LENR may not produce the same kind of ionising radiation and high energy particles as fission or traditional impact fusion ( however there will be low end Beta when forming and coasting and then a range of particles at a range of energies when the Active Agent self-containment partially or completely fails, then there is also a potential for a small balance of excited / unstable nuclei to decay through well understood means).
The need to bleed
If one over-makes the Active Agent without breaking/bleeding it or you cannot contain it sufficiently (over and above its self-containment), then it has the potential to basically consume anything that it comes into contact with (favouring elements that are conductive, low melting point, high electron affinity etc.) resulting in a likely-hood to produce Ca, Fe, Zr, Pb etc - In fact, a good rule of thumb is that it will tend to favour production of elements that are in high crustal abundance initially, and then those that pack the most density as it progresses. As long as there is sufficient low AMU feed-stock in the immediate vicinity of the active agent, it will stay in the green zone with transmutation back and forth between elements as more low Z material is consumed.
Difficulty with ceramics
A case where the Active Agents own activity can cause physical containment choices to fail is that of Al2O3, when the AA produces enough local heat, it can change the conductivity of Al2O3 from a dielectric to a conductor which will allow the AA to start consuming it (AA likes to be in the most conductive stable medium around). With Al being highly desirable to the AA and both Al and O being low Z feedstock, a positive feedback results, causing the AA to vector in the direction of the first material to have been raised to a temperature that gave a conductivity sufficient for its resistivity to be lowered enough for it to be consumed. The results of this action were well documented by Shoulders, I witnessed the net effect in Moscow in early 2015 (but took a few years to understand the mechanism), Parkhomov suffered it for years and likely may other researchers using Alumina or ceramics that are suitable for Nernst lamps did too. Parkhomov finally had a successful full in-reaction-zone consumption of fuel when he switched to Boron-Nitride ceramics.
In the case of ECCO fuel, much of the lower Z elements had been crushed in the vicinity of the Active Agents inside the fuel grains, so you got sizeable amounts of Zr, Nb, Sn and Pb from H, C, O, Ti & Ni. At this end of the process, elements appear to be favoured that have high Tc for superconductivity, IMPO this may be because they are able to support the Active Agent more easily, just as a more conductive element is and why Al is so good at the low end. Therefore all additional SOUND energy put in, stimulated the production of Pb resulting in over 50% of the sample surface composition presenting as Pb - it may have been that the system produced Higher Z numbers, but as I have shown in the Making Gold presentation, these would be highly unlikely to survive due to stability and the nature of LENR.
Uranium is a unique and precious gift of nature
In an extremely intensive system where no lighter elements are ultimately available, there would be a potential to produce Uranium isotopes with a production ratio related to their stability. On that note, this is an interesting quote:
"The half-life of uranium 238 is of 4.5 billion years, while uranium 235 has a half-life of 'only' 700 million years. Though both isotopes were at the time of Earth formation equally abundant, natural uranium today consists today of 99.3% uranium 238 and only 0.70% uranium 235." SOURCE
Think about that quote for a minute, what is that saying to you?
Uranium will be featuring in an up-and coming presentation. Suffice to say, it is a VERY special element.
The challenge with Metals
Metals are conductors at room temperature, that is a gift to the AA in LENR. Here I shall just briefly re-iterate a problem when using metals for structure or containment.
When using any metal that gets exposed to the Active Agent, it will appear to liquefy (NOT MELT) based on its conductivity (ability to transport the Active Agent), melting point (susceptibility to failure of electron lattice bonding) and electron affinity (desire to take on board the Active Agent) and other factors such as possible net energy gain from fusion of nuclei. This is why Aluminium is VERY easily influenced, it is 4th most conductive, has low melting point, medium-low electron affinity and high energy yield from production of 54Fe. IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE HOT to be affected by the active agent. Attached is an example of Aluminium exposed to the Hutchison Effect, the fields were switched off and Alik Pezaro, a then colleague of John went to pick up the sample, the sample was described as cool to the touch, but as he tried to lift it, his fingers started to push into the sample and it began to slip from his hand.
Figure 1: Aluminium exposed to the Hutchison Effect with finger impressions from Alik Pezaro when he tried to pick it up
The sample, being placed on a non-conductive surface in a dry environment (BOTH IMPORTANT) had not been able to drain the Active Agent sufficiently and the net result was that the samples metallic lattice was still only loosely held together.
Dr Egely and I witnessed something similar with Iron rebar in Suhas Lab last year though less pronounced, the sample started to neck with very little applied tension. Suhas had previously described Fe liquefying (he said melting) under water. If Al can remain as a loosely held blob under high influence of the Active Agent, one can imagine Fe, where there is no easy path to net beneficial nuclear transmutation, can withstand much higher levels of attack. PURE Fe would be great, but you would need to have no light Z elements in play - which is hard to do. Ultimately, even Fe will progress to Pb/ other heavier elements, given intense enough local Active Agents.
