Quantum Nucleonic Reactors!

[athelind]

I was skimming the latest Popular Mechanics this morning, waiting for a prescription at the drug store. Across the cover, in that marvelously hyperbolic style that's characterized PM for more than a century, was emblazoned "ATOMIC PLANES: A New Age Dawns For Private Aircraft Powered By Miniature Nuclear Reactors". that demanded a closer look.

It seems that they only discovered this tech in the late '90s, so it's bleeding edge stuff. Basicly, if you aim "soft" x-rays (like the kind the dentist uses) at a block of hafnium-178, you get a gamma ray output that's 60 times the energy of the x-ray input. No fission, no fusion, no neutrons -- just gamma rays. Gamma rays need a lot of mass to shield, but they don't have the contamination problem that neutrons and alpha particles do.

As the title suggests, they're talking about using this as an aircraft powerplant -- using the gamma output to heat up the air and run a jet turbine. Apparently, you could run the x-ray machine on a solar panel.

The most fun of all: they stumbled on this accidentally. It's all so wonderfully comic-book! Can't you just see some Pulp Era Inventor bombarding the Mysterious Hafnium Isomer with X-Rays and discovering an Astounding New Power Source?

The basic story is pretty straightforward, but the physics behind it is frankly beyond me. Blah blah blah handwave blah energy states blah quantum blah magic.

Some scientists question the technology, but their experimental technique seems fundamentally flawed. "They used weak, limp, girly x-rays, so we'll use bigger, badder, far more impressive x-rays from our Superatomic Hyperphallic Compensator Collider! Nope, we didn't get a proportionally larger output; they must be wrong!"

Did they try actually duplicating the experiment? I'm hardly a nuclear physicist, but even I can come up with three or four plausible reasons why low-energy x-rays would produce an effect where high-energy ones wouldn't.

Comments

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Extreeeeeeemely kewl.

"Pelted by Gamma Rays! Ain't he un-glamma-ras?"

[athelind.livejournal.com]

While playing with Gamma Rays, Bruce
Chanced to catch a few that got loose.
"'Twas nothing," he said
As he went off to bed
But he woke up next morning... chartreuse.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

*L*

[taral.livejournal.com]

Where does the energy come from?

[rikoshi.livejournal.com]

"They used weak, limp, girly x-rays, so we'll use bigger, badder, far more impressive x-rays from our Superatomic Hyperphallic Compensator Collider!"

Words don't do justice to the smile on my face right now.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

This is the part I don't QUITE get, so bear with me.

It seems that nuclei can exist at different stable energy states, called ISOMERS. A given hunk of Hf-178 includes a percentage of atoms at these isomers, with all this extra energy bound into their nuclei. Somehow, the x-rays increase how often one of these high-energy nuclei will shift to a lower energy state, releasing a large amount of bound energy.

As I said, this goes well beyond my biologist/ecologist/cartographer's knowledge of nuclear phenomena and quantum mechanics.

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

A guy I vaguely know through The Intarweb got named managing editor of Popular Science magazine, and he said that they determined that airplanes and/or tanks on the cover of the magazine boosted sales by some measurable percentage. I told him he should put flying tanks on every cover.

[taral.livejournal.com]

Ah. That makes perfect sense. :) It appears from a first reading that they were claiming some kind of catalysis in the Hf-178.

[araquan.livejournal.com]

I find the following quote interesting:

"It's probably something you would want to stay away from but it's not going to kill you,"

     -- Christopher Hamilton

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

That sounds so very EE Smith! I was instantly reminded of the "Skylark" power source. But this is real, which is nice. When the hafnium has stopped putting out gamma rays, how do they recharge it?

[athelind.livejournal.com]

I told him he should put flying tanks on every cover.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

I think you have to replace the hafnium. Since it's a half-life thing, perhaps they can process the depleted fuel rods like they can with uranium.

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

Hrmm. Yeah, gamma rays come from high energy transitions in the nucleus-- forgive me, I've read the concepts but forget the proper terms. Electrons jumping from one quantum state to another-- from one orbital to another-- give off the resultant energies as photons. So do nuclear particles, but the energy levels are much higher.

So this isn't a radioactive decay. The halfnium wouldn't go away; in the same way that a neon tube emits quanta, and light results, but the neon is still there.

The energy has to come from somewhere, though. SOMEHOW you have to pump up the quantum level of your particles in the nucleus, and you have to keep it in a metastable state until you release it. If the energy came in from somewhere else first, merely being stored in the halfnium until released, this wouldn't violate conservation of energy.

Sounds pretty darned cool. But it also sounds miraculous enough I'd like to see it before I believe it.

Did Popular Mechanics run an article lauding cold fusion, by any chance?