Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
"...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?
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.
Ummm... I recently installed PVes on my roof. Tedious? I don't think so. Expensive? It was 1.5 month worth of my wage. Warranty for 25 years, I guess they'll last at least 12 without degrading in performance too much. Reliable? Well, as reliable as the Sun is... would I be able to invest in an 15K buffer system, I'm sure I could live "off power grid" even in winter time (summer time, I'm pushing on the grid twice as much as I'm consuming).
What point I'm trying to make? I'm less dependent know on the power producers than I was 1 year ago and I didn't need to sell my first born for it.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Nickel-64, at a natural abundance of about 1%, would be a better candidate, as neutron capture would result in Nickel-65 which decays to stable Copper-65 with a very short half-life of 2 hours. This is a "clean" beta-emitter with an energy of about 2.1MeV.
The overall reaction seems to be p + Ni-64 -> Cu-65 + ve + anti-ve + 2.1MeV. This is at least physically plausible as a reaction. The electron (removed from both sides above) acts as a sort of catalyst, a way to get the proton through the coloumb barrier by transforming it into a neutron.
Getting the neutrons to collide with Ni-64 nuclei rather than escaping implies a lot of Ni-64, and any escaping neutrons would irradiate everything else nearby, or impurities in the nickel such as the aforementioned Ni-62, or worse Ni-58 which would produce Ni-59, a positron emitter with a half-life of 76000 years.
But to me, the real red flag on this is getting the hydrogen atoms to collapse into neutrons, a process which I've never heard of before. Even if it's possible, can you get a net gain? Does it take more than 2.1MeV? Slashdot - educate me!
Sean Ellis
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Also born of ignorance: conspiracy theories depend on every allegedly greedy company acting with surprising benevolence for it's community of allegedly greedy companies.
They all fall down where they simply assume that all these companies unanimously feel they'll be better off if they collaborate and suppress something. They never manage to explain why every individual conspirator wouldn't be working as hard as they can to eliminate the others, which gets especially murky when you consider that the individual companies aren't companies but people, and people get concerned about things like legacy and principles and whatever (which simultaneously leads to good things - tech companies building spaceships - and bad things - the Koch brothers believing they're still fighting communism or something).