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Ask Slashdot: Advice On a DIY Neutron Beam?
Max Littlemore writes "I have been breeding
thorium
cattle
children
gremlins
at home using lots of old smoke detectors with a view toward generating my own
electricity
radiation
plutonium
wormhole
and getting off the grid. The only thing stopping me is a reliable neutron beam. Given that all the equipment I'm using is re-purposed kitchen equipment, concerns about safety mean I'm
reluctant
hesitant
exuberant
defiant
to build a uranium reactor to supply neutrons to the thorium one. So I'm putting the question out there: do any Slashdotters know of a
hazardous
good
safe
legal
way to make a powerful neutron beam out of things I might find around the house?"
It would be helpful to include images and diagrams of your own personal neutron beam
generators
rifles
casseroles
beer
.
It's days like this when I really miss "OMG!!! Ponies!!!"...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
enough.
This happens every year, chill.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
A DiY neutron beam? Sure. Give me three coconuts, a piece of string, MacGyver, and your bank account numbers.
And OMG Ponies. Please, for the love of God.
PS - Act now and I'll sell you the Brooklyn bridge at a 12% discount.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
under the boiler for steam turbine. You'll literally have energy for the rest of your life, and as a side bonus you'll be permanently reducing your carbon footprint.
Disguise your rig as a powerful cement pump and ship it to Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. They will be glad to irradiate it for you.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
You don't need a uranium reactor to generate neutrons (although if you use the thorium from some lantern mantles, you could probably create one). You also don't need to be messing about with nasty americium to breed plutonium as a neutron source.
Just build a Farnsworth Fusor like that guy on Slashdot did last week. There's your neutron source. Should be pretty safe, compared to the alternatives.
Right, that doesn't solve the problem of your neutron beam beer.
Put a bottle of Pu240 Weapons Grade Ale in front of your Something in there'll get activated for just long enough to technically call it neutron beam beer.
At 8% ABV and 100 IBUs, it's a hop bomb that'll getcha bombed even without neutron activation!
You could just ask your neighbor. Most high school kids who are even remotely interested in science already have a neutron source in their basement. Borax, you get in the laundry aisle and as moderator I suggest to go with pencils. Graphite is a well documented moderator and has worked in Chernobyl for many years without a problem. You could use tea-lights for shielding, but imho shielding is for sissies.
Just one warning: As in banking, the important thing is to start big. If you build a small reactor, the police will come knocking down your door, but if you build a really big one, your local congressman will help you to find a way around stupid regulations.
This is probably a joke or troll, but since there actually have been morons trying to do this sort of thing before:
If you do not have enough knowledge and experience with radioactive materials and radiation safety to know how to generate neutrons, attempting to do so is a Bad Idea (TM). Neutrons are very penetrating and hard to shield against, and when absorbed they activate the material they are absorbed in, creating secondary radiation hazards. Using them to irradiate fissionable isotopes, like thorium or uranium, is an even more insane idea since it will not only multiply the number of neutrons generated, but also produce a dirty mix of fission products, many of which are gaseous and hard to contain.
Seriously, just go do something safer instead, like base-jumping or sword-swallowing.
Take approx. 2kg of sifted weapons grade plutonium (this is perfectly safe, it's sub-critical) and place in a mixing bowl. With a mortar and pestle grind together about 5g of polonium-210 and 10g of finely powdered beryllium. Gradually stir in to the plutonium until the mixture begins to get warm, then add about 500cc of deuterium hydroxide. Divide equally into a 12-portion muffin dish. Decorate with thorium oxide granules and bake in a suitable containment vessel until red hot. Serve on a bed of fuel pebbles with a cesium iodide dressing.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
All you need is a whole load of Sellotape (Scotch-tape for you Americans) (and some deuterium).
Everyone (well, Slashdot readers) knows that peeling Sellotape produces x-rays, so get some industrial sized sheets of Sellotape, probably at least a few layers. While peeling, aim your Sellotape at some material why only needs low energies to induce a photonuclear reaction (deuterium, beryllium perhaps).
