In reply to Jones Beene's message of Mon, 31 Mar 2008 07:41:38 -0700 (PDT): Hi, [snip] >Richard, > >> OK, when you get through chuckling over it, expand on the thought. Aussies >love to tease Texas boys but behind the comment lies something I haven't >thought of before. > > >Robin can speak for himself- but there is no tease here IMHO.
Correct. The smiley was just because I thought it was an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how serious to take myself in this case. [snip > >I think that what he is suggesting is that just like the plastic film in CR-39 >leaves evidence of a nuclear reaction, the same kind of thing could be >happening with HMWPE- in the sense that the reason you see the needle-like >pitting with sea-water and not with manufactured chlorine is that the chlorine >has become photoactivated. When an energetic charged particle rips through solid matter, it ionizes the atoms. If that solid is a good insulator then the electron and ion pairs formed will tend to remain in the solid, because the electrons can't migrate through insulating material to find their way back to ions to neutralize them. That leaves a suspension of ions along the path that the charged particle took. If the substance is normally resistant to ionic chemical attack (as are most plastics), then the suspended ions form a weakness where such an ionic attack can take place. Hence etching the plastic in a strong alkali hollows out the tracks taken by the charged particles. Well, that's my guess as to how it works. > >Actually there are three or four possibilities and perhaps at least three are >required to cause the marking you see: > >1) The chlorine in the sea water must become photoactivated, and a percentage >of it must remain in a metastable state by long exposure to UV light. This >wold imply that the water used is surface sea water and not from the depths > >2) All sea water will contain deuterium, but perhaps the HDO content has been >enriched by natural processes in the particular situation > >3) During processing, on occasion, the QM reaction mentioned in the previous >post occurs, where the deuterium atom tunnels into the k-shell of the >photoactivated chlorine resulting in a neutron stripping reaction. The neutron >is absorbed leading eventually to a beta decay. Beta decays don't leave tracks in CR-39 though, AFAIK, so perhaps my little "yarn" here above is not quite correct. It may also require that individual nuclei get completely knocked out of place - which would require the momentum of a heavy particle (e.g. proton or alpha). > >Alternatively: > >4) Solar hydrinos are created in the sun's corona and if they arrive in the >solar wind, they will likely accumulate in the oceans of earth, and have an >affinity for alkali metal ions. Unlike potassium, sodium is not a catalyst so >it would only attract and not further shrink the hydrino - which is then >poised to react with photoactivated chlorine. There are theoretically lots of nuclear reactions which might have been involved, and many ways in which they might have come about. However I'm a little cautious about this whole approach, because I thought that the tracks in CR-39 were microscopic in size, and get the impression in this case that they are quite large. Now, this may be due to use of a different plastic, different exposure and "etching" times, and different "etching" chemical(s). > >BTW - it would be extremely interesting to remove some of this pitted material >and have it tested with a sensitive GM monitor to see if there is any residual >radiation present. Agreed. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk The shrub is a plant.
