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
