-----Original Message----- From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax > But his [Scott Little] standing offer is to use his fancy calorimeter, and I'm not searching for heat. Just neutrons. Neutrons are direct evidence of nuclear reactions ...
That is a good strategy, and Scott is also an expert in radioactive species detection. He may be semi-retired however, but I'm sure he would be interested in helping at some point. BTW - aside for CR-39 film, another way of detecting neutrons which we have not mentioned before is possibly worth consideration for some specialty uses like yours, and that is the rare earth metal gadolinium, element 64 ... and it is not as rare as you might think, since it is a byproduct of high tonnage thorium mining and refining where they have to get rid of every trace, for the obvious reason. Whereas boron has extremely high sensitivity to low energy neutrons, as we all know - gadolinium is over 10 times higher ! (~50,000 barns) Truly remarkable. I don't know if you knew about Gd, but if not - it would be worth putting some thought into a way to use gadolinium in the testing procedure, as it may be superior to film at some level. It might be best used as an adjunct and alternative. Obviously if you detect these cold neuts in two different ways, then it eliminates the objections to film which have been voiced. Gd could be used with a simple GM meter, for instance, since it (presumably) converts low energy neutrons to gammas on adsorption. Again, if a cell is showing (cold) neutron production in two different ways, then that fact backs skeptics into a tight corner - and as for availability - I notice that it is being sold on eBay. Jones
