LENR theory – Page 2 – The Explanation of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction

LENR behaviors that theory must explain

The many discussions of theory have encouraged me to summarize what is known about LENR having relevance to theory, and what a theory requires to explain.

A theory in conflict with any one of these essential requirements, I suggest, is not worth discussing. On the other hand, many details about each of the requirements need to be ignored until more information is obtained. Nevertheless, the basic requirements can be used to eliminate many ideas and reduce the discussion to a few possibilities.

For those who believe theory is not important or useful, I would like to point out that we presently have theories being used to explain behavior and to design experiments. If these theories are wrong, the conclusions being reported will be wrong. Agreeing on the basic characteristics of LENR would help prevent such mistakes.

LENR has a few basic and well established behaviors and many unknown features. We can debate the unknowns, but the well known behaviors must be acknowledged by any effective explanation.

Of course, imagination can provide all kinds of exceptions to any condition, but an effective search best focuses on the more plausible and more likely possibilities.

The well known LENR behaviors include:

1. LENR is initiated only with great difficulty. Many materials have been subjected to a wide range of conditions without LENR being produced.

2. Once a material is “activated” the LENR effect is robust and sustained with a possible rate in excess of 10^11 events/sec.

3. Helium, tritium, and a variety of transmutation products are formed.

4. Each of these nuclear products are found produced in the surface region when the location can be determined.

5. Helium production is the source of most observed heat energy.

6. Very little energetic radiation is detected outside the apparatus.

7. Because LENR takes place in a chemical structure surround by normal atoms, the mechanism causing the nuclear reaction must be consistent with this environment.

Normally, any mechanism able to initiate a nuclear reaction will also cause significant chemical changes in the surrounding material. Such changes are not observed when LENR occurs.

1. The behavior identified as #1 implies that a rare and novel condition must form in the material in order for the LENR process to occur. I call this region the nuclear active environment (NAE). This region is not present in most materials and can not be easily created.

This characteristic eliminates vacancies of any type, dislocations of any kind, impurities of any kind, and large cracks because each of these features is normally present in common materials.

2. The characteristics listed in #2 show that the NAE is stable once formed and can be present in significant concentration. The NAE is not the result of a minor impurity or an occasional flaw in the material.

3. Helium and tritium formation can be attributed to reactions between isotopes of hydrogen but transmutation is difficult to explain. The explanation of transmutation must account for two types, one that adds helium to a nucleus without fragmentation and another type that results in fragmentation of the target after hydrogen is added.

4. The nuclear products are found associated only with the surface region. Consequently, the NAE is not expected to form in the bulk material.

5. Most of the heat energy results from He4 formation when deuterium is used. An effective theory must explain how helium is formed while producing the amount of energy expected to result from D+D fusion.

6. The huge mass-energy released by a nuclear reaction must be communicated to the surrounding material as heat energy. This process must not destroy the NAE or create significant energetic radiation. Consequently, a narrow range is placed on the rate at which energy is released and the type of the energy release process.

7. Creation of the NAE and the nuclear process must be compatible with the chemical conditions known to be associated with the material in which LENR takes place.

Are there additions or clarifications?

Can these requirements be used to eliminate the bad theories?

Progress Report #5

Here is the latest progress report. Shown are some important behaviors that have been misinterpreted in the past, so a careful reading would be useful. This report will appear with the other Reports on www.LENRexplained.com. Because these are quickly written informal reports, some typos and other errors are to be expected. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

PROGRESS-REPORT-5 (20Mb) (corrected)

This study is an example of having available an apparatus that can detect new behaviors only because such behaviors are expected. We see only what we are permitted to see by the apparatus. Consequently, the design of the apparatus is basic to understanding LENR. In this case, the design was influenced by the behaviors predicted by my theory.

Fig. 9 from Report #5. Overall view of the calorimeter showing the position of a laser. A laser is positioned to apply laser light to the cathode surface at various angles and locations. The laser can be focused to change the spot size on the target, heated to change its frequency, and rotated to change its polarization relative to the target. A second laser can also be used either together or independently. A hole through the back of the calorimeter allows insertion of a fiber optical cable to measure the frequency of the laser. The laser is not being used at the present time.

