Huizenga Post Script II

About that Ideal Gas Law...

Here's another way of looking at it. According to the Ideal Gas Law, 1 mole is always equal to 22.4 liters. Doesn't matter which gas, any gas. What is a mole? It is defined as a standard number of gas molecules. This doesn't vary with the gas. For example, 1 mole of oxygen has the same number of oxygen molecules as 1 mole of hydrogen. The same is true for carbon dioxide. It is true of all gases.

Now, the thing that does differ is the mass. Therefore, 1 mole of hydrogen gas is about 2 grams ( because hydrogen bonds with itself to form a molecule of H2 gas, therefore it has two atoms of hydrogen instead of just one). Now, compare this with a solid, like nickel, which has about 60 grams. If, by any chance, that you can saturate the nickel with hydrogen so that there is one hydrogen atom for each nickel atom, the mass only changes by the mass of 1 mole of hydrogen, or just 1 gram. ( assuming the hydrogen separates from itself back into elemental hydrogen)

Question: Is that the ratio of hydrogen atoms to nickel atoms one to one? If it is, then one observation leaps out at you. That is this: 1 mole of nickel takes up very little volume. Compared with the volume of 1 mole of hydrogen, which is 22.4 liters. You have to realize that 1 mole of nickel is much, much smaller in volume. This is where Fleishmann and Pons (F&P) came up with the idea that saturating the palladium with hydrogen actually increases its effective pressure.  That because to squeeze the hydrogen down to the same volume as the nickel would require a lot of pressure.

Hydrogen tends to seep into metal.  It is something of a problem to use hydrogen in an internal combustion engine because it will seep into the metal and make it brittle.  In order to deal with this problem, the metal has to be specially treated.

So, the chemical behavior of hydrogen to seep into metals is actually very useful to help us with fusion.  That's provided that someone is clever enough to see how that might be done.  I think F&P may have been the ones who were clever enough.