Posted on 08/08/2006 9:40:52 AM PDT by Sopater
my cold fusion reactor is not working properly.
please help
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I'd like to help, but my kids used my alpha emitters as toys and now they're broken.
Nothing wrong with that if they can speed up decay significantly. Those funds would be paid back a hundred times over. Wouldn't it be crazy not to do the experiments to find out if this really works and instead spend billions to bury the stuff? Then, 50 years from now, we find out it could have been done more easily.
Good catch!
After 1000 years of storage, the main concerns from spent fuel is Am-241 (a gamma ray emitter), Pu-240 and Pu-242 (both neutron emitters). Speeding up alpha emission would not help long term storage concerns, but would certainly help with the mid-term (5-1000 year) storage activity.
Not an expert, but my recollection is alpha emmitters are 1 the most damaging radiation in that they are the most energetic and 2 the easiest to stop (shield) because alphas are big charged particles.
The worst emmitters are gamma and neutron emitters. They are really hard to stop (shield).
Back to the article, regarding plasmas, if this is true, you should be able to cook the radioactive waste too by emersion in a true plasma and sending em shockwaves of the correct frequency to agitate the nuclei into emitting early.
any comments physicist ?
that is what I thought too except I thought betas (electrons) were not much of a problem either.
True, but they do have some penetrating abilities, particularly to the lens of the eye. Nowhere near gammas or neutrons.
Well, every generation science is surprised by something it didn't know yet. Nothing is sacrosanct. Scoffers very likely said:
Man couldn't fly
Can't split the atom
Impossible to stand on the moon
Underwater limit for man is how long he can hold his breath
Can't genetically engineer something God didn't make first
Etc. Scientists make far wilder claims than "changing radioactive decay rates" and no one makes them out to be idiots. For example, using wormholes (did I say that right?) or black holes to travel through time and space instantaneously. Sounds far wilder to me.
Listen with your ears open and watch with your eyes open.
[From a man without a PhD but with two engineering degrees and a sound mind.]
Oh, I don't think they're idiots. I just think this claim will be easy to prove or disprove. I also think that if it was possible to radically change the decay rate by cooling we would have seen some hint of that before now.
This is particularly true of radioactive teeth.
Their proposed technique – which involves slashing the half-life of an alpha emitter by embedding it in a metal and cooling the metal to a few degrees kelvin – could therefore avoid the need to bury nuclear waste in deep repositoriesHmm. Could be a good fit with pebble bed nuclear reactors.
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