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NASA's Basement Nuclear Reactor
cylonlover writes "If Joseph Zawodny, a senior scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center, is correct, the future of energy may lie in a nuclear reactor small enough and safe enough to be installed where the home water heater once sat. Using weak nuclear forces that turn nickel and hydrogen into a new source of atomic energy, the process offers a light, portable means of producing tremendous amounts of energy for the amount of fuel used. It could conceivably power homes, revolutionize transportation and even clean the environment."
"But what about the terrorists?"
Government: Approval Denied.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
While I think technically this is possible, IMO it will never happen. Imagine the following tagline:
"Have enough electricity for 20 years"
Do you really think any power plant company will want this? Of course maybe somebody will sell for 20 years, and 35K, thus making it not that useful. The only reason why we are not using our own generators right now is because they are too tedious and twiddly factor. If you could produce reliable energy without the twiddle factor we would not be in this mess we are.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
There have been quite a few news reports about LENR lately. There seems to be a revival in legitimate scientific research into this area. University of Missouri is running a 5.5 million USD research project, and scientists at other institutes like Purdue, Illinois-UIUC, NASA, MIT, SRI, NRL are all looking into it.
A couple of days ago the Nuclear Energy Institute was talking about it on their facebook page and the American Nuclear Society posted a similar story on their "nuclear cafe".
The University of Missouri will host a cold fusion conference in July this year and George Miley from Illinois (UIUC) will discuss his research results in a talk at the upcoming "Nuclear & Emerging Technologies for Space (NETS-2013) organized by the ANS starting coming Monday. (http://iccf18.research.missouri.edu/)
On a ANS meeting in November 2012 Mitsubishi Heavy Industries reported about their transmutation experiment and successful replications of the experiment at Toyota lab.
just one single instance in which cold fu- i mean, low-energy nuclear reactions have EVER been publicly and transparently demonstrated to work.
It may be "safe" but is it secure against tampering? Once someone has physical access it is pretty difficult to secure anything.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Like fusion power, it sounds like this technology is 50 years away.
If something can be done on a small scale, it can be done better on a large scale This is why we have power stations.
Good luck with recycling that, where I live it's hard enough to get rid of used auto oil at the local dump (municipal recycling facility).
And if it's like any other "white goods" it's going to be upgraded, have parts replaced, newer model put in.
Going to love what happens when your old nuclear powerplant goes past its warranty date and you want some new hoses, want to chuck out the old model for a bigger model etc. How does that work for the local recycling facilities? or if you want to knock down an old house and level the ground so you've got to dump an old nuclear reactor somewhere?
I'm sure there's a simple answer, please enlighten me. Apparently some cities have mountains of discarded washing machines/fridges/other white goods, will we have the same of nuclear reactors?
"...is called Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions or Lattice Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR). In the late 1980s, it went by the name of “cold fusion.”
This claims you can harness the power of the weak nuclear force while turning nickel to copper without releasing ionizing radiation.
And: "In past years, several labs have blown up while studying LENR and windows have melted".
Seriously?
Maybe NASA will let other scientists play with it to prove it's not a scam, unlike Rosi's device. We don't even hear about that one anymore, where's the mass produced fusion generator for every home ?
" In past years, several labs have blown up while studying LENR and windows have melted – showing that if it really works, it can produce an impressive amount of energy." I wanna play too.
FTFA:
"In past years, several labs have blown up while studying LENR and windows have melted"
Must have been ME or something
If you read the article, the reactions only work if you subject it to THz wave EM energy. So damaging this type of reactor would only ever have one kind of effect... it would stop working and go back to being a big lump of inert metal. Assuming it works in the first place after all.
RTFA - There is no nuke waste. Oh this is /.
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein
So this turns nickel into copper. Call back when it turns lead into gold.
Sound great - I want at least a couple to power my mainframe in the garage
"Brought to you by the knights who say NiH!"
