🚀 go-pugleaf

In "A straw man & Calorimeter drift", Jed Rothwell raises the point that
Yamaguchi "got a million [neutrons] per second for several seconds" whereas
I  "got a few dozen, " and "It seems to me that he has a lot more going for him
than you do. ... You see a spark, they see a bonfire.  What's the matter with
that?"

My colleague Howard Menlove, Fellow of the Los Alamos National Lab., visited
Yamaguchi late in 1992.  Howard has worked for decades on neutron detection,
and with the BYU group on measuring neutrons from deuterided solids.  The
numbers of neutrons he reports for random neutron emissions are consistent
with those we found:
"Experiments using high-efficiency neutron detectors have detected neutron
emission from various forms of Pd and Ti metal in pressurized D2 gas cells
and D2O electrolysis cells.  Four independent neutron detectors based on 3He
gas tubes were used. ... For the random emission yields, the levels (approx.
0.08 n/s) were similar to the yields reported by Jones et al." [in Nature]
[Quoted from Menlove et al., J. Fusion En. 9: 495-506, Dec. 1990.]

Following his visit to Yamaguchi's lab (NTT, Japan), Howard said Yamaguchi's
neutron detection system consisted of a pair of health-physics counters.
(I can imagine Dick Blue groaning at the news.)    The
neutron-detection efficiency of each is about 10E-6.  Thus, the detection of
a million neutrons per second is near the sensitivity of these rather
crude detectors.  By contrast, Menlove's detectors have a n-detection
efficiency of 30-40% (typically).  Howard told me that Yamaguchi's neutron 
counter technique was "unimpressive."  He did not believe 
Yamaguchi's claims of neutron detection at levels a million times ours, 
and neither should you.

But Yamaguchi's experiments are front page news in Japan.  If you buy the
NTT cold-fusion kit for a mere $565,000 (J. Wall Street 11/27/92), which is
based on Yamaguchi's experiments,
you might want to get a better neutron-detection system.

Also, note that even at 10E6 n/s, fusion would generate only about a microwatt
of heating  -- not measurable by current calorimetry experiments.  That is,
even if we believed Yamaguchi's claims of a million n/s, this is not enough
by far to account for macroscopic xs heat.

-- Steve