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The Controversy of a Potential Hafnium Bomb
deglr6328 writes "Physics Today has a report detailing the surprisingly heated controversy surrounding the usually sober science of nuclear isomers (the Washington Post has run a less scientifically rigorous version). Since the 70's it has been known that the specific "m2" isomer of Hafnium-178 has an extraordinarily long half life of 31 years (nuclear isomers usually have half-lives on orders of pico or nanoseconds) and on decaying, emits high energy gamma rays at ~2.5 Mev. The prospect of energy storage and rapid release in Hf-178 for the puropse of creating large energy stores, bombs and even exotic gamma ray lasers did not escape the interest of Reagan era Star Wars researchers and was seriously studied for a time during SDI's heyday, but was eventually abandoned after being considered unfeasible. Then, in 1999, Carl Collins at the Univ. of Texas Center for Quantum Electronics reported inducing energy release from Hf-178 by bombarding a sample with X-rays (from a dental machine no less). Immediately, comments about the article were submitted, pointing out inconsistencies with basic nuclear theory and the controversy has only grown since then, with claims and counter-claims of flawed experimental design, incompetence and irrational theories in feuds reminiscent of the cold fusion debacle of the late 80's. It's seeming more unlikely as the arguments drag on, but if a Hafnium bomb could be built, it is thought that a golf ball sized chunk could produce the energy equivalent of 10 tons of conventional explosives."
Find out here!
It's seeming more unlikely as the arguments drag on, but if a Hafnium bomb could be built, it is thought that a golf ball sized chunk could produce the energy equivalent of 10 tons of conventional explosives.
I'm assuming they'll not be using this material to make golf balls...
This is a special excite
This
"... but if a Hafnium bomb could be built, it is thought that a golf ball sized chunk could produce the energy equivalent of 10 tons of conventional explosives."
Well, damn, we had better get our best minds on that one !!
than Nonium at all.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
After 9/11 I thought to myself "Hmm, now we know they don't have nukes"
-- "You can lead a yak to water, but you can't teach an old dog to make a silk purse out of a pig in a poke" - Opus
what could be done with a Wholenium...
three basic rules in science when creating new things
1. can you blow it up?
2. can you have sex with it?
3. can you profit from it?
if atleast one condition is filled, it might be worth researching/funding
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
What if journalists and scientists agree to only discuss the *positive* uses of scientific invention?
Holy fuck. It's obvious. We'll get both of them to sit down and have a gentleman's agreement over tea!
Jesus! We've been going at this all wrong! Maybe we can get the Israelis and Palestinians to sit down and agree to only say nice things about each other, too! Surely if Sharon and Arafat can sit down in the same room and not blow each other's heads off, they all can agree to get along! We'll surely turn things around there yet!
Would you like a cookie, too?
As for you...
This makes sense until you have that "eureka" epiphany moment when you realise that the quiet geeky white men in their labs who squander billions of public funds to come up new and exotic ways to kill people in the name of patriotism are the 'uneducated terrorists'. None of this shit would exist if they didn't make such a focused effort to invent it.
I call bullshit. The science and engineering of weapons development isn't something that's reserved for discovery by your gov't bankrolled, morally corrupt, mad scientists. If "they" don't do it, someone else will.
Wouldn't the world be a different place if the Soviet Union had dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, rather than the US....
What, too old school for you? Well, you might have heard about the, you know, planes that were crashed into the WTC. Some pretty fucking basic weapons development there!
That you hold the feet of the discoverers of principles to the same fire as the fucktards that decided to play cruise missile with passenger planes is what's retarded. Christ. The myopia astounds me.
TFOAE
Who modded this up? Obviously no one who understood the physics of the story. So let's explain.
The process described is neither fission nor fusion. Instead, it's analogous to how a light bulb works.
(What? Yes, a light bulb. Bear with me.)
In a lightbulb, you add energy to a fillament. The electrons (mostly) in the fillament are placed into excited states by the energy, then very quickly release the energy in the form of photons (visible light) and fall from the excited state into a ground state.
A similar thing can be done to particles other than electrons -- such as neutrons. In most cases, the neutrons fall from the excited state very quickly and release photons (gamma rays and the like).
In hafnium, however, the excited state of the neutrons is metastable -- which is just a fancy way of saying they stay excited for a long time between when they're excited and when they release photons.
If a way could be developed to induce the grounding, then hafnium could be used to store large amounts of energy in the metastable state, and then induced to release it all at once, resulting in much larger discharges than ordinary chemical reactions can store/release.
It doesn't yield energy; at best you get from the grounding the energy you put in to get the neutrons excited. It isn't fission, and it isn't fusion; not what we typically call a "nuclear" reaction. However, it is a beyond-chemical-bond-capacity energy release based on the nucleus.
Oh, and by the way, there are middlish-weight elements that are unstable, and thus can provide nuclear energy through ordinary radioactive decay. The classic example is Technetium, number 43 on the Periodic Table, atomic mass 98.