There was a colloquium at CERN last year, see http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=177379
you will find the presentation about the Widom-Larsen-Srivastava that TFA talks about.
you will also find the slides about the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries transmutation experiment (and the Toyota replication of it) http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?resId=5&materialId=slides&confId=177379
As mentioned above it was also presented at the American Nuclear Society's winter meeting in Nov 2012:
"Replication experiments have been performed in some universities or institutes mainly in Japan. T.Higashiyama et al. of Osaka University observed transmutation of Cs into Pr in 2003[7]. H.Yamada et al. performed similar experiments using Cs and detected increase of mass number 137 by TOF-SIMS. They used a couple of nano-structured Pd multilayer thin film and observed the increase of mass number 141 (corresponding to Pr) only when 133Cs was given on the Pd sample [8]. N. Takhashi et al., the researchers of Toyota Central R&D Labs, presented that they detected Pr from the permeated Pd sample using SOR x-ray at Spring-8 and the detected Pr was confirmed by ICP-MS and TOF-SIMS [8]." http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ANS2012W/2012Iwamura-ANS-LENR-Paper.pdf
One word: bullshit. One name: Rossi.
This is the exact principle of working of Rossi's device, the E-Cat, which is a hoax out of proportions. Even distinguished scientist here in Sweden have been fooled by that crazy italian. Just google for the evidence, or lack there of. Evidence rebuting the working of the actual device said to implement the theory are many.
As for the therory, you cannot rule it out. Though, my bets are not on that horse. Solar power, not only through PE, simple, readily available, down to earth energy. Keep it simple stupid!
Sidenote: Terahertz frequencies are generated when removing adhesive tape, with a broad peak around 18THz [citation completely missing]. /Oscar Campbell
All kinds of information nuclear reactions and decay is available in "Nuclides and Isotopes", a chart of the nuclides published by KAPL (Knowles Atomic Power Laboratory). I recommend the "chart" in book form as it comes with a bunch of nuclear physics discussion. Based on the description in the article Ni+n=Cu+e. There is only one stable isotope of Ni that has a chance of going through this process and resulting in a stable isotope of copper and that is Ni62. Ni62 is only 3.63% of naturally occurring nickle. The most abundant isotope is Ni58 (68.07%) and it will go to Ni59 with addition of a neutron and will beta decay to Co59. Ni59 has a 7600 year half life so you could continue to change it to Ni60 then Ni61 then Ni62, but all of this wouldn't happen instantaneously as stated in the article (I guess you could start an enrichment plant so you are only using Ni62, but that cost a lot of money and energy and would have to be factored into the energy balance of the final "reactor"). These types of reactions don't take place in nature because the stable isotopes are already at the bottom of the "valley of stability" (have a minimum mass or maximum binding energy, see pages 27-28 of the 16th edition of the "Nuclides and Isotopes"). I guess it is possible that the 30THz vibrations change the local laws of physics, but I will remain skeptical until there is more than speculation. The article states, "LENR is a very long way from the day when you can go out and buy a home nuclear reactor. In fact, it still has to be proven that the phenomenon even exists, but hundreds of experiments worldwide indicate that heat and transmutations with minimal radiation and low energy input do take place with yields of 10 to 100 watts." TFA states that they are not even sure if the phenomenon exists and it doesn't provide the total energy input to the system so you can't tell if 10-100W is noise or error in the measuring equipment (this is one of the things that was going on in the cold fusion of years past).
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Looks like a rebranded version of cold fusion, from the same frothing, foaming-at-the-mouth fraudsters, weirdos and cranks.
Slashdot editors and commentors are so credulous.
After reading the article, it appears that the magic formula is subjecting a nickel metal hydride to T-waves. Perhaps all the existing NiMH batteries out on the market can be somehow re-purposed to last forever if someone can invent a portable terahertz wave generator.
Isn't this the story we were all laughingin 2011 when Andrrea Rossi announced his e-Cat units were now functioning?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/10/06/1430210/does-italian-demo-show-cold-fusion-or-snake-oil
It does look like the process at least conserves baryon and lepton number, so it's at least prima facie plausible. Unfortunately, e+p is a full 782KeV short of the energy to make a neutron at rest which makes me doubt that this is actually going on.
A back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests you'd need almost 50,000 lbs of pure nickel-63 to generate 13 kW (assumed peak power consumption of your average home) of electricity. That's something like a 12-foot tall cylinder with a diameter of 3 feet. AND I'm assuming that somehow the inventor has overcome self absorption.
Of course, TFA suggests some method for stimulating beta decay, which would increase the activity, but not the theoretical efficiency. That said, an order of magnitude of increase in activity would mean an order of magnitude decrease in the required mass.
For once a scientist has possibly developed a system where were not boiling water. In reality we have never left the steam age as even our most technologically advanced fusion reactors are nothing but steam generators in the end. Here we have something that can finally produce direct electricity in usable currents (Yes there are beta batteries but they're radioactive).
