Re: [Vo]:Rossi Nickel enrichment : is a liquid-phase Calutron possible?
In reply to Berke Durak's message of Fri, 4 Nov 2011 22:06:25 -0400: Hi, [snip] If the assumption is that Ni64 is the only isotope that is reacting, then clearly the reaction itself is already selective of that isotope. So why bother enriching at all? Just use native Ni, and let the reaction itself select the isotopes it wants. Whatever is left after months/years of use can then be returned to the market for normal use. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
Re: [Vo]:Rossi Nickel enrichment : is a liquid-phase Calutron possible?
Robin van Spaandonk wrote: So why bother enriching at all? Rossi himself stated that the fuel is enriched, and that the energy cost for enriching it for a 1 MW set of reactor is (only!) 200 W.h. By analogy with classical Uranium nuclear reactors, I can only assume that the reactive isotope ratio in natural nickel is not enough for self-sustained operation. -- Berke Durak
Re: [Vo]:Rossi Nickel enrichment : is a liquid-phase Calutron possible?
In reply to Berke Durak's message of Sat, 5 Nov 2011 22:03:31 -0400: Hi, [snip] Robin van Spaandonk wrote: So why bother enriching at all? Rossi himself stated that the fuel is enriched, and that the energy cost for enriching it for a 1 MW set of reactor is (only!) 200 W.h. By analogy with classical Uranium nuclear reactors, I can only assume that the reactive isotope ratio in natural nickel is not enough for self-sustained operation. Isotope enrichment in Uranium is necessary, because the fissioning nuclei provide the neutrons that keep the reaction going. However in fusion reactions there are no neutrons provided by the reaction, and the reaction isn't maintained by a neutron chain reaction, hence the analogy doesn't hold up. The reaction is maintained by external factors which makes the isotope ratio irrelevant. *IMO* Rossi just said that enrichment took place to throw others off the trail, and because he had only just discovered that reactions with isotopes other than Ni62 Ni64 produce gammas which can't be easily shielded. Since he wasn't seeing the gammas, he simply said that they enriched the Ni (rather than admit that he didn't really have a clue what was going on). Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
Re: [Vo]:Rossi Nickel enrichment : is a liquid-phase Calutron possible?
In reply to mix...@bigpond.com's message of Sun, 06 Nov 2011 16:06:41 +1100: Hi, [snip] *IMO* Rossi just said that enrichment took place to throw others off the trail, and because he had only just discovered that reactions with isotopes other than Ni62 Ni64 produce gammas which can't be easily shielded. Since he wasn't seeing the gammas, he simply said that they enriched the Ni (rather than admit that he didn't really have a clue what was going on). I should add that at the time he was also trying to publicly defend his previous statement that Cu was produced, and that the copper that had been found had an isotope ratio close to natural . Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
Re: [Vo]:Rossi Nickel enrichment : is a liquid-phase Calutron possible?
On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 2:52 PM, Peter Heckert peter.heck...@arcor.de wrote: The ion diffusion speed in an electrolyte is only some centimeters per minute at best, while the speed in a Calutron is probably some 100 to some 1000 kilometres per second. Therefore the mass inertia of the nucleus at this low speed has no effect. The electrolyte vessel must be some 1000 km long for this to work. Yes, but can't the liquid be accelerated to a sufficient velocity using pumps? A quick search reveals that the radius of the circular path described by a charged particle subject to a transverse magnetic field is R = mv/qB where m is the mass, v is the velocity, q is the charge and B is the field in tesla. Assume we want to separate two isotopes of masses m1 and m2, we'll want R1 - R2 d for some sufficiently large d. Take d = 1cm, m1 = 58 amu and m2 = 64 amu, and q = 2 x 1.6e-19 C (for Ni 2+), then we need v = qB/(m1 - m2) = 32e6 m/s/T. For a 100 nano tesla field, this gives 3.2 m/s and R1 = 9.6 m and R2 = 10.6 m. I suppose 3.2 m/s is a reasonable velocity. If we pump the solution so that the Ni2+ ions reach a velocity of 3.2 m/s while keeping the magnetic field around 100 nanotesla, we might be able to separate them. By properly orienting the setup with respect to the Earth's magnetic field, some mu-metal shielding or using some active cancellation technique, it might be possible to obtain a 100 nT field. The problem might be that you will also have whatever cations are present swirling in the opposite direction. I don't know how that would affect the Ni2+ ions. Any physicists / electrochemists in the room? -- Berke Durak
RE: [Vo]:Rossi Nickel enrichment : is a liquid-phase Calutron possible?
