Historical research guide · 0007 · 2023
LENR Products: Lattice Confinement Fusion (LCF), Fission, or Both?
Theresa L. Benyo · Pamela Mosier-Boss · Lawrence Forsley · Wayne Jennings · Bruce Steinetz · Gus Fralick · Robert Hendricks
In one minute
Theresa Benyo, the principal investigator on NASA Glenn's lattice confinement fusion project, brought a question to the 2023 ICCF-25 conference: when a deuterium-loaded metal produces heat and strange new elements, is that fusion, fission, or both at once? She lays three experiments side by side. Cycling deuterium gas through a palladium-silver tube produced unexplained temperature jumps — a result Gus Fralick first saw in 1989 and the team repeated four times since — and left the tube carrying chromium, copper, iron, manganese and zinc that were not there before. A bremsstrahlung beam, the hard X-rays a linear accelerator makes, produced fusion neutrons in deuterated metals and, in deuterated depleted uranium, a full spread of uranium fission products. A low-current electrolytic cell produced the same fusion neutrons. Benyo's proposal is that electron screening lets a palladium or silver nucleus swallow a whole deuteron, and the overloaded nucleus then splits into pairs the surface maps actually show. She closes by asking for the experiments that would confirm it.
Connection
This is chapter 12's open question asked by the people running the hardware: the products coming out of a deuterium-loaded lattice look like fusion and fission at the same time, and Benyo names the measurements that would tell them apart.
From the source
Pressurised cycling of deuterium gas through a palladium-silver alloy tube produces unexplained temperature rises — 17 °C in 15 seconds in 1989, 25 °C in 4 seconds in 2014 — that appear with deuterium and not with hydrogen, repeated across five campaigns between 1989 and 2018.Gas Cycling Experiments: Description
Post-test analysis of the Pd25Ag tubing found elements that had not been there before: chromium, copper, iron, manganese and zinc in the bulk, with zinc rising from undetected to 285 ppm, and molten surface spots whose isotopic maps show chromium, iron, nickel, copper and zinc.Gas Cycling Experiments: Bulk Analysis and ToF-SIMS slides
Exposing TiD2 and ErD3 to a 2.9 MV bremsstrahlung beam produced d-d fusion neutrons plus higher-energy boosted or Oppenheimer-Phillips neutrons, and exposing deuterated depleted uranium to a 6 MV beam produced a full spread of uranium fission products including barium-140, the iodine chain, xenon-135, strontium-92 and krypton-87.Bremsstrahlung Irradiation Experiments: Neutron and Gamma Spectroscopy
An electrolytic co-deposition cell run at currents below 500 mA produced 2.45 MeV d-d fusion neutrons and higher-energy neutrons, with the fusion neutrons strongest in the first two hours, alongside transmutation products on the outer co-deposition layer and evidence of tritium.Electrolytic Wet Cell Experiments
Palladium deuteride, which is not an actinide, has a measured fission threshold below 10 MeV despite an expected fission barrier near 50 MeV, and the fissility ratio Z squared over A gives 20.15 for palladium-105 and 20.65 for silver-107 against a threshold of 17 — so on that measure both are potentially fissile.Transmutation Theories: Fission Parameter
The proposed mechanism is that electron screening lets a palladium or silver nucleus capture a whole deuteron, leaving an unstable isotope that splits into observed pairs; the team asks whether that isotope is unstable enough to fission on its own or whether another as yet unknown vehicle assists, and states that additional experiments are needed to confirm the working fusion-fission theory.Summary
The way in
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20230012003How to cite it
Theresa L. Benyo, Pamela Mosier-Boss, Lawrence Forsley, Wayne Jennings, Bruce Steinetz, Gus Fralick, Robert Hendricks (2023) LENR Products: Lattice Confinement Fusion (LCF), Fission, or Both? https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20230012003