Airlines the the most doomed industry unless this is brought into commercial production, because eventually fuel will become too expensive and this may be the only viable alternative capable of producing enough thrust energy. Cause there's no way they will use nuclear reactors like the military tried in the 60's.
For the purpose of this post, I'll accept that they can convert protons to neutrons as described, although I'm very dubious about this.
Here is a table of nickel isotopes.
Here is the first source I found for neutron cross sections of nickel isotopes (pdf). (See figure 12, look at the left hand side of each 'destruction channels for ??Ni' plot for what low energy (thermal) neutrons will do.)
Cross sections are in barns, and are approximate as I'm eyeballing them off a logarithmic scale.
58Ni [stable, 68% abundant] (0.006 barn) -> 59Ni [-> 59Co, 76000 yr half life]
59Ni [unstable but long lived] (0.02b) -> 59Co [stable] or (0.005b) ->56 Fe [stable] or (0.004b) -> 60Ni [stable]
60Ni [stable, 26%] (0.006b) -> 61Ni [stable]
61Ni [stable, 1%] (0.002b) -> 62Ni [stable]
62Ni [stable, 4%] (0.006b) -> 63Ni [->63Cu, 100yr]
63Ni [unstable] (0.001b)-> 64Ni [stable]
64Ni [stable, 1%] (0.004b) -> 65Ni [->65Cu, 2.5 hr]
None of the cross sections are hugely larger than the others, so all these reactions will occur with reasonable frequency. So irradiating nickel with thermal neutrons, you are going to produce radioactive 59Co (76000yr), 63Ni (100yr) and 65Ni (2.5hr). The 65Ni isn't a problem - turn off the reactor, wait a couple of days, and it will all be gone. The 59Co is only a bit of a problem - with such a long half life, it isn't very radioactive. The 63Ni however is nasty. Like 137Cs (30yr) from the Fukashima reactors, the half life is short enough to be quite radioactive but long enough that you can't just wait it out. Finally, the nickel won't be 100% pure, so you have to worry about what neutron irradiation will do to the impurities.
The 65Ni means when you turn off your reactor, it will continue to produce residual heat for hours.
The article gives the impression that weak nuclear reactions aren't dangerous, but this is not so. If it were, nuclear reactor waste wouldn't be dangerous.
This reactor will be producing ionizing radiation when running (mostly gamma rays, some beta rays mostly from 65Ni decay, and a tiny amount of alpha particles from 59Co(n,a)56Fe.) This will require some pretty heavy shielding to stop it. (A good sized water bath should work, every 7cm of water halves the radiation and you want hot water anyhow. But concrete is less prone to leak away.) You'd also need to worry about stray neutrons, although I expect that can be fixed with a thin layer of something that has very high thermal neutron cross section and no dangerous daughter products.
In short, I don't think I want this in my basement.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
A nice link explaining the science which intrigued NASA: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Widom-Larsen.php
...getting the landlord to fix the nuclear reactor.
It's hard enough to get him to fix the water heater.
This stuff works because of "melted windows" or what ? Not because they can actually find the after-products of their fission/fusion/whatever.
A Fine Example Of Your Taxpayer Money Being Burned.
The first line of the article "If Joseph Zawodny, a senior scientist at NASAâ(TM)s Langley Research Center, is correct" is misleading. Zawodny hasn't stated that it works or that he thinks it's definitely a real effect.
Let's look at what Zawodny actually has stated before:
http://joe.zawodny.com/index.php/2012/01/14/technology-gateway-video/
That he still holds this opinion is consistent with the quotes in the gizmag article:
Please stop repeating that stupid meme.
" You can convert CO2 back into O2 gas and carbon (soot), reversing a century of greenhouse gas emissions"
Why would you want to?
www.climatedepot.com
This could be used for terraforming Venus. If someone can work out the decay chain, we can transform the extra abundant elements into Hydrogen, Nitrogen and O2. But what Venus really needs is a large moon.
And then, the terrorists come alive. And China hackers.