It seems you are conflating two processes when only one will suffice. And one of them is absurd from the start. Why pump the liquid at all? Why use a magnetic field with pumping, when a simpler route exists? Calutrons were a gigantic waste of money in the Manhattan project and were only used for a few years as an expedient. Centrifugal acceleration (even the common lab centrifuge) should give similar or better results, if what you want is enrichment by density gradient in a NiCl solution. In fact the chloride is ready-made for this since by varying the water content and temperature (solubility) - the heavier fraction can be solidified by chilling - while the light fraction remains a liquid and is more easily removed at the early stages (to automate the process). If you are going for enriching an isotope that is 10% denser, it will take at least seven stages for every doubling (not counting losses). This is the rule of seventy (similar to formula used in compound interest). Therefore, to increase a 1% isotope to 16% might require a minimum of 28 stages of progressive enrichment, but when losses are included, it is probably closer to 50 stages. Automation makes a big difference with this many stages. For the NiCl solution (hexa-hydrate) the solubility is 254 g/100 mL at 20 °C - and 600 g/100 mL at 100 °C. That difference could help a lot in automating the processing, so that even 50 stages in a continuous centrifuging would not be a insurmountable problem to get 64Ni enriched to a level in the mid-teens at an affordable cost. At least this is doable, but - as for final cost - that is another question based on many issues. But if the enrichment percentage can be kept to a low level, it need not be too expensive for the numbers Rossi is throwing around. This is because with NiCl - the rejected isotopes are of the same value as the feedstock, and this makes the processing simply a matter of overhead, efficiency and labor. The bulk nickel is no less useful in industry - with the 64Ni removed as with it there. In effect, you only rent the feedstock, removing very little. That is a huge difference compared to what we look to as the model for isotope enrichment. With uranium enrichment - in contrast, the feedstock cost must be 100% absorbed in the cost of the enrichment (since the depleted U has almost no value) so that factor alone grossly inflates the net cost by several orders of magnitude (compared to nickel). Enrichment cost alone, for even the heavy metals - is not outrageous so long as there is a large market for the depleted feedstock. That is key. There seldom is a market, but since nickel has that as its major feature, then an enriched isotope on a mass production scale, for a NiH energy system, is not out of the question. -Original Message- From: Berke Durak On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 2:52 PM, Peter Heckert peter.heck...@arcor.de wrote: The ion diffusion speed in an electrolyte is only some centimeters per minute at best, while the speed in a Calutron is probably some 100 to some 1000 kilometres per second. Therefore the mass inertia of the nucleus at this low speed has no effect. The electrolyte vessel must be some 1000 km long for this to work. Yes, but can't the liquid be accelerated to a sufficient velocity using pumps? A quick search reveals that the radius of the circular path described by a charged particle subject to a transverse magnetic field is R = mv/qB where m is the mass, v is the velocity, q is the charge and B is the field in tesla. Assume we want to separate two isotopes of masses m1 and m2, we'll want R1 - R2 d for some sufficiently large d. Take d = 1cm, m1 = 58 amu and m2 = 64 amu, and q = 2 x 1.6e-19 C (for Ni 2+), then we need v = qB/(m1 - m2) = 32e6 m/s/T. For a 100 nano tesla field, this gives 3.2 m/s and R1 = 9.6 m and R2 = 10.6 m. I suppose 3.2 m/s is a reasonable velocity. If we pump the solution so that the Ni2+ ions reach a velocity of 3.2 m/s while keeping the magnetic field around 100 nanotesla, we might be able to separate them. By properly orienting the setup with respect to the Earth's magnetic field, some mu-metal shielding or using some active cancellation technique, it might be possible to obtain a 100 nT field. The problem might be that you will also have whatever cations are present swirling in the opposite direction. I don't know how that would affect the Ni2+ ions. Any physicists / electrochemists in the room? -- Berke Durak
Re: [Vo]:Rossi Nickel enrichment : is a liquid-phase Calutron possible?