Production of excess energy is once again claimed, but this time it is correlated with radiation being generated by the energy-producing process. This correlation is new and provides powerful evidence for the excess energy being real and being caused by a nuclear reaction.

As for the importance of radiation. I have gradually come to the conclusion that claims for excess energy can not be attributed to a nuclear process unless they are correlated with the products of a nuclear process. The correlation with helium production meets this requirement. However, these measurements are difficult and expensive. Detection of radiation also meets this reqirement. In this case, the measurement is easy and cheap. The only requirement is to actually use a sensitive detector within the apparatus. Radiation with the energy being detected can not be made by a chemical reaction. This is proof of a nuclear process. As for reproducibility, I have already reproduced the effect several times and intend to use the correlation to justify my claims for producing LENR.

The role of temperature was largely misinterpreted in the past. Production of power is controlled by the ambient temperature, not by using pulses, although pulses will have an effect because they change the average ambient temperature. This realization has profound importance to any proposed explanation.

The composition of the PdD is not the most important variable in determining whether excess power will be produced. This study shows that temperature is one of the most important variables, which according to my theory affects the rate at which the D can diffuse to the NAE where the nuclear reaction takes place.

Of course, the NAE must be first created before any excess power will be produced regardless of the temperature. Temperature alone does not create the NAE nor does the composition alone create the NAE.

The ultimate challenge is to discover exactly what does cause the NAE to form. That is the goal of this study.

PROGRESS-REPORT-5 (20Mb) (corrected)

How To Evaluate LENR Theory?

It has been posed that a major criterion for evaluating theory is “comparison with the observations we expect it to ‘explain'”, such as

1) A failure to observe intense penetrating radiations.
2) A failure to observe secondary hot reactions (recoil etc.)
3) Why the reaction takes place mainly outside the bulk.
4) How tritium / neutrons are produced.
5) How energy is transmitted to the lattice as heat.
6) How the above can occur in both light and heavy hydrogen systems.
7) Iwamura’s transmutations.

I have studied LENR now for 26 years. I found the difficulty in creating the effect very frustrating. Most of my attempts failed. When a sample made energy, it seemed no different from the samples that did nothing. Finding an explanation for this difference became my goal. Use of trial and error was not practical because I did not have the resources to run the required large number of experiments.

I turned to the explanations that were being proposed and found that they ignored the unique conditions required to initiate the nuclear reaction and focused on the nuclear process using selected behavior. In other words, they were useless in showing me how to make success more reliable.

Having a chemical background, my first question was, “What was unique about the material that could cause a nuclear reaction”? After all, for over 100 years, scientists failed to detect any indication that a nuclear reaction could be affected by the chemical environment no matter how extreme the conditions and no matter how hard they looked. Clearly, a very rare and unique condition had to be created. In 1996, I identified this condition as the nuclear active environment (NAE).

Once the NAE is accepted, the question has to focus on where in the material this rare and unique condition is located and how can it be created.

Obviously, the condition is not part of the structure normally present in all materials, such as vacancies or dislocations. If these common conditions were the NAE, LENR would be much more common and much easier to replicate.

An answer to this quandary is basic to explaining LENR.

The second problem involves the mechanism. The mechanism must only affect a nuclear reaction. The process must have no effect on the chemical behavior. After all, chemists have been studying Pd/D for over 100 years and have detected nothing unusual about its chemistry. The material acts like any other hydride, except it is more reactive to H than most other elements.

A mechanism involving electron energy levels would affect the chemical conditions. Chemistry has failed to find such a mechanism. Simply put, DDL, neutron formation, and any other mechanism involving the electrons can be eliminated from consideration, at least at first.

Nevertheless, electrons are required to reduce the Coulomb barrier to a level permitting the observed reaction rate. This means electrons are involved, but how?

Finally, LENR creates helium rather than fragments of helium, as does hot fusion. Somehow a mechanism must overcome the barrier while at the same time dissipating the nuclear the energy. In the case of hot fusion, these two events are separated in time. In LENR, the two events must occur at the same time and be part of the same basic process. This requires a very unique mechanism.

In conclusion, LENR requires a unique and rare condition in the material and a very rare and unusual mechanism must operate in this condition. This path immediately eliminates most explanations and forces the discussion to ask different questions. I asked these questions in my book The Explanation of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, and provide detailed answers to each of the questions posed, along with many others.