This device is never going to work, converting protons in neutrons in the metal isn't going to happen, the process requires nearly a MeV of energy that isn't there, (and Terahertz waves are no were near a MeV). This is a cold fusion under different name, cold fusion didn't work, and neither does this. Shame on NASA for supporting research so obviously wrong, and previously debunked.
http://discovermagazine.com/2012/nov/27-big-idea-bring-back-the-cold-fusion-dream/
"In fact, it still has to be proven that the phenomenon even exists...." When you see this in an otherwise-gushing piece, the bells should go off.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Cold Fusion sounds like snake oil but low energy fusion potentially could be real. People can debate energy and gamma releases all they want but for me if they are finding copper where there wasn't copper before the only way for that to happen is some form of fusion. The beauty of the system is if it works you just have to shield from the gamma release while the reactor is operating. Shutting off the reactor stops the release of gamma radiation. The bi-product when you reprocess the core is copper, a useful element. The problem seems to be creating stable reproducable conditions for a process that's poorly understood. Ironically they may be closer to LENR as an energy source even though hot fusion is far better understood. This could be one of those eureka moments when science changes through a single discovery. People forget such things were commonplace in the 1800s up through the early 1900s. Now the eureka discoveries have to come from more obscure things like LENR since most obvious discoveries have been made.
what the fuck is gizmag?
When I were a lad, we spelled it jizz mag, and we were happy.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Ecat is ridiculed because they cannot demonstrate it in any substantially useful way. They claim to get more energy out than is put into the system. They provide only "black-box" demonstrations that people aren't allowed to inspect the box - let alone what's inside - enough to verify it isn't just plugged into a wall somewhere.
Demos are notoriously contrived and hidden and all the "quotes" are basically from shills saying they saw things that nobody else at the same demonstration (including people with some proper qualifications) saw at all. That's if you even GET a demo. Half the time they are just delayed, cancelled ("because of the naysayers") or never happen.
The website STILL currently says, on the front-page, "During 2011/2012, ECAT.com will collect pre-orders and provide answers to inquires from potential customers. Due to the high expected demand for ECAT products, orders will be put on a waiting list and delivery is scheduled for 2012/2013 (depending on product)."
As yet, there's nothing. And they won't answer if you're not a customer.
If you want to prove you have something, why hide it? Hide the details, patent the process, show everyone. If you've invented "the next big thing", then you'll want to show it off.
ECat is a complete con, from what I see. It certainly doesn't show that anything was "done" and certainly not "2 years ago".
Don't they know that LNER is just a rip-off scheme for the gullible? Andrea Rossi has been defrauding people with the E-Cat for years, with one laughably obvious faked demonstration after the other.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Even if LENR is real it is one step before hot fusion - we still need to remonstrate it happens
Even if it was clean and 100% safe, the big power brokers will not allow it to happen because it would be money out of their pockets.
Having a nuclear reactor in your basement is dangerous. Just think... A group of teenagers might break into your house, drain your source of cooling water (also doubles as a heated swimming pool), tamper with your fuse box, push a red button, and inadvertently cause a nuclear meltdown.
If you read the article, the reactions only work if you subject it to THz wave EM energy. So damaging this type of reactor would only ever have one kind of effect... it would stop working and go back to being a big lump of inert metal. Assuming it works in the first place after all.
Only after all the secondary products decay. According to another poster, this thing produces a product with a 100 year half life, that is only slightly less radioactive than plutonium 238 (88 years). How long do you plan on waiting for that to "go back to being a big lump of inert metal"?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
A "girl" is like your mom, but not related to you.
The list of potential applications reminds me of the Fallout series of video games. For those of you who haven't played or read about the world in those games, technological philosophies stopped at around the 1950's - 1960's, e.g. once they had fission reactors they stopped looking for better methods. The games take place in the post-nuclear winter era after the inevitable global-thermonuclear war. Houses, cars and most other forms of transportation and structures all had their own nuclear fission reactors built in for generating unlimited power. Nuclear fallout shelters were placed just about every square mile and were actually just covers for running unethical scientific experiments on communities and population groups, though I suppose they did actually serve the shelter purpose as well in some cases.
Even those with good senses of humor, honor, and saintly intentions must occasionally require the use of a strong shield
Experiments that failed too many times
Transformations that were too hard to find
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle If it wasn't for some stupid Congressman Chester E. Holifield we would't have this problem with green house gasses; peak oil; and very expensive energy.
So the mechanism to get the reaction to happen is thought to involve the weak force, the end result is Ni + H -> Cu which is just plain fusion. You can compute the energy output based on the mass difference of the inputs and outputs. The problem is that people are finally reproducing the old Cold Fusion work and getting a better understanding, but they face the problems caused 20 years ago. Problems like the DOE deciding it was all a crock and putting policy in place not to fund any research in that area. Problems like the physics community lashing out saying "it can't be fusion, it must be a chemical reaction" (saying that to chemists working with 4 elements in a jar). Now it has to go by the name LENR, but places like NASA and MIT and (allegedly) some folks in industry are working on this.