On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 11:26 AM, Jones Beene jone...@pacbell.net wrote: It seems you are conflating two processes when only one will suffice. And one of them is absurd from the start. Why pump the liquid at all? Why use a magnetic field with pumping, when a simpler route exists? Calutrons were a gigantic waste of money in the Manhattan project and were only used for a few years as an expedient. Because you need to have v d * q * B/(m1 - m2) where v is the speed, d the desired separation distance, q the charge, B the magnetic field and m1 and m2 the respective masses, and if you don't pump, you'll have to rely on the acceleration provided by the electrical field, which may be too low. Centrifugal acceleration (even the common lab centrifuge) should give similar or better results, if what you want is enrichment by density gradient in a NiCl solution. In fact the chloride is ready-made for this since by varying the water content and temperature (solubility) - the heavier fraction can be solidified by chilling - while the light fraction remains a liquid and is more easily removed at the early stages (to automate the process). If you are going for enriching an isotope that is 10% denser, it will take at least seven stages for every doubling (not counting losses). This is the rule of seventy (similar to formula used in compound interest). Therefore, to increase a 1% isotope to 16% might require a minimum of 28 stages of progressive enrichment, but when losses are included, it is probably closer to 50 stages. Automation makes a big difference with this many stages. For the NiCl solution (hexa-hydrate) the solubility is 254 g/100 mL at 20 °C - and 600 g/100 mL at 100 °C. That difference could help a lot in automating the processing, so that even 50 stages in a continuous centrifuging would not be a insurmountable problem to get 64Ni enriched to a level in the mid-teens at an affordable cost. At least this is doable, but - as for final cost - that is another question based on many issues. But if the enrichment percentage can be kept to a low level, it need not be too expensive for the numbers Rossi is throwing around. This is because with NiCl - the rejected isotopes are of the same value as the feedstock, and this makes the processing simply a matter of overhead, efficiency and labor. The bulk nickel is no less useful in industry - with the 64Ni removed as with it there. In effect, you only rent the feedstock, removing very little. That is a huge difference compared to what we look to as the model for isotope enrichment. With uranium enrichment - in contrast, the feedstock cost must be 100% absorbed in the cost of the enrichment (since the depleted U has almost no value) so that factor alone grossly inflates the net cost by several orders of magnitude (compared to nickel). Enrichment cost alone, for even the heavy metals - is not outrageous so long as there is a large market for the depleted feedstock. That is key. There seldom is a market, but since nickel has that as its major feature, then an enriched isotope on a mass production scale, for a NiH energy system, is not out of the question. -Original Message- From: Berke Durak On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 2:52 PM, Peter Heckert peter.heck...@arcor.de wrote: The ion diffusion speed in an electrolyte is only some centimeters per minute at best, while the speed in a Calutron is probably some 100 to some 1000 kilometres per second. Therefore the mass inertia of the nucleus at this low speed has no effect. The electrolyte vessel must be some 1000 km long for this to work. Yes, but can't the liquid be accelerated to a sufficient velocity using pumps? A quick search reveals that the radius of the circular path described by a charged particle subject to a transverse magnetic field is R = mv/qB where m is the mass, v is the velocity, q is the charge and B is the field in tesla. Assume we want to separate two isotopes of masses m1 and m2, we'll want R1 - R2 d for some sufficiently large d. Take d = 1cm, m1 = 58 amu and m2 = 64 amu, and q = 2 x 1.6e-19 C (for Ni 2+), then we need v = qB/(m1 - m2) = 32e6 m/s/T. For a 100 nano tesla field, this gives 3.2 m/s and R1 = 9.6 m and R2 = 10.6 m. I suppose 3.2 m/s is a reasonable velocity. If we pump the solution so that the Ni2+ ions reach a velocity of 3.2 m/s while keeping the magnetic field around 100 nanotesla, we might be able to separate them. By properly orienting the setup with respect to the Earth's magnetic field, some mu-metal shielding or using some active cancellation technique, it might be possible to obtain a 100 nT field. The problem might be that you will also have whatever cations are present swirling in the opposite direction. I don't know how that would affect the Ni2+ ions. Any physicists / electrochemists in the room? -- Berke Durak
Re: [Vo]:Rossi Nickel enrichment : is a liquid-phase Calutron possible?
