In reply to David Roberson's message of Sun, 14 Apr 2013 01:10:28 -0400 (EDT): Hi, [snip] >I am not familiar with a process that accelerates the decay of isotopes, but >perhaps this is possible. Do you know of any method that can be employed to >determine whether or not this can be done?
NMR might be key to this. Paul Brown, and before him Alfred Hubbard claim to have had success in this. Since NMR relies upon interaction with a magnetic field, a magnetic motor (with rapidly varying field strengths) might regularly meet the required conditions to stimulate decay. (Regularly - i.e. when the local instantaneous field strength was exactly right.) > > >Van Allen belt energy extraction would be interesting to analyze. What >characteristic of this source would you be able to modify as you drain some of >its energy? It appears as though you are suggesting that an electromagnetic >process could be tapped. The Van Allen belts comprise charged particles from the Sun that are trapped in the Earth's magnetic field, in as much as they are make circular "orbits" around the field lines (one way to describe it). As kinetic energy is drained from the particles, the radius of the orbit decreases. The total power available is equal to the rate at which particles are trapped in the field, multiplied by the energy of the average particle. Since the particles came from the Solar wind, both the average energy per particle, and the particle density, are fairly well known. The only figures that require a bit of guess work (at least for me), are the overall size of the field, and the percentage that gets trapped. As for tapping the energy, what I see is a bunch of particles trapped in a magnetic field, and emitting cyclotron radiation. This would normally be a very slow process due to the low cyclotron frequency of the protons (which have most of the energy), however precisely because the frequency is very low, the wavelength is very long, and in some cases may well extend all the way to the Earth's surface. That may make resonant reception possible, with power only weakening as 1/r rather than 1/r^2 as would be the case with normal radio emissions. IOW because the separation distance can be less than one wavelength, it's a near field coupling process rather than a true emission process. I imagine this to be a form of air core transformer, with the particles as the primary coil, and the receiver on Earth as the secondary. Because the cyclotron frequency of the protons ranges from a few hundred rpm to multiple thousand rpm, it seems to be a natural match for a magnetic motor. Whether it would actually work or not, I have no idea. :) (But there have been a number of "free energy" claims that might actually have been tapping this source.) [snip] Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
