On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 3:11 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: I also suspect that he originally used D iso Li, but changed to Li when he > found > that D produces protons that are too energetic and produce too much > secondary > radiation. >
Another astute observation. To elaborate on what might have happened with this test: - They've been using deuterium during testing and figured out along the way that lithium could provide a boost of some sort from proton knock-on. Perhaps they then figured out that neutron stripping of lithium was itself a direction reaction. - When they use deuterium they get a higher power output but also penetrating radiation from fast protons (as you mention). - In order to provide a safe test and no penetrating radiation, they got rid of the deuterium and provided the Italian/Swedish team with a fuel charge with plain hydrogen and lithium. The daughter 6Li, as you point out, will be pretty slow. The pure 1H does nothing in this particular instance. - Another reason to use LiAlH4 depleted in deuterium would be to avoid reactions such as 62Ni(d,p)63Ni, which will carry the Ni(Li,Li)Ni chain past 62Ni. So like you I'm betting Industrial Heat have more powerful reactions under investigation involving deuterium, but these ones are harder to shield against and so would not have been wise for use in a largely unsupervised test at a third party laboratory. Note that Industrial Heat itself provided financial support for radiation protection. Since under this explanation the modus operandi is neutron stripping, there are probably many other similar reactions that might be going on. When I run the numbers, I'm seeing that out of 3184 isotopes in Mathematica, 2965 are exothermic under neutron capture versus 95 that are endothermic. Eric
