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."

Comments

One small problem

[girlintraining]

"But what about the terrorists?"

Government: Approval Denied.

Re:One small problem

[Anonymous Coward]

So in other words, this has not been conclusively proven impossible.

Re:Tamper-proof?

[Issarlk]

Absolutely, there will be copper inside that thing. Your fusion central heater will be stolen in no time.

I can see the marketing slogan right now

[CoolGopher]

"Brought to you by the knights who say NiH!"

Re:Legitimate science, they are not alone

[Moabz]

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

Chart of the nuclides

[balsy2001]

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).

Re:Chart of the nuclides

[Stoutlimb]

Well, it looks like Dr. Joe Zawodny himself agrees with you that the extraordinary evidence to prove this even works has yet to be demonstrated:

http://joe.zawodny.com/ That's his private blog, and an interesting read. Looks like he's into model rocketry too.

Re:Chart of the nuclides

[seanellis]

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!

Re:Cool idea, but never happen...

[c0lo]

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.

Re:Cool idea, but never happen...

[Lonewolf666]

I doubt the "all over the world". China for instance is unlikely to bow to US lobby demands.

So if LENR turns out to be real, I expect the following sequence of events to happen:
1) Western energy industry giants badmouth the technology and lobby against it.
2) China, Russia and maybe India will use it anyway.
3) Above countries have considerable economic advantages, get stronger in comparison to USA.
4) US politicians panic. Having LENR is declared a matter of national security, opposition from energy industry giants is overruled ;-)

It will still be radioactive

[Michael Woodhams]

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.