More on my vast left or right wing conspiracy theory of cold fusion suppression.
On the subject of my possible low budget Pb207 isotope separation I wrote: >> I couldn't get any uranium because the nuclear section was >> more or less off limits to me, and besides the melting point >> is too high for the equipment I had available. To make a >> long story short, I was apparently able to get significant >> concentration of Pb207 from the natural isotope mix using >> the molten metal and a simple electromagnetic technique. I >> will definitely not give the details here for fear of another >> MIB visit. Ed completely skirts the issue of isotope separation and writes: > Lead is very toxic. I can understand why someone might not > want you messing with it. Golly gee, Ed, I thought it was a food additive. This was 1962. No one anywhere was worried about anything toxic, or anything nuclear, for that matter. There was a student operated nuclear reactor not a hundred yards from where I worked at the Bureau of Mines. You could have walked in there at night and yanked all the control rods and it would maybe have set off an alarm. I didn't want to flesh out this narrative for fear of sounding like an old geezer yakking about old times at the U.S. Bureau of Mines, but well here it is anyway. In any case, get a load of my actual job there, as opposed to my isotope separation hobby. I was in charge of electroplating manganese salts into mercury cathodes and then boiling off the mercury in an iron still to recover the manganese. I had to keep plating until the amalgam was just a sludge. The mercury was boiled off in a creaky old mercury still made for the purpose. You had to purge the manganese with nitrogen before removal and then slowly expose it to air, as it was a fine black powder and highly pyrophoric. A lot of times the manganese lit off anyway and there was a hell of a fireworks display. You can just imagine how much residual mercury was in it. I did in fact contract mercury poisoning from doing this. My point here is that no one was worried about my messing with anything toxic. Clearly, what they were worried about was any inexpensive isotope separation scheme. BTW, Ed that lead acetate makes a hell of a low-cal sweetner. Used to be call sugar of lead, y'know. Thins you right out. M. _______________________________________________ Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com The most personalized portal on the Web!
