the production concentration. Personally I have no problem with this issue of a “persistent false positive” for helium, ongoing for twenty years, so long as the calorimetry is accurate, which I am convinced - is accurate. QM tells us there will be some percentage of helium produced, no matter what, and it is the relative proportion which is difficult to assess.
