The ion diffusion speed in an electrolyte is only some centimeters per
minute at best, while the speed in a Calutron is probably some 100 to
some 1000 kilometres per second.
Therefore the mass inertia of the nucleus at this low speed has no
effect. The electrolyte vessel must be some 1000 km long for this to work.
Am 03.11.2011 19:32, schrieb Axil Axil:
I don't think that as a practical matter electroplating can work to
coat the particles of a micro powder but vapor disposition will work.
Furthermore, the powder can be made of bulk material, only the
nanometer thick secret surface treatment needs to be heavy nickel
(Ni62-64). This is not that much material at all and is a very small
fraction of the total weight of nickel.
Think about the colored sugar coating on the surface of an M&M but far
thinner.
Using vapor disposition, isotope selection by weight can be done by
using a magnetic field.
I would like to call attention to the patents of special interest
that are mentioned in the Rossi 2009 patent. The ones taling about
vapor disposition caught my special attention.
On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 8:46 AM, Berke Durak <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hello everyone,
My name is Berke and I'm not an electrochemist. Nor a physicist for
that matter. (Just a comp. sci.
guy.) That being said, I'd like to discuss this issue nonetheless. I
find this subject extremely interesting.
Also, congratulations for this well-kept and informative list.
Some people have speculated that the heavier nickel isotopes (in
particular Nickel-64) are the active
elements in Rossi's alleged reaction. I recall reading that Rossi
claimed that the enrichment is quite
an easy process. Prof. S. Çelebi asked Rossi about the quantity of
energy required to produce the
fuel assembly, and Rossi responded that 200 W.h are enough for a 1 MW
unit. Since Rossi claims
that 10 kg of (enriched) nickel is good for 180 days worth of 1 MW
production, I suppose that this 200 W.h
figure is what is required to process 10 kg of nickel, or maybe the
corresponding amount of some nickel
ore or salt. On the other hand, there is talk of nickel powder being
used, although I don't know if
nanometric powder is required.
I don't know anything about powdering, but based on some quick web
research and back-of-the-envelope
number crunching, it seems that 200 W.h is a reasonable amount of
energy to pulverize 10 kg of some
softish metal into a 70 micrometer-ish powder using commercially
available equipment.
Now, that doesn't solve the enrichment issue. Note that we don't
necessarily need pure Nickel 64.
Some Reddit folks were talking of a 64 Ni -> 65 Cu reaction giving off
40 keV (as gammas I suppose).
Since 64 Ni has .00926 abundance, you'd need to enrich that isotope by
something like 5 times.
So how could nickel 64 be cheaply enriched x 5? I had this weird
idea, which may well be completely
unfeasible. Take a nickel electroplating bath. There you have
negatively charged nickel ions moving towards
the anode. If you place a sufficiently long bath in a magnetic field,
won't the trajectories of the nickel ions be deviated,
in a quantity decreasing with their mass? If this is true, then you
may be able to separate the heavier nickel
ions from the lighter ones. Note that Nickel-64 is about 10% heavier
than the most abundant isotope, so maybe this
won't require require too many stages, if feasible. Basically, this
would be a liquid-phase Calutron. Maybe
there is a good physical or chemical reason why this wouldn't work, so
I'd like any knowledgeable persons
to step forward and give their opinion.
If this works, from the couple pages I've read on electroplating, I
gathered that it should be possible to obtain
relatively brittle nickel by controlling the parameters of the
process. This is probably a good thing,
since after enrichment, you'll want to pulverize your nickel.
In addition, it probably is not unreasonable to use a copper anode.
Then, your fuel will be contaminated
with natural copper. So, if the fuel sample you provide for analysis
didn't run for very long, you'll have way
more natural copper than transmuted copper, and the isotopic
composition may well be indistinguishable
from that of natural copper.
Now if that enrichment process is feasible, we need to run some
numbers to see if 200 W.h is in the ball park
for 5 x enrichment of Ni-64.
--
Berke Durak