Some might say that those might need gamma rays, but those are only high energy X-rays, so shake your Sellotape fast, and you'll increase the frequency nicely.
And voila: Neutrons!
The rest is just details
Just build a cyclotron. They're quite easy to make, being basically a huge magnet and a curved track in a vacuum. There is a minor technical challenge that they're designed to accelerate protons or electrons, but I'm sure it's easy to adapt it to handle neutrons instead.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
It's really difficult to get voltage that high from household equipment. To make your own beam target you will also probably need to build a CVD chamber.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_generator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_vapor_deposition
But this looks interesting too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyroelectric_fusion
All rites reversed 2010
I understand they have an excess of neutrons and such over at the Fukushima nuclear facilities. You can probably get all the neutrons you want at bargain (turbine building) basement prices. In fact, since it sounds like you are entrepreneurial, you could probably get them to pay you to haul the stuff away. It's a mixed bag of goodies but since the fuel rods have melted down, you might be able to collect enough fissionable material out of the tons of highly radioactive water available to get your own chain reaction going, cutting out the middle man, allowing you to pass on savings to your customers. Everybody wins!
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
If you didn't think the replies to the actual (albeit fake) question were interesting, this may not be the site for you.
.. if you're handy with tools and your money: This solution will require you to put your thorium vessel in a vacuum chamber: Cut the end off some old but still functional 4-400A power vacuum tubes (as would be used in a surplus tube amp from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway or an old AN/SQS-23 sonar system), and put a charge stripping plate (of heavy enough copper) biased to pull the charge off the electrons, at the business end. Glass-weld the tube and plate to a flange on the vacuum vessel. Fire up the cathode, put sufficient voltage on the plate, and you're streaming neutrons.
Slashdot's name? When my compiler sees
Fusors are very good sources of neutrons. But the concept of a neutron beam is pretty lulzy. Neutrons have no charge and are unaffected by magnetic fields so good luck shaping that thing. May I recommend,
Kitten Kitten Kitten Kitten
Kitten TTTTTTTT Kitten
Kitten T Fusor T Kitten
Kitten T Fusor T Kitten
Kitten TTTTTTTT Kitten
Kitten Kitten Kitten Kitten
Kittens provide dual shielding for both radiation and detection, who would ever look under a pile of kittens for a nuclear reactor? Further the kittens will be drawn to the warmth, just provided a constant supply of Thorium, deuterium, and fish. Remember to remove dead kittens otherwise the smell might attract hobos.
I suggest you consider lamp mantles from camping lanterns and gas lamp posts. Much higher yield of Thorium. Then encase the extracted Thorium in depleted uranium in an asymmetric manner. Pack all this in a graphite cylinder with hundred of layers of bimetal sheet thermocouples in a massive series parallel schema. The interstitial material should be silicon dioxide and clay, but make sure it is boron free. Bop down to your local ceramics custom paint shop and borrow their kiln to "fire" the setup into one solid mass to make your own homemade traveling wave radio-thermal-generator. After testing the output of the first one, proceed to manufacture as many as required for your electricity needs. They are after manufacture virtually pollution free. (May we suggest a 1/2 inch stainless steel vessel welded closed around the individual cells, oh, and assure that you use aluminum or silver wiring and avoid copper in the construction.) You may wish to purchase your own kiln after determining the number of units you'll need and the cost of firing them outside of your own facility. Also consider a micro-controller for each cell to monitor its health and power output, as well as a small conditioning circuit to match the outputs into a seamless AC source to minimize interface issue with standard house generation, and provide minimal common failure points. As the controllers will need to be interfaced as a network, you may as well distribute the decisions across all the micro-controllers, thus ending up with a beowulf-cluster of "smartRTG"(tm)s
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
As silly as this April fools joke is, a few seconds of googling would lead to the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor.
Er no, neutrons don't "pass through harmlessly", they either knock off sub-atomic particles (then keep on going) or stick and make radioactive isotopes. It's not the uranium that's making heat in the japan reactors, it's the secondary radioactive isotopes created by the neutrons.