At 12:12 PM 12/8/2009, Horace Heffner wrote:
I need to be more clear about the fact my article is *not* suggesting amateurs use trace tritium doping. It explicitly states: "Though the use of tritium can only be done in the US by licensed labs, and practical devices would preferably be deuterium only, trace tritium doping experiments may provide a necessary step in the progress toward practical devices." I guess that wasn't enough, so I added: "Amateur experimenters should of course avoid the use of tritium." to draft #22.
And why? The most dangerous thing about the experiments I'm designing is etching the plastic in hot concentrated (6.5 normal recommended by the Galileo project) sodium hydroxide. After that, it would be the possibility of accumulation of an explosive mixture of deuterium and oxygen, which isn't likely in these open cells.
The amount of tritium needed to test the effect of large increase in tritium concentration, compared to the natural occurrence and comparable to the tritium found already in these experiments, would be very small, and probably could be put together from legal sources. I have not checked specific regulations, but I doubt that putting together a *limited* number of these sources would be a violation of any law or regulation. The concentration would be barely detectable with good equipment. Remember, that's the problem with tritium measurement in CF experiments: the generated level is quite low.
It would seem that Horace is thinking of a large amount of tritium. Sure. For that, absolutely not amateur, and the cost would be very high and the regulation strict, anyway. Tritium is *really* not cheap, I'm sure.
