I’m no physicist but it seems to me that the discovery at the CERN laboratory that neutrinos could move faster than light could have implications for cold fusion. Neutrino releases have apparently been detected in some cold fusion experiments. So I have to wonder could faster than light movement by neutrinos be responsible for the huge releases of energy detected in some Low Energy Nuclear Reactions?

It is also interesting to note how this discovery could impact physics. The physics establishment has been telling us for decades that nothing could move faster than light. They dismissed FTL as nothing but “science fiction.” Now it looks like they were wrong about that one. One has to wonder if they’re wrong about cold fusion too.

Some members of the physics establishment have already come out and started attacking this neutrino discovery much as they attack cold fusion. University of Maryland Physics Department Chairman Dave Bawden told a reporter that a neutrino was a “magic carpet.” Obviously the scientists behind OPERA disagree with Bawden, he sounds a lot like the cold fusion skeptics doesn’t he.

CERN's Neutrino Detector

“This can’t be right, this can’t be real, James Giles, CERN’s own head of communications told another reporter. Sound familiar doesn’t it? If we aren’t smart enough to explain something it can’t be real. If we don’t have all the answers deny it, ignore it and hope it goes away so we won’t be embarrassed by it any more.

It’ll be interesting to see where this leads or if it amounts to anything. Hopefully the arbiters of science who tried to quash Pons and Flieschman won’t have their way with this one. It’ll be really interesting see what Focardi and Guissepe Levi have to say about this. Not to mention Andrea Rossi.

My understanding is that the E-Cat produces heat through the release of gamma radiation. What does gamma radiation have to do with neutrinos? I doubt the Widom-Larsen theory (which I heard NASA thinks explain the principle of LENR Ni-H that powers the E-Cat) needs faster than light neutrinos to explain.

As I pointed out I’m not a physicist and don’t claim to be one. Although I remember reading somewhere that somebody I think it was Focardi mentioned something about neutrino releases and e-cat. It is interesting to me as a layperson that research indicates the physicists know a lot less about things than we were led to believe they did. I have to wonder what else they’re wrong about. Thanks for the explanation.

From what I heard the experts say, a tremendous amount of heat is released because of the actual fusion of hydrogen into the nickel lattice, to produce copper, as well as the enactment of gamma radiation. The gammas are converted to heat within the reactor because their travel is stanched by the lead shielding. Thus we have more heat from the gamma radiation: 2 sources of heat – that ios, … as I understand it. As a proper student of all this, I stand to be corrected.

By the way, this is the best description I’ve found yet for what is happening in a LENR Ni-H exothermic reaction:

Protons turn into neutrons if they capture an electron. The electron neutralises its positive charge.
If a neutron is converted back into a proton by losing an electron there is a mass discrepancy of 0.328eV.
If a nickel neutron is converted into a proton the atom becomes copper and 0.328eV worth of energy is released.

A muon is a extra heavy electron. In muon catalysed fusion the muon replaces an electron. It has a negative charge so is invisible to the Coulomb barrier. It goes close enough to the nucleus to be captured by the weak force and a nuclear process is initiated.

I understand Focardi to be saying that an electrically neutral hydrogen atom can behave like a muon and convert one neutron of the nickel into a proton, with the commensurate exothermic energy yield.
(Nickel is No. 28 and copper is No. 29 on the periodic table)

The process described is the beta decay:
n -> p + e- + nu
(n: neutron, p: proton, e-: electron; nu: anti-neutrino)
The “mass discrepancy” of 0.328 MeV (not eV!!!) is just the average kinetic energy of the emitted electron, plus a (very small) energy of neutrino (nu). There isn’t any “mass discrepancy”.

I would like to remind that neutrinos do not interact easily with matter; OPERA, the experiment claiming the superluminal neutrino, is 1250 tons 10×20 meters wide and can detect only few neutrinos among the billions impinging on it.
Physics would need new theoretical checks if this measurement will be confirmed, but basic (and more complex) physical results, including nuclear reactions, would remain valid.

To be corrected:
All units are wrong; they should be MeV not eV (a factor 1000 wrong).
electron mass is 0.51 MeV (not eV); proton mass 939.565 MeV and so on.

1.) With the FTL neutrino, there should be no surprise that there is skepticism. The researchers themselves who found it published it in the context of “hey, we found this thing, and looked for an error that could cause it, but didn’t find one… please take a look at our work and see if you can find the error.” Many people have theories about what the error is, and it may be something as simple as not counting for the relativistic effects of the satelite’s movement… or it may actually be an FTL neutrino. But the scientific community is doing the right thing by checking thoroughly for an error before believing it.

2.) muon-catalyzed fusion works as follows:
The strong force, which controls the nucleus is very strong (hence the name), but only works over very short distances. Thus, two nuclei will be repelled by the positive-positive charge repulsion (called coulombic force) well before they get close enough for the strong force to kick in, unless they are travelling at ridiculous speeds, like happens in the sun (hot fusion).

if you have a normal deuterium atom, it’s got a proton and a neutron in the nucleus, with an electron orbitting a relatively huge distance away (if the nucleus were the size of a basketball, the electron would be several miles away). Two deuterium nuclei won’t come near each other because they both have positive charges and repel each other. They can form a chemical bond by sharing an electron, though this puts them still very far away. So far, that there’s no realistic way that one could fight the coulombic repulsion for the miles (in basketball scale) it would take to get close to the other nucleus

A muon is like an electron, except it’s ~250 times heavier. Because it is negatively charged, it can orbit a nucleus like an electron does, but the mass means that it orbits very close to the nucleus (using the basketball example, they would now be in the same room). So when the two deuterons share the muon as they would share an electron, the bond distance is so close that the strong force can kick in between them (in quantum mechanical terms, they are close enough for their wave functions to overlap), and they can be pulled together fusing into a helium. This helium has so much energy that it flies away, usually leaving the muon behind to cause this reaction all over again.

The problem is that muons require a lot of energy to make in a particle accelerator, and they decay in about 2.2 microseconds. So to produce power, they need to create enough fusions in their very short lifetime that they can pay for the energy it took to make them with some proffit. Calculations say that each muon needs to cause an average of 1,000 fusions for this tactic to acheive a reasonable energy return. The problem is that 1% of the time, the muon sticks to the helium that it created and can’t get away before it dies. If that happens 1% of the time, that means on average, each muon will create 100 fusions before decaying, one tenth the amound needed. Some people have found ways to get it up to 200, maybe 300 fusions per muon, but it seems to have plateued there for now.

I personally know people who are working on ways of trying to break that muon off the helium and increase the number to the magical 1,000 mark, and these are very bright guys. But if you ask them, even they will tell you that it’s a long shot that probably won’t work, but they still feel like the potential benefits are so great they ought to try.

3.) Neutrinos are particles emitted by many nuclear reactions. They don’t interact with much and are difficult to detect. While I can’t rule anything out 100%, it is very doubtful that anything regarding these neutrinos will affect cold fusion for these reasons:
a) Remember, it may still very well be a miscalculation.
b) Even if it’s not, if it can only be produced by CERN, that’s a lot of power going in (CERN is not energy cheap to run), and this neutrino would need to be kicking out a lot of energy to pay for the energy that went in.
c) neutrinos don’t interact with much, so even if you got one FTL neutrino to give you a ton of energy somehow, you would be creating many times more neutrinos just to get one to interact (thus raising the energy-per-neutrino required for proffitability).
d) Neutrinos are usually a “waste product” of nuclear reactions. They are not something used to cause an effect. I’m not saying they can’t be, but it would require significant change in perspective, which means a significant monetary investment for what is already an incredible long shot.