I went over to the JREF forum to get their take and found the typical facepalm comments and one asking how nano-thermite could bring down a tower, (a point sliced through like a hot knife through butter by Jon Cole's new video) after which they pull the "debunker" card of suggesting it isn't a real substance anyway.
"ElMondoHummus" writes:
Yes. The excuse is that organics combusting in the chip are what sends the readings above and beyond just pure thermite. And admittedly, if that were true and there was both a thermite redox and a regular burning of the organics present, there would be no way to separate the energy release of one from another. But that does beg the question of why the calorimeter argument was even made, and it does reveal the basic dishonesty of the paper; I find it hard to believe that this was an honest mistake, given that the energy density of a thermite reduction is well known. The energy density was presented as proof that this was an "energetic substance" (which it was), but then conflated with thermite (which was merely alleged).First off, as the paper notes, "The presence of an organic substance in the red material is expected for super-thermite formulations in order to produce high gas pressures upon ignition and thus make them explosive."
As an April 2000 report by Gash et. al. about the sol-gel process states, "Once dry the (hybrid inorganic/organic energetic composite) material burns very vigorously and rapidly with the evolution of significant amounts of gaseous species."
The fact that the material found in the WTC dust is more energetic and has a lower ignition temperature than a known sample of nano-thermite doesn't mean that it isn't nano-thermite, but rather that it is a very powerful form of nano-thermite!
The commenter also states:
The researchers did not eliminate the possibility that all the heat release was due to organics burning - and on top of that, breezily ignored the fact that the variations in their runs indicated a problem with such a thesis (why so much variation in a substance allegedly designed to be an incendiary?).As Jim Hoffman has pointed out, "The authors attribute this variation to the fact that the chips had different ratios of active red material to inert gray material." This makes perfect sense and therefore they didn't "breezily ignore" the issue! Furthermore, the fact that the chips create molten-iron spheres is itself evidence of a high temperature chemical reaction, which would not happen if they were just chips of paint as "debunkers" have asserted.
