NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/sci/physics/fusion/1868

Internet Message Format | 1992-07-28 | 3.6 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!SLEEPY.NETWORK.COM!logajan
From: [e-mail] (John Logajan)
Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
Subject: The importance of being chained
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 29 Jul 92 00:06:42 GMT
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Tom Droege reports an apparent 9mW average difference between
bosons on and off.

If we postulate that the source of the 9mW of heat is D+D=>He plus
24MeV, we find that that implies a minimum of 1.2 Curies of
activity (A Curie is 3.7E+10 events per second.)

However, Tom's boson source is nowhere near one Curie.  In fact,
it is marked 0.5 microcurie -- one two-millionth of a Curie.  He
further suggests that the source is old and is only a fraction of
its marked activity, he speculates as low as (or lower than) 0.008
microcurie.  This is less than one 150-millionth the number of
events required to generate the observed heat on a one-for-one
basis.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that some sort of chain
reaction *must* be appealed to. [Standard disclaimer about the
reliability of the original data, etc.]

An average gain per trigger event of less than 1.0 will never
account for the gain of 150 million.   An average gain of exactly
1.00000 will not account for it either.

Only gains greater than an average of 1.00000 can hope to account
for the net gain of 1.5E+8.  And gains greater than, yet very
nearly, 1.00000 are improbable due to the arbitrary geometry of
the Pd cathode surface which presumably "leaks" doomed chain
events.

The only logical conclusion to be drawn is that the gain is
greater than 1.0000 by some significant amount.  But that leads to
further requirements.  If the event times are on the order of
picoseconds, all the pending event opportunities will be consumed
in a fraction of a second.  If these be all the D's in the Pd
lattice, we ought to have a serious nuclear explosion rather
than tiny quantities of excess heat.

I see two general possibilities to explain the absence of mushroom
clouds in Orlando and Batavia.

One is that at any given time there are only a very few pending
event opportunities -- a fraction of the available D's.  They all
do go off in a very quick chain reaction flash, but their numbers
are relatively small.  A fraction of a second later after the
previous flash, new event opportunities arise, and the relaxation
oscillator can be triggered to fire again.  Sort of like the early
German V-1 "buzz bomb."  (Depending upon the rate of relaxation,
an RF "signature" might arise from this hypothetical mode.)

A modification of this is to postulate that there is always a
continuum of event opportunities appearing in the lattice, and
these overlap the firing of their predecessors.  The chain is
controlled, then, by the rate of event opportunity creation, just
as a rocket engine self-ignites new fuel.  (This would be a
continuous "burn" and might have no RF "signature.")

The second possibility is that event opportunities can assume bi-
stable states.  One state is the ground state, and one state is
the excited state.  The excited state halflife is (apparently) on
the order of minutes or hours -- if the statistics do actually
show a "lag" effect.

The problem with the bi-stable state theory is that it ought to
still lead to a runaway condition, although the onset of such
slowed to hours or days.  There is no evidence yet of such an
ongoing runaway condition.  So I have to conclude that the bi-
stable is not present, or is further controlled by some secondary
mechanism.  In any case the evidence is ambiguous.

  -- John Logajan