It's because touting "clean & cheap energy" gets you fat taxpayer funded research grants. This is the tonic salesman of 2013.
In the core of the Sun, where the temperature is many millions of degrees and electrons and protons are squished into degenerate matter, the probability that an electron and a proton will combine via the Weak Force to make a neutron is rather low --in spite of all the energy and pressure available to help. It is so low that a completely different reaction is described: two protons combine to make a deuteron (one proton becomes a neutron during that process, and a positron is emitted instead of an electron being absorbed).
While I also know that certain unstable nuclides are quite willing to capture an electron and thereby convert a proton into a neutron, I have doubts that a stable nickel nucleus can be induced to do it. Furthermore, such a reaction would completely fail to explain how experiments involving palladium and deuterium have generated so much "heat" (not just controversy!), and have even been replicated, as reported in a major physics journal. Then there is also titanium, another metal that has interested various cold-fusion researchers.
So I think a different hypothesis is needed to explain what happens inside those metals. Since the replication-experiments prove that something is indeed happening in there, the experiments need to continue, and the nay-sayers need to shut their yaps. Just remember that humans managed to extract metals from utterly non-metallic rocks for thousands of years before understanding the chemistry behind what they were doing. Knowing the chemistry allows more efficient extraction methods to be developed, and in this case a better hypothesis of cold fusion would lead to improved experiments. But lacking such a hypothesis, it is still possible to get useful results --it will merely take longer. It just doesn't need to take even longer than that, due to idiots who think that just because we don't understand what is going on, nothing can be going on....
GREAT, now we have to worry about "peak nickel".
Hopefully this will give us enough cheap energy that we can start strip-mining the asteroid belt.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
what the fuck is gizmag?
When I were a lad, we spilled it jizz mag, and we were happy.
FTFY
I hope Slashdot got paid for posting this. The number of things NoScript and Ghostery together blocked is just mind-boggling, and there was still a popup that got through. I can only imagine how much money they made with a front-page Slashdot headline.
IF it works as described it should produce 59Cu, which beta decays into 59Ni in about a minute, which beta decays into Co over tens of thousands of years. Both decays are beta so could be shielded with a piece of paper. And the second happens so slowly that it's essentially stable, particularly in the amounts that would be produced in one of these reactors.
You wouldn't want to eat the waste products, but the metal poisoning would probably get you before the betas.
An exhaustive collection of published papers concerning low energy nuclear phenomena can be found at http://lenr-canr.org/
This sets off a reaction in which one of the neutrons in the nickel atom splits into a proton, an electron and an antineutrino. This changes the nickel into copper, and releases energy without dangerous ionizing radiation.
A proton and an electron moving with nuclear decay energies are precisely what "dangerous ionizing radiation" is. The used fuel from nuclear reactors is dangerous because it is rich in beta emitters which produce high energy electrons. High energy protons are even more dangerous because, for the same energy, they will move more slowly and so be more heavily ionizing.
The article is also extremely vague about how the electric field forces the electrons and protons to convert in neutrons. Typically giving an electron more energy causes it to move into a higher energy orbital which have even less overlap with the nucleus. It is also exceedingly unlikely that they can give it enough energy that the nuclear cross-section is significantly enhanced. The mass of the W boson which mediates the reaction has an energy roughly 10 orders of magnitude higher than the electron energy (~10 eV vs. 80 GeV). Increasing the energy will certainly help to some degree but it seems unlikely that they can do this by the many orders of magnitude required to have a significant effect. So, if it does indeed work, there is going to need to be some research to figure out exactly how.
It's nice that this area of research is getting increased and, it would seem, more legitimate investigation. However, statements like the following give me pause:
"The former has been controversial for decades while the latter [referring to fusion] has been in the research phase since the 1950s, and is still as far away from practical application now as it was then.".
followed by
"LENR is a very long way from the day when you can go out and buy a home nuclear reactor. In fact, it still has to be proven that the phenomenon even exists"
LENR may have promise as a safer approach to energy production, but I see no evidence in this article that LENR is any further ahead than (hot) fusion at this point in time in practical development.
