Posted on 03/14/2013 1:27:00 PM PDT by Kevmo
Tiny Nuclear Reactions Inside Compact Fluorescent Bulbs?
Harmless low-energy nuclear reactions may be taking place routinely inside of compact fluorescent lightbulbs, according to a physicist whose theories have NASA researchers abuzz with the prospect of cheap, non-polluting energy.
Nuclear reactions may be responsible for an unusual fingerprint of mercury isotopes in used fluorescents that can identify environmental pollution from the bulbs, said Lewis Larsen, a Chicago physicist associated with the Widom-Larsen Theory, which explores slow nuclear reactions among elements that are not radioactive.
“Unbeknownst to the general public, dynamically active nuclear processes are presently occurring in tens of millions of households worldwide,” Larsen told me.
“Fortunately, there aren’t any radiological health risks associated with CFLs because no hard radiation is emitted from them, ” Larsen said, “ and no environmentally hazardous, long-lived radioactive isotopes are typically created by LENRs (low energy nuclear reactions).”
Larsen has suspected low energy nuclear reactions occur in CFLs, he told me, and is encouraged by a February study of used bulbs that found isotopes of mercury that more conventional theories cannot explain.
NASA: A Nuclear Reactor To Replace Your Water Heater Jeff McMahonContributor
The authors of that study analyzed used fluorescent bulbs looking for a unique fingerprint of mercury isotopes. If they could find a unique fingerprint, researchers could identify mercury pollution in the environment that comes from discarded fluorescents:
“All fluorescent lamps use mercury (Hg) and can be a source of Hg to the environment when broken,” write the authors, led by Chris Mead of Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability, in a February issue of Environmental Science and Technology (subscription required).
As compact fluorescents command a larger share of the lighting market, the researchers expect mercury pollution from the bulbs to increase:
“ “The share of atmospheric anthropogenic Hg emissions represented by fluorescent lightbulbs in the United States is 1–5 percent. Only a third of fluorescent lightbulbs are recycled. As fluorescent lighting continues to supplant incandescent lighting, and as emissions from large point sources of Hg, such as coal-fired power plants and municipal waste incinerators are reduced, fluorescents will become an increasingly important source of Hg to the environment. Therefore, a method to detect and quantify Hg derived from fluorescents would be very useful.”
The researchers found their unique fingerprint for mercury from fluorescent bulbs. But they can’t explain why it’s so unique:
“The trapped Hg of used CFL show unusually large isotopic fractionation (the distribution of mercury into its various isotopes), the pattern of which is entirely different from that which has been observed in previous Hg isotope research aside from intentional isotope enrichment.”
Larsen believes he knows why the mercury isotopes in used CFLs are different:
“When viewed through the conceptual lens of the Widom-Larsen theory, Mead et al.’s carefully collected Hg isotope data suggests that low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) transmutations may actually be occurring at extremely low rates in CFLs during normal operation,” he said.
And that should make the idea of home nuclear reactors less frightening, Larsen said.
“If this outstanding new data is substantiated by further experimentation, it provides yet more proof that LENRs are likely to be a truly ‘green,’ safe nuclear technology.”
Larsen hopes to demonstrate that low-energy nuclear reactions are safe, green and commonplace in part to distinguish them from fission reactions that produce dangerous ionizing radiation in conventional reactors. He has found evidence of LENRs occurring in lithium-ion batteries, catalytic converters, and naturally in bacterial processes and lightning.
Many researchers, including NASA scientists, are working on low-energy nuclear reactors that use non-hazardous fuels like nickel and hydrogen to produce energy and non hazardous by-products, like copper. I discuss the reactors in more detail in a prior post, NASA: A Nuclear Reactor To Replace Your Water Heater.
But if low energy nuclear reactions are so commonplace, why haven’t scientists noticed them before? In part because they haven’t looked. LENR activity is subtle, according to Larsen, and it “can only be readily detected and measured through the use of extraordinarily sensitive mass spectroscopy techniques on stable isotopes.”
“Consequently, for nearly 100 years LENR processes have effectively been hidden in plain sight from the vast majority of the scientific community.”
READ MORE:
“You demand it for cold fusion.”
If I do, then quote me on it, otherwise stick it in your tailpipe.
“These are the things I’ve been saying about LENR but the anti-science LENR truther crowd is against even that.”
I have to call shenanigans on that one. Nobody is raging against legitimate research, people have just been skeptical of unsubstantiated claims made by non-scientists with a long history of fraud, which you are fond of posting here.
Quite.
Which is where the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” meme comes into play.
You’re right. We have been told over and over for years that low energy nuclear reactions(cold fusion)were not possible. Careers have been destoyed for just saying maybe it is possible so if it turns out to be true all these scientists who called it sci fi dreams should be fired. And I mean every one of them. Clean out all the colleges and labs and start over with people who have open minds.
Kevmo: “You demand it for cold fusion.”