The higher the actual melting point of the metal, the more instantaneous the destruction from Active Agents of a certain strength, as the sample will sublime from solid lattice, through melting, to consumption in an environment containing any other light elements, especially when the Active Agent is built with those light elements. This is why W and Mo don't do much, and then they do EVERYTHING at once. Think SAFIRE W Probe. Think Mills catastrophic failures. The lighter the element that the Active Agent is built from, the greater its effect on heavier elements when a critical threshold is reached, the heavier the element that the active agent with a low Z basis is interacting with, the more likely the interaction when it is possible. For both SAFIRE and Mills the AA is built in the lightest of elements. Until these researchers and others recognise what is going on, they will be doomed to false starts.
My view is that Hafnium (Hf) is a good element for PRODUCTION of the active agent because it has a HIGH melting point, has low conductivity, and 0 electron affinity. This is some of the reasons (low conductivity and 0 electron affinity) WHY Shoulders was successful when he wet his W electrodes with Hg. This is why I asked Phillip Power to add these factors to his version of the Parkhomov reaction tables.
History shows us a story, if we are willing to see it
As said above once made, the Active Agent must be harvested / bled or destroyed or it will eventually destroy any physical containment.
The ECCO reactor dealt with this effectively since the cores were configured such that micro failures were not an issue and the Active Agent was prevented from building too high due to ion rich tap water capturing and bleeding them away continuously.
The Lugano reactor configuration allowed the central core to be uncritically breached allowing the heater coils to capture the excess Active Agents and bleed them away - preventing too high a quanta resulting in failure, but lowering the potential excess - the affect of the Active Agent on the heater wires may have resulted in the claimed lowering of the resistance, the copper feed wires conductivity change would have been marginal by comparison.
If one applies this kind of thinking to many 'strange' observations both recently and very historically, it is NOT a very cleaver thing to realise why other inventors have had challenges. Tesla, Papp, Chernetsky, Rossi QX. When you know what is going on, it is just plain obvious. You will know, and it will be just a thing at that point and the 'magic' and 'mystery' will be gone. So will the straw man arguments previously used to dismiss these other researchers work.
Containing the Active Agent is the most important factor to successful control of High net yield reactors
The only way to CONTAIN the AA above a certain strength is to do it using NON PHYSICAL MATERIAL BASED MEANS. Shoulders spelt this out - it is not inventive to have re-discovered this - it is OBVIOUS. This is WHY I was asking for people to investigate what Shoulders had invented before 1980 (that made him uniquely equipped to conduct his research). Regardless, above a certain scale, only free-space gives you the freedom to keep on scaling it without destruction of literally ANYTHING of ANY size. A mid way approach to building VERY large Active Agents (well, small, but big compared to what is possible terrestrially) and studying them, would be to do it in the Ionosphere.
I am stating this here, and the reasons, to stop it from being patented.
I will state suggested configurations for production of the Active Agent in up and coming presentations. But there is much context to present before and a lot of hard work.
Credit must be given to John Hutchison for and Kenneth Radford Shoulders for sharing the fruits of their life.
Thanks to All!!! and for ALL ;-)
I will be featuring it in my weekly #technology and #science curation post for the @minnowsupport project and the Tech Bloggers' Guild! The Tech Bloggers' Guild is a new group of Steem bloggers and content creators looking to improve the overall quality of our niche.
Wish not to be featured in the curation post this Friday? Please let me know. In the meantime, keep up the hard work, and I hope to see you at the Tech Bloggers' Guild!
If you have a free witness vote and like what I am doing for the Steem blockchain it would be an honor to have your vote for my witness server. Either click this SteemConnect link or head over to steemit.com/~witnesses and enter my username it the box at the bottom.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. This post is just getting a few things on the record, however, it does require a lot of background that can be gathered from following the links to a certain extent.
Why is hafnium an active agent (AA)? Will actinides be active agents? Can any element of large Z be used as an active agent (AA)?
No, Hafnium is a perfect structural material that can be used, in part, for initiation of / production of small scale Active Agents.
Since Active Agents act in many ways as an electron, having a material that has a high melting point lowers the probability of degradation during the production of the Active Agent, having a 0 electron affinity means it is unlikely to take on board produced AAs and having low conductivity means that any that are taken on board, would not propagate well. Also there is a good spread of isotopes, which may mean that perfect resonance within the metal is unlikely and transmutation products in the metal could balance to Hafnium in the absence of any lighter elements in the AAs. IMPO, this is a good overall combination of properties.
You would want to use light gaseous elements for nucleation of the AAs to give the maximum yield in nucleon balancing reactions.
Hello! Bob.
As you posted last year. I've done my own experiments, and I've found that the ashes taken out of the nickel-hydrogen reactor are placed in PET or CR39 plastic containers, and over time, the plastic is corroded.
Fascinating. It would be interesting to see what this looks like under a NURUGO lens on a smartphone.
Moreover, I would suggest following the methodology I used with a Logitech 910C, covered with black electrical masking tape and using "Cosmic Ray Finder" - it took around 600 hours to observe 3 strange radiation tracks from a highly active ECCO fuel sample, but it was well worth it.
Have you got images of the degradation at a higher resolution. If not, and you have samples you would be willing to have looked at, I would be happy to do that for you.
George Hants Question on ECW
Reply
I would like to note that the drop in resistance of the Lugano reactor is likely not just due to the Active Agent affect on the heater coil, but also as a result of the Alumina becoming a conductor as we re-discovered during GS testing and that was the basis of the Nernst lamps around the turn of 1900.