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Chlorine is the chameleon of the periodic table – a noxious poison, despite it being absolutely necessary for most biological life. It is so very ironic that it has become the "bad boy" of the environmental movement lately... that irony arises because the salt content (i.e. the chlorine content) of bodily fluids, and of every cell in the body, is very close to being the very same identical ratio to the salt content of the oceans in which life first evolved. IOW chlorine is as essential to human life as any carbohydrate. And furthermore, there may be something about that chlorine/H2O ratio in sea water which makes it an evolutionary "norm" after several hundred million years of survival pressure in higher life – i.e. life having already left the confines of the oceans, so why maintain the ratio when salt can be hard to find in certain locales? If chlorine... that is, chlorine in the form of salt, NaCl, and in a fairly exact ratio with H2O, were not highly advantageous, then some form of advanced life would have veered away from it, one would think. I like to harangue the environmental movement from time to time, despite being a dyed-in-the-wool environmentalist myself, basically because most of Nader’s Raiders and the Sierra Club are little more than pudden-headed tree-huggers – single-minded zealots who shun science as must as they cherish a warped understanding of "nature." The only common ground being a shared and rather intense shame for our national Oil addiction, and more intense hatred for the greedy "pushers"... the insidious nazi-esque high level control exerted by the (shadow) petro-government. At any rate, the future use of chlorine for free-energy is a prospect which could materialize in the next few years, despite protestations from the far-left. The far right is more problematic. And I refuse to call environmentalists "green" for this posting... esp. in light of the color of many chlorine compounds. But if comes down to belligerency with both MIB and MIG, is there any hope? The most amazing property of chlorine may go beyond its enormous chemical(only) reactivity and its electron affinity, which is highest among all elements – higher even than fluorine. This property may be important in the context of a hypothetical heavy electron, which we have been calling electronium, and designating as (*e-). Don’t bother to google it and find anything relevant, as the concept was invented here recently and the name co-opted. To continue the color scheme, this idea of a previously unknown heavy electron is greener-than-green. To continue the list of superlatives for chlorine, the atom participates in a certain photo-chemical reaction so violently that it has been said to produce a supra-chemical or atomic reaction, i..e "atomic" in the form of free neutrons splitting from deuterium when combined with photocatalyzed chlorine. I would stress the "photo" of photochemical. Think of it as a synergy where two elements, which would normally react to produce a few eV of mass/energy... will instead produce a few hundred eV per resultant molecule, and with a few excursions (on the tail) into the keV range, by the simple expedient of pumping up the chlorine with UV light. Impossible...? Not if chlorine contains in its k-shell a particular kind of electron – (*e-). As far back as 1727 a fellow named Schulze discovered the photoactivity of silver halides (compounds of chlorine, iodine, etc.) leading to a whole new industry - photography. The photo-reactivity of halides, particularly chlorine, is about as well known in some circles as Hamburgers. But one of those circles, not circle-K necessarily, was nipped-in-the-bud... shall we say. Back early in 1942, if not before, Dr. George Kistiakowsky, then Head of the Explosives Division of the Manhattan Project and inventor of all of the A-bomb "triggers" for the next dozen years, proposes a photocatalyzed DCl reaction as the best atom bomb trigger. An A-bomb trigger must release lots of neutrons at the exact same time that the fissile core is being uniformly compressed by an external explosion. Chlorine is perfect for the explosion, of course, but how does it produce neutrons and what happens after it has been irradiated by being near the core for extended periods...? Huh? You say. Why didn’t this show up in Rhodes’ book? Well, the DCl research was classified from that point on, becoming blacker-than-black - and remains so today. This could be out of concern for another incident which occurred within the same year and which our government has failed to "come clean" on, because after 60 years it involves billions of dollars of potential liability today. Not to mention severe racial overtones. R. Rhodes missed-out on that scoop too. We are pretty sure (from reading between the lines of the archives) that a DCl trigger resulted from Kistiakowsky’s R&D work in the early 1940s and was actually manufactured, and we suspect that the first A-bomb explosion... no... not the one at Trinity in New Mexico, but the one a year earlier at Port Chicago in California, may have been caused by a DCl trigger which went off prematurely. >From that point on, nothing else remains to be found in the LANL archives... except perhaps the acrid odor of a malingering and sodden high-level cover-up. Or was that odor from a defective chlorine pump at the motel swimming pool? Consequently, we are left to speculate as to why the head of a prestigious 600 man R&D department would recommend a chemical reaction to release neutrons, if the reaction did not do so; why the research was then classified Top Secret if it did not work; why the research remains classified 60 years later, if it did not work; whether or not the mechanism was too unpredictable for actual usage in a bomb; and whether or not this mechanism caused a major accident in which hundreds of innocent lives were lost (and then the underlying blame maliciously shifted – i.e. "mutiny" !!)... ...and, most importantly for the new millennium, whether or not the Cl-photo-effect could be implemented to produce energy in a range far above chemical but not quite nuclear. One wonders if the proliferation issues themselves were just too overwhelming, or whether the liability issue was the main concern? Does the phrase "deuterium splitting" mean anything? If not, and if you buy into the official accounting of the Port Chicago incident, then this posting will not mean much. Fast forward to 1984, and Patent # 4,426,354 granted to Robert Scragg for a Power Generator System using HCl Reaction. This system uses a nuclear reactor, not to generate heat but to generate radiation, which chlorine absorbs in order to react far more violently with H2 or even with H2O than normal. As it absorbs such energy, the Cl reactivity with hydrogen increases exponentially, becoming the most powerful chemical reaction known by far. This patent didn’t go far in the good old USA, for reasons which seem obvious. Reactors are dangerous enough without adding chlorine...but that is not the best use for it. Was it "borrowed" here or elsewhere? One wonders why the soviet space program is said to still be considering the use of chlorine.... Without trying to sound too much like James Burke (or James Bond) ... stayed tuned for next week’s episode... Jones |
