At 05:25 PM 2/23/2011, Harry Veeder wrote:
Well done...but your local nuclear regulatory agency might shutdown
your business until the kit is thorougly screened for all manner of
emissions. Or have you already got that covered?
Well, you should understand the expected neutron level. From my
understanding, the level is about ten times cosmic ray neutron
background, but the emitter is very small and "background" refers to
the SSNTD that is very close to the cathode. The level at human
distances away would be well below background. And neutron background
is very low, there is much more dangerous radon floating around as well.
I'll be lucky if I get a neutron per hour leaving tracks. But the
experiment runs for about three weeks....
Anyway I would buy one of the kits and try to show it to some
nuclear scientists. I live in a town where the main employer is a
government funded nuclear research lab, CRL (Chalk River Research
Laboratory) whose principle missions include the production of
medical isotopes and technical support for the CANDU reactor. Both
operations are run by the crown corporation AECL (atomic energy of
canada ltd.) Currently the future of AECL and CRL is up in the air.
The government wants to break up AECL by selling off the CANDU
reactor and operations. It will maintain ownership of CRL while but
want it to be run by the private sector. Harry
I'll announce the kits when they are available. Making replication
easy was the idea! You can do a lot more with these kits than the
simple experiment. As I've mentioned, I'll be watching the cathode
with a microscope. What will I see when I watch in the dark? I'll
have a piezoelectric detector on the deuterium cell and a control
hydrogen cell ($70?), listening. What will I hear, or more to the
point, see with a high-bandwidth oscilloscope? Will I see any sign of
excess heat? I'm not doing careful calorimetry, but hey, why not at
least observe cell temperature and ambient?
I'm doing what's cheap and easy to do.
Later, with a cell like this, drop a little beryllium chloride into
the electolyte and See What Happens. Anything?
This is what I call fun. Thinking about it is fun. Doing it is work,
to get there, but is, overall, I believe, even more fun. And then I
get to write about it -- whatever happens! That's fun, too....
And it might do some good.
I'm also going to try something that I haven't mentioned, since it
only costs me a buck. I will place, below the cathode SSNTD, another
SSNTD, oriented edge-on to the cathode. I want to see if I can
capture the full length of some tracks.... I intend to, first, expose
some LR-115 edge-on to my Am-241 source. There is lots of High School
Science possibility here....