Boogieman: If I do, then quote me on it, otherwise stick it in your tailpipe.
Here it is:
From post #10 upthread:
Sherman Logan: I will be happy to believe in LENR when someone drives a car across the country or fuels a power plant with one.
***Kevmo: Raising the bar on cold fusion while lowering the bar on hot fusion. To date, cold fusion experiments have generated hundreds of MJoules over several months while the greatest Tokomak has operated for a few seconds and generated 6MJoules. Where is my hot fusion powered car?
Post #14, you step in and reinforce Sherman’s logical fallacy with a followup of your own:
To: Kevmo
“Raising the bar on cold fusion while lowering the bar on hot fusion.”
Not by a long shot. You forget we already have working fusion generators everywhere in nature, so building one from scratch isn’t even necessarily to demonstrate the principle.
13 posted on Thursday, March 14, 2013 2:16:29 PM by Boogieman
So... stick that in your tailpipe... of your hotfusion car.
Nobody is raging against legitimate research,
***Sure they have. Just look through these LENR threads to see the usual skeptopaths spewing out their anti-science positions.
people have just been skeptical of unsubstantiated claims made by non-scientists with a long history of fraud,
***And exactly how many of those 14,700 replications are within those “claims made by non-scientists”?
which you are fond of posting here.
***When was the last time I posted an article focused on such “non-scientists” with long histories of fraud? Months. But the anti-science LENR crowd continues in its invective. My turn to call shenanigans.
Thanks 4 Bumping The Thread T4BTT
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2965392/posts?page=19#19
Science doesn’t work that way.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck
Max Planck:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Wissenschaftliche Selbstbiographie. Mit einem Bildnis und der von Max von Laue gehaltenen Traueransprache., Johann Ambrosius Barth Verlag, (Leipzig 1948), p. 22, as translated in Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, trans. F. Gaynor (New York, 1949), pp.33-34 (as cited in T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).
Paraphrased variants:
Die Wahrheit triumphiert nie, ihre Gegner sterben nur aus. Truth never triumphs — its opponents just die out.
Science advances one funeral at a time.
Got that covered already - check out solar powered cars. Powered by HOT FUSION energy.
Yeah, right... and they output skittles from the tailpipe, just like unicorns.
Unlikely in the extreme. This is mass spec providing the analytical results. Nothing esoteric about it at all. MS is well understood, as are the factors that affect it.
LOL! You nailed him.
No, actually they don't. The same criteria apply to all science phenomena. This phrase originated among the career skeptics to put down science-based research into paranormal phenomena. It has zip to do with legitimate science.
"But I’m more than willing to be convinced if that evidence is supplied.
One well-done experiment (or series of experiments) and one replication of those experiments at a different lab are all that is necessary.
Disagree. Displacing a well-grounded scientific consensus with a totally new explanation of observed phenomena requires, and IMO should require, more solid evidence than a claim with less evidence already in existence on the other side.
If you are old enough you would have seen numerous abandoned hulks just rusting away awaiting the day iron prices rose high enough to make their recovery economically feasible.
Yes, you would have seen them rusting away EVERYWHERE but the door hinges, or any other part of the body, that had been welded with an acetylene torch.
None checked out why that had happened until a young lady in the DC area won science fair after science fair demonstrating a technique for creating DIAMOND FILM with nothing more than a poorly tuned acetylene torch.
That method has since been put to work welding small diamonds together into large diamonds!
So, yes, quite ordinary processes which are quite commonly observed by great scientists and trash haulers alike can be totally ignored!
Now, how is it paint is actually mixed ~ been doing that one for thousands of years ~ what new wonders will be discovered as that process is subjected to intense scrutiny.
A common process that changes one isotope of mercury into several others is definitely something to look at!
Interesting info.
Thanks.
What a coincidence. Cold fusion also has zip to do with legitimate science.
On our side we used the scales to weigh samples of mail (usually 10 pieces) which would give us the factor necessary to estimate the accuracy of the mailer's count.
These scales were responsible for verifying the validity of weights and piece counts on about $40 billions in postage per year. 20 years of that would come to just under $1 trillion.
The two issues for us were the precision of the reading (that is, how many hundreds of millions of current readings would be made) in how much time ~ and how to protect the scale platform from pressure differentials created by breathing and, to put it bluntly, ausfahrting!
The solution was simple ~ after so many hundred millions of measurements of current you just cut it off ~ just like that ~ and take what you get. During the act of weighing the sample, the acceleration of the mass of the sample pieces exceeded the pressure differentials from breathing, and ausfahrting ~ but ausfahrting could be controlled by telling the clerk "face the readout" while weighing the samples ~ that way, although the scale was at roughly tail high, the direction of any emissions would be away from the scale.
Differences would be obscured over the course of doing hundreds of samples per tour ~ with little deviation from the expected values. Aggregate revenues would be protected.
The answer is that precision measurements are accurate only to the extent required by the process to achieve satori in real time. This applies to all systems.
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