In August 2005 Ludwik Kowalski, of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Montclair State University in New Jersey, posted a short note titled "Manipulating nuclear decay rates" on his personal cold fusion web pages. The note reproduces a message he had sent that day to CMNS, a restricted discussion list of the International Society of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, and adds his comments on two experimental claims associated with Vladimir I. Vysotskii. It is an informal post, not a peer-reviewed paper. It matters to this dossier because it is an early informal comment on the Cs-137 work from a physicist outside the Vysotskii group, and because it states plainly which mundane explanations a claim of Accelerated Radionuclide Deactivation has to rule out.
The question Kowalski frames
Kowalski opens with what he calls the prevailing view: that what happens inside atomic nuclei cannot be altered by chemistry. He gives the half-life of Cs-137 as his example, saying it is the same whether the cesium is pure, in a compound, in air, in vacuum or inside a living organism. He presents the 1989 Fleischmann–Pons announcement as the start of a challenge to that view, and the two Vysotskii reports as further cases of the same kind. He does not claim to settle the matter. He asks how mainstream microbiologists regard reports of bacterial transmutation, and admits that most list members, himself included, lack the biology and analytical chemistry needed to judge them.
The microbial Cs-137 claim as Kowalski describes it
According to the note, Vysotskii presented a paper on microbial breakdown of radioactive cesium at the 11th International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF11, September 2004). Kowalski summarises the claim as Cs-137, with a half-life of about 30 years, being turned into something non-radioactive within several days. He says that if rapid deactivation of Cs-137 and Sr-90 were real, it would simplify the disposal of spent-fuel waste by at least an order of magnitude.
On access to the paper, Kowalski says only that the lenr-canr.org library listed it without offering a download, and he asks whether it had appeared in a biological journal. On replication, he suggests that many physicists working with biologists could repeat the experiment using a widely available sodium iodide (NaI) gamma spectrometer. That is his suggestion about how the work could be checked; the note does not say what detector Vysotskii's team used, and it does not report that anyone had repeated the experiment.
The two traps he names
The core of the note is a short list of ways a falling count rate could appear without any nuclear change:
- Loss rather than destruction. Radioactivity could leave the flask instead of disappearing, for example as a gas produced by the microbes' metabolism. On Kowalski's reading, a transmutation claim stands only if activity is shown to be destroyed rather than moved.
- Changed counting geometry. If the cesium were heavily redistributed inside the flask, for instance by concentrating in biomass or settling, the fraction of gamma rays reaching the detector would change. The count would then fall even though the amount of Cs-137 stayed the same.
In his later addendum on tracers, Kowalski repeats the second point more broadly. Any before-and-after difference must not come from cesium moving into a metal surface or into the surrounding air during the run.
The reported experimental design and its limits
Kowalski writes that he was "highly impressed" by the precautions the team took and that Vysotskii seemed fully aware of these traps. The specific point he marks as uncertain is the setup: he asks, with an explicit caveat about his memory, whether there were about ten identical experiments and ten controls running at the same time. He then states that a rapid fall in radioactivity, over days rather than decades, was seen in each tube. That too is his recollection of a presentation he heard roughly a year earlier, not a result he had checked against data, and he ends by asking what the current situation was.
The note therefore records one listener's impression of a presentation. It is not a check of the data. It does not say how gas loss or geometry changes were actually excluded, whether controls showed any decline, or what count rates were measured. Kowalski reports that no one had replied to his message when he posted it.
The mica screening claim
What was claimed. The second case is older. At ICCF10 (August 2003), Vysotskii and colleagues, whom Kowalski places at Moscow State University, presented "The theory and experimental investigation of controlled spontaneous conversion nuclear decay of radioactive isotopes". Their headline claim, as Kowalski relays it, is that a thin mica crystal near a radioactive source inhibited the conversion channel of nuclear decay by 7–10% and lengthened the lifetime of excited Fe-57 by 6–9%. Kowalski frames the puzzle himself: how could a crystal hundreds of microns from the source affect what happens inside its nuclei?
What was measured. The quantity behind the claim is a ratio of gamma-ray peak areas. The source was Co-57 (half-life 257 days), which decays to Fe-57; the gamma lines at 14.4 keV, 122 keV and 136.4 keV were recorded, and the authors defined R = N14.4/(N122+N136). By Kowalski's account, a 50-micron mica sheet placed between source and detector shifted R, and R depended on the source-to-mica distance X. Two values he cites are 0.82 at X = 250 microns and 0.88 at X = 420 microns.
What the note says is missing. Kowalski observes that the paper gave no error bars on its data points and said nothing about whether the results could be reproduced. He also does not cite any control runs with screens of other materials; he assumes such controls rather than reporting them.
How far his acceptance goes. Kowalski accepts the main claim only provisionally, and only after granting the authors three things the paper did not show him: that the results were reproducible, that the uncertainties were negligibly small, and that non-mica screens of equivalent form left R unchanged. He adds that he could not follow the theoretical part of the paper, noting only that it draws on an idea of zero-energy. He rates the mica effect as weaker than the claimed bacterial effect on Cs-137, and says either would undercut the prevailing view only "if confirmed by other researchers".
The tracer argument
In an addendum dated the following day, Kowalski argues that radioactive isotopes are far easier to track than stable ones. Assuming a one-microgram detection limit for conventional cesium analysis, about 4.5×10^15 atoms, he works out that a NaI counter at 1% efficiency could easily detect about 1.48×10^11 atoms of Cs-137. That is roughly 30,000 times fewer atoms. He therefore proposes that suspected transmutations of stable elements be tested by adding a radioactive tracer of the same element and comparing the activity of dried samples taken before and after the run. Only the ratio of the two measurements would matter. Suggested tracers include Ag-110 (253 days), Zn-65 (245 days) and Pt-188 (10 days). He credits G. Milley's ICCF10 review of transmutations as the prompt for this addendum.
What the note does and does not establish
The note shows that by 2005 the Cs-137 claim was circulating in cold fusion circles, and that a physicist open to such claims, while stating his doubts, could name the specific artefacts it had to rule out. It also gives a remembered description of a design with parallel controls. It does not provide data, does not confirm that gas loss or geometry effects were excluded, and does not report any replication. It notes that the ICCF11 paper was listed in the lenr-canr.org library without a download link. These open questions match those recorded in Biological Transmutation Claims vs. Evidence: Acceleration Factors, Control Contamination and the Absence of Replication.
Source notes & attribution
- https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~kowalskil/cf/246vysotskii.html