How knowing about rabbit holes leads to the evidence for deuteron stripping reactions

One of many paths in the world of cold fusion

My longtime friend of 25 years and oft times lab and sometime business partner Tom Passell has written a consummate paper describing his deuteron stripping case based on years of experimental studies. I cannot count the number of talks he and I have had about his being on the trail of the Oppenheimer Phillips reaction as a prime candidate to explain cold fusion.

Tom has spent a long lifetime working on nuclear energy. For many years, at the start of cold fusion, he was in charge of the Electric Power Research Institutes $6 million plus cold fusion research program. Then of late in his retirement years, he has spent many years in his painstaking study involving rounding up samples of metals from cold fusion experimentalists to see what nuclear footprints they might expose, a process I have actively helped Tom to do.

My good friend Tom Passell in this wonderful world of cold fusion

Alice in Wonderland has nothing on Tom Passell as his latest paper is now published.

Once the samples were in hand Tom sent them off to the research reactor at the University of Missouri. There a few milligrams of each material was put into a small plastic container known as a ‘rabbit’ and with the research reactor briefly turned up to full power and making an abundance of neutrons the rabbit is sent through the ‘rabbit hole’ which is a long tube that goes right through the heart of the reactor core.

The ‘rabbit’ is driven by a puff of air pressure and flies very quickly through. Of course, quick is all a matter of perspective as any even impossibly short time in the core of a nuclear reactor exposes every atom in the sample to massive neutron radiation and neutron activation.

In the blink of an eye, the reactor is flashed to critical and the rabbit blows through the core falling into a basket on the other side. There the sample is screamingly radioactive as all its atoms have been activated and made into radioactive species. Their radioactive decay signature is collected by a very sensitive energy dispersive gamma detector and those distinctive decay signatures allow Tom to ascertain just what nuclei were in the sample. Nary a nuclei goes uncounted in this most precise of all isotope measuring technique. Naturally, samples of the material before and after cold fusion are studied.

5…4….3….2….1… FIRE! And through the reactors rabbit hole goes the sample.

There’s more oddball cold fusion reactions than characters at a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

What Tom’s work shows is that a very available tool in the form of neutron activation analysis can and does clearly show ‘cold fusion’ includes deuteron stripping reactions as one of the perhaps many reactions taking place along with the expected D+D = 4He reaction. Once the first miracle of cold fusion, the crossing of the Coulomb Barrier, is in place the rich and diverse atom-ecology provides for more than a few forms of cold fusion to occur.

More workers in this field ought to follow Tom to the rabbit hole and start amassing the isotopic evidence the field needs for a fuller understanding. Here’s a link to the Missouri Research Reactor program.

The Case for Deuteron Stripping with Metal Nuclei as the Source of the Fleischmann–Pons Excess Heat Effect

Thomas O. Passell∗
TOP Consulting, Palo Alto

Abstract

Evidence is cited from the research literature on metals containing absorbed deuterium supporting the hypothesis that the excess heat episodes observed over the past 25 years are the result of exothermic deuteron stripping reactions with atomic nuclei of the absorbing metal. The deuteron stripping reaction is one in which the neutron half of the mass 2 deuteron is captured by an atomic nucleus while the proton half of the deuteron is ejected, repelled by the Coulomb field of the positively charged metal nucleus. This hypothesis provides a plausible explanation of why so little external radiation accompanies the episodes of excess heat first observed by Fleischmann and Pons [1].

The reaction products from stable isotopes of the host metal are a proton with energies from up to 9.2 MeV energy and a recoiling nucleus with energies of ∼100–to 600 keV. These two reaction products are retained near their birthplace because their range in solids is less than ∼100 µm. The emitted proton is energetic enough to produce by (p,n),
(p,α), (p,T), and (p,X-ray) reactions with host metal nuclei and their light-element impurities, the small number of neutrons, alpha particles, tritium atoms (T), and X-rays, occasionally observed associated with deuterated Ti and Pd. The PIXE process (proton-induced X-ray emission) is expected in which numerous K, L, and M X-rays of the absorbing metal are produced. For metals with thicknesses of >1 mm the vast majority of such X-rays do not escape the metal.

In experiments with foils of the host metal sufficiently thin, low levels of charged particles (mostly protons) have been observed. Some of the observed protons were at energies larger than 3.0 MeV, the largest possible energy of protons from the fusion of two deuterons.. Widely observed He4 and tritium are known products of the deuteron stripping reaction with Li6, which is a major constituent of electrolytes and a minor impurity in most metals. In any case, researchers have observed small but definite indicators of nuclear reactions other than d+d fusion in deuterated metals at temperatures not significantly above ambient.
#c 2014 ISCMNS. All rights reserved. ISSN 2227-3123

Here’s a link to the pdf of the full paper…. Passell-1 dstrip