I don't think that as a practical matter electroplating can work to coat the particles of a micro powder but vapor disposition will work. Furthermore, the powder can be made of bulk material, only the nanometer thick secret surface treatment needs to be heavy nickel (Ni62-64). This is not that much material at all and is a very small fraction of the total weight of nickel. Think about the colored sugar coating on the surface of an MM but far thinner. Using vapor disposition, isotope selection by weight can be done by using a magnetic field. I would like to call attention to the patents of special interest that are mentioned in the Rossi 2009 patent. The ones taling about vapor disposition caught my special attention. On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 8:46 AM, Berke Durak berke.du...@gmail.com wrote: Hello everyone, My name is Berke and I'm not an electrochemist. Nor a physicist for that matter. (Just a comp. sci. guy.) That being said, I'd like to discuss this issue nonetheless. I find this subject extremely interesting. Also, congratulations for this well-kept and informative list. Some people have speculated that the heavier nickel isotopes (in particular Nickel-64) are the active elements in Rossi's alleged reaction. I recall reading that Rossi claimed that the enrichment is quite an easy process. Prof. S. Çelebi asked Rossi about the quantity of energy required to produce the fuel assembly, and Rossi responded that 200 W.h are enough for a 1 MW unit. Since Rossi claims that 10 kg of (enriched) nickel is good for 180 days worth of 1 MW production, I suppose that this 200 W.h figure is what is required to process 10 kg of nickel, or maybe the corresponding amount of some nickel ore or salt. On the other hand, there is talk of nickel powder being used, although I don't know if nanometric powder is required. I don't know anything about powdering, but based on some quick web research and back-of-the-envelope number crunching, it seems that 200 W.h is a reasonable amount of energy to pulverize 10 kg of some softish metal into a 70 micrometer-ish powder using commercially available equipment. Now, that doesn't solve the enrichment issue. Note that we don't necessarily need pure Nickel 64. Some Reddit folks were talking of a 64 Ni - 65 Cu reaction giving off 40 keV (as gammas I suppose). Since 64 Ni has .00926 abundance, you'd need to enrich that isotope by something like 5 times. So how could nickel 64 be cheaply enriched x 5? I had this weird idea, which may well be completely unfeasible. Take a nickel electroplating bath. There you have negatively charged nickel ions moving towards the anode. If you place a sufficiently long bath in a magnetic field, won't the trajectories of the nickel ions be deviated, in a quantity decreasing with their mass? If this is true, then you may be able to separate the heavier nickel ions from the lighter ones. Note that Nickel-64 is about 10% heavier than the most abundant isotope, so maybe this won't require require too many stages, if feasible. Basically, this would be a liquid-phase Calutron. Maybe there is a good physical or chemical reason why this wouldn't work, so I'd like any knowledgeable persons to step forward and give their opinion. If this works, from the couple pages I've read on electroplating, I gathered that it should be possible to obtain relatively brittle nickel by controlling the parameters of the process. This is probably a good thing, since after enrichment, you'll want to pulverize your nickel. In addition, it probably is not unreasonable to use a copper anode. Then, your fuel will be contaminated with natural copper. So, if the fuel sample you provide for analysis didn't run for very long, you'll have way more natural copper than transmuted copper, and the isotopic composition may well be indistinguishable from that of natural copper. Now if that enrichment process is feasible, we need to run some numbers to see if 200 W.h is in the ball park for 5 x enrichment of Ni-64. -- Berke Durak
Re: [Vo]:Rossi Nickel enrichment : is a liquid-phase Calutron possible?