The Widom LArson Theory is based on the Muon Catalyzed Fusion process that has been known since the 1950's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion
"Muon-catalyzed fusion (CF) is a process allowing nuclear fusion to take place at temperatures significantly lower than the temperatures required for thermonuclear fusion, even at room temperature or lower. It is one of the few known ways of catalyzing nuclear fusion reactions.
Muons are unstable subatomic particles. They are similar to electrons, but are about 207 times more massive. If a muon replaces one of the electrons in a hydrogen molecule, the nuclei are consequently drawn 207[1][2] times closer together than in a normal molecule. When the nuclei are this close together, the probability of nuclear fusion is greatly increased, to the point where a significant number of fusion events can happen at room temperature."
So the electron is not 'forced into' the proton making a neutron, but rather the muon-proton pair is sort of disguised as a neutron due to the size and proximity of the muon to the proton. The source of energy that creates the muon (vibrations, electrical pulses, or sonic waves) also triggers the muon-hydrogen pair to be taken into the nickel nucleus and it then either collapses into a neutron or the muon is released and both cause net energy.
This really is not as outlandish as many would like to think it is.
First off, a sheet of paper would only stop the lowest of energy beta decays (usually a sheet of paper is the example given for blocking alpha particles). For normal beta decays of the energies involved (couple hundred keV to MeV), you would want a good centimeter or two of metal to stop some of it (but not all... depends on how strong your source is). In this case though, both of those are positive beta decays, i.e. positrons, so when they are stopped, they then release gamma radiation that would need another centimeter or two, potentially of lead, to stop.
In the end, the source would have to be pretty strong. Assuming the thing was super efficient and you were getting several MeV of energy per reaction, you would need activity on the order of couple PBq just to get 1 kW of power. That is within a factor of 10 of the release of Cs-137 from Fukushima (although smaller than the iodine release), which happens to be a negative beta source.
It strikes me that omitting the battery bank means you are tied to grid power whenever there's not enough sunlight, which in the northern part of the US would mean more than half the time in the winter and all night in the summer.
I would think that battery banks would be a big benefit for ROI, especially if you got aggressive with conservation as you would be able to run with little grid power all the time, and especially at night.
When I were a lad, we didn't have magazines. We'd warm up the onions from our belts in some dying coals from the fire and go to town. The rings made them one-size-fits-all!
Everyone's homes will be built to resemble large missiles and won't that be a hoot for our enemies, not being able to detect the difference from the real ones!
I have a general understanding of what you said but reading through your post and the AC response discussing Muon Catalyzed Fusion made me realize what my parents and wife feel like as I explain advanced networking principles to them. Well played...brain sad...brain cry now.
I believe fusion only produces energy up to Iron. After iron energy must be supplied to cause fusion. Fission works for elements above Iron. Their reaction should cost them energy. From the periodic table:
Fe 26 Iron
Co 27 Cobalt
Ni 28 Nickle
Cu 29 Copper
I was referring to the 63Ni. However, I am not a nuclear scientist and since the time of the post I reference I see that others have chimed in suggesting different decay routes. I'm not qualified to give any more opinion on the subject.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
63Ni is also a beta decay process. Don't swallow it and you'll be fine.
You're right that very short half lives aren't a problem because you just have to wait, and long ones aren't so bad because it means the isotope isn't very radioactive, but you also have to consider the type of decay. Beta decay means that you end up with an electron getting shot out of the nucleus. Electrons are technically ionizing radiation but they're very effectively stopped by pretty much anything so you can literally shield the source effectively with a piece of paper. Or skin.
You don't get pebble bed based nuclear reactors on regular scale but somehow we're going to get home based nuclear power and let the local electrician get new certification in stalling a nuclear bomb in your home? Sorry, but I'll take a mixed-use solution with Solar and Wind for a thousand, Alex.
Electrons are technically ionizing radiation but they're very effectively stopped by pretty much anything so you can literally shield the source effectively with a piece of paper. Or skin.
You have beta decay confused with alpha decay. The latter can be stopped by dead skin cells and paper. Beta decay can take anywhere from a few millimeters to several centimeters of metal.
Hydrogen in a metal matrix. In the 80s it was called cold fusion. Progress in CF has been slow due to a pervasive and comprehensive conspiracy to suppress positive results in the field Funny, they're still at the F&P stage twenty+ years later... Whatever. Good luck with that.
For more on LENR check:
http://www.reddit.com/r/LENR/
...been bought by Aperture Science? I can't help read this article without hearing Cave Johnson say it.