Isotopic forensics

Why the library suggests it

The first clause of the protocol this card asks for is a number written down before the device is opened: how much excess energy a run must have released, per gram of fuel, before each of the two measurements can say anything at all. One team published theirs. Here it is, with their own runs placed against it.

The isotope threshold, set before the run

Opening a device afterwards only answers a question that was asked in advance. One team wrote the rule down before looking at any sample: a proton capture on nickel that releases one megajoule consumes about six hundred million billion nuclei, so an isotope that was not in the fuel becomes detectable at roughly one megajoule per gram of fuel — while moving the ratio of an isotope that was already there, far enough for an ordinary mass spectrometer to resolve it, takes more than a hundred megajoules per gram. Two lines, two orders of magnitude apart. Put a run on the axis and read which of the two measurements it is entitled to attempt.

Place a run on the axis

AP2, the nickel-and-lithium reactor (214.3 megajoules per gram)KV3, hydrogenated from the gas phase (222.2 megajoules per gram)GS3, the careful outside analysis (50 megajoules per gram)The Lugano test (5,800 megajoules per gram)

Excess energy per gram

214.3

Back to the first reactor

• A new isotope becomes detectable
• A ratio already present can be resolved

Excess energy per gram:

214.3 megajoules per gram

Against the ratio-shift line:

2.1 times

Nuclei consumed at this excess energy:

9E19

A new isotope becomes detectable:

in reach

A ratio already present can be resolved:

in reach

What this run may claim — Past both lines: Both measurements are in reach. A shift in the ratio of an isotope already present is resolvable by an ordinary mass spectrometer at this energy, which makes it the measurement worth pre-registering.

Runs that cannot be placed

• Protok-6, on a flowing-water calorimeter — Excess energy 100 MJ
• VV3, the largest excess in the set — Excess energy 790 MJ

These two reactors publish an excess energy and no fuel loading, so they have no energy per gram and are listed here rather than drawn on the axis. Inventing a loading to fill the picture is exactly what a pre-registered protocol exists to prevent.

The gap between the two lines is the point. A careful analysis at fifty megajoules per gram found no isotope change, and sits between them — so that finding is a statement about how far the instrument reaches, not about whether anything happened. Deciding which of the two measurements a run can attempt, before the run, is the protocol this card asks somebody to write down and publish.

One analysis in this set stands apart and its authors published it rather than setting it aside: the lighter lithium isotope in the first reactor's spent fuel rose from 7.4 to 15.4 per cent in one laboratory's measurement, while a second laboratory measuring the same fuel saw the change only within its own error.

The sheet every figure here is stated in

Mahadeva Srinivasan and K. P. Rajeev gather what several laboratories found on their cathodes afterwards, across electrolysis, glow discharge and simple gas permeation, and find a consistent pattern of elements that were not there before in proportions that do not match the natural isotope mixture (Transmutations and isotopic shifts in LENR experiments, 2020). One team's example of doing it properly — calculating in advance how much excess energy a reactor must release before an isotope shift could even be seen, then measuring against that line and reporting what fell on each side — opened four of its own nickel-hydrogen generators after runs of six days to seven weeks and 100 to 790 megajoules of excess heat, found nickel and lithium ratios close to natural with one exception, and found substantial elemental change in the ceramic tube and surrounding powder (Isotopic and Elemental Composition of Substance in Nickel-Hydrogen Heat Generators, 2018). And the published method for doing this to any unusual material — instruments, chain of custody, comparison against a prior analysis, in a peer-reviewed aerospace journal — is Improved instrumental techniques, including isotopic analysis, applicable to the characterization of unusual materials (2022), which maps which atoms and which isotopes sit at which point in a sample, far below the scale of a human hair.

The experiment or build

The instruments are in biomedical and semiconductor laboratories already; the missing piece is a shared protocol. Write and publish one: pre-run baseline analysis of every component including the vessel, sealed chain of custody, blind sample coding, the same analysis after the run, and a pre-registered threshold for what counts as a shift. The settling measurement is the isotope ratio of a named element, before and after, on a blind-coded sample, with the excess energy released calculated in advance so that the expected shift can be compared with the detection limit. Publishing that protocol would do more for the credibility of section 2 than any single new result.