The ion diffusion speed in an electrolyte is only some centimeters per minute at best, while the speed in a Calutron is probably some 100 to some 1000 kilometres per second. Therefore the mass inertia of the nucleus at this low speed has no effect. The electrolyte vessel must be some 1000 km long for this to work. Am 03.11.2011 19:32, schrieb Axil Axil: I don't think that as a practical matter electroplating can work to coat the particles of a micro powder but vapor disposition will work. Furthermore, the powder can be made of bulk material, only the nanometer thick secret surface treatment needs to be heavy nickel (Ni62-64). This is not that much material at all and is a very small fraction of the total weight of nickel. Think about the colored sugar coating on the surface of an MM but far thinner. Using vapor disposition, isotope selection by weight can be done by using a magnetic field. I would like to call attention to the patents of special interest that are mentioned in the Rossi 2009 patent. The ones taling about vapor disposition caught my special attention. On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 8:46 AM, Berke Durak berke.du...@gmail.com mailto:berke.du...@gmail.com wrote: Hello everyone, My name is Berke and I'm not an electrochemist. Nor a physicist for that matter. (Just a comp. sci. guy.) That being said, I'd like to discuss this issue nonetheless. I find this subject extremely interesting. Also, congratulations for this well-kept and informative list. Some people have speculated that the heavier nickel isotopes (in particular Nickel-64) are the active elements in Rossi's alleged reaction. I recall reading that Rossi claimed that the enrichment is quite an easy process. Prof. S. Çelebi asked Rossi about the quantity of energy required to produce the fuel assembly, and Rossi responded that 200 W.h are enough for a 1 MW unit. Since Rossi claims that 10 kg of (enriched) nickel is good for 180 days worth of 1 MW production, I suppose that this 200 W.h figure is what is required to process 10 kg of nickel, or maybe the corresponding amount of some nickel ore or salt. On the other hand, there is talk of nickel powder being used, although I don't know if nanometric powder is required. I don't know anything about powdering, but based on some quick web research and back-of-the-envelope number crunching, it seems that 200 W.h is a reasonable amount of energy to pulverize 10 kg of some softish metal into a 70 micrometer-ish powder using commercially available equipment. Now, that doesn't solve the enrichment issue. Note that we don't necessarily need pure Nickel 64. Some Reddit folks were talking of a 64 Ni - 65 Cu reaction giving off 40 keV (as gammas I suppose). Since 64 Ni has .00926 abundance, you'd need to enrich that isotope by something like 5 times. So how could nickel 64 be cheaply enriched x 5? I had this weird idea, which may well be completely unfeasible. Take a nickel electroplating bath. There you have negatively charged nickel ions moving towards the anode. If you place a sufficiently long bath in a magnetic field, won't the trajectories of the nickel ions be deviated, in a quantity decreasing with their mass? If this is true, then you may be able to separate the heavier nickel ions from the lighter ones. Note that Nickel-64 is about 10% heavier than the most abundant isotope, so maybe this won't require require too many stages, if feasible. Basically, this would be a liquid-phase Calutron. Maybe there is a good physical or chemical reason why this wouldn't work, so I'd like any knowledgeable persons to step forward and give their opinion. If this works, from the couple pages I've read on electroplating, I gathered that it should be possible to obtain relatively brittle nickel by controlling the parameters of the process. This is probably a good thing, since after enrichment, you'll want to pulverize your nickel. In addition, it probably is not unreasonable to use a copper anode. Then, your fuel will be contaminated with natural copper. So, if the fuel sample you provide for analysis didn't run for very long, you'll have way more natural copper than transmuted copper, and the isotopic composition may well be indistinguishable from that of natural copper. Now if that enrichment process is feasible, we need to run some numbers to see if 200 W.h is in the ball park for 5 x enrichment of Ni-64. -- Berke Durak
