Eric--Bob Cook here-- It may be that laser radiation at selected frequencies could activate organic Ni compounds selectively based on the mass of the Ni isotope. The activation may be ionization or other molecular changes to increase or decrease solubility and the opportunity for separation. Selective activation may also be possible via the magnetic properties of the respective Ni isotopes with oscillating magnetic fields
I think you have the decay scheme for Ni-59 wrong. It has a 76,000 year half life and decays by electron capture as you said. The data I have indicate no gamma activity, in the transition to the Cu-59 nucleus. This is unusual situation that the new nucleus is not formed in an excited state. This is a nice feature of Ni-59, and it should cause no problems. Ni-59 does have a neutron activation cross section, and checking for it in reactor residue should not be to difficult. One would use neutron activation with gamma evaluation of the activated product. One would need to use a research reactor for a source of neutrons like the U of Missouri has. Bob ---- Original Message ----- From: Eric Walker To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, February 07, 2014 8:17 PM Subject: Re: [Vo]:MIT Course Day 5 -- NiH Systems On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 9:39 AM, Bob Cook <[email protected]> wrote: 1. Is Rossi separating Ni isotopes for the Ni he uses in the reactor? This would be expensive. I can only imagine. I'm not sure how one would go about enriching select isotopes of nickel. Perhaps they have sufficiently different properties to make separation straightforward? (E.g., maybe the spin-0 claim one hears occasionally in connection with some isotopes, which is something I know nothing about, can be made use of.) Hank Mills reports that Rossi has found a cheap way to enrich the nickel, although I do not have an opinion about this [1]. 2. Is there radioactive ash (Ni-59 or Ni-63) left in the spent reactors? I was thinking of radioactive species of copper and zinc, primarily. By contrast, I believe 62Ni and 64Ni would go to stable isotopes of copper after proton capture. In natural abundance, 58Ni is the most prevalent, at 68 percent: p + 58Ni → 59Cu + ɣ + Q (2.9 MeV) Here 59Cu is an unstable species which will beta-plus decay to 59Ni, which will then transition to 59Co via electron capture. I believe it will be accompanied by an Auger cascade, so there will be lots of activity taken together. By contrast, p + 62Ni → 63Cu + ɣ + Q (5.6 MeV) Here 63Cu is a stable isotope. If one assumes the ɣ is somehow being fractionated as a large set of lower-energy photons through some as-yet discovered mechanism, as I suspect is happening (I'm rooting for an interaction with the electronic structure, here), then you want 62Ni and 64Ni, because there will be no activity with these isotopes afterwards. Using nickel in its natural isotopes will be like banging the keys on a piano -- there will be lots of noise leaving the system. My final observation is that the Rossi-Focardi comment that there is no radioactivity in the residue needs to be checked. Yes, very much so. This is one of those mutating details, subject to a mysterious law of entropy, where one doesn't know what to believe. In a related connection, I recall an anecdote of an experiment by one of the Italian researchers, perhaps Piantelli, where some nickel that had been undergoing a reaction was placed in a cloud chamber and all kinds of activity was seen. If there is proton capture happening at a significant level, and there is no activity, my guess is that this would be primarily because Rossi has succeeded in enriching the nickel to suitable isotopes to a high degree. But my understanding is that it is also the case that in PdD experiments, transmutations are often seen to stable isotopes, so there may be something inherent to cold fusion that leads to stable isotopes, mitigating perhaps the need for enrichment to very high levels. Eric
