Rossi, NASA and Low energy nuclear reactions and Nickel 62 and Nickel 63 Speculation

Rossi had a third party investigation of his hot ecat. They should have done flow calorimetry, but the tests they did show interesting results.

There are rumors on the internet that Ampenergo (Rossi related company) has raised a lot of money. This fact fits with both the fraud conspiracy and the real deal theories.

Looking at what might be at work if it is the real deal

In 2011, Rossi has indicated Hydrogen and nickel was the mechanism.

Rossi said that about 30% of nickel was turned into copper, after 6 months of uninterrupted operation.

If it is nickel and neutrons

If nickel isotopes are the key
* start with highly enriched nickel 62
* get a cheap source of neutrons at 10^14 neutrons per second
* get a lot of nickel 63 and then have an environment that accelerates decay to copper

This would generate a lot of energy with radiation that would not escape a metal container and would have stable copper as an end product.

Note – a less controversial way to get to this would be to have super-efficient enrichment with say laser enrichment and then having some other cheap neutron source.

GE – Global Laser Enrichment received a construction and operation licence in September, 2012 for a full-scale laser enrichment facility in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Nickel 63 is unstable and will beta decay into copper. There is radiation. The radiation is easy to stopped with a piece of paper.

Beta radiation is easily shielded. The level of shielding depends on the energy of the beta radiation. The Ni-63 found in ECDs is easily shielded by even a sheet of paper because of its very low energy of emission. Thus this isotope has virtually no external radiation risk, though it certainly can be a dangerous source of internal exposure if the source is leaking.

Intense magnetic fields can induce beta decay based on a 1983 paper in Physical Review Letters.

Details around Nickel 63 energy

Natural nickel consists of five stable isotopes:
nickel-58 (68.27 percent)
nickel-60 (26.10 percent)
nickel-61 (1.13 percent)
nickel-62 (3.59 percent)
and nickel-64 (0.91 percent)

The Russians had tried to make industrial quantities of Nickel 63 for power generation.

Nickel-63 (a pure beta-emitter with a half-life of 100 years) is one of the most promising radionuclides that can be used in miniature autonomous electric power sources with a service life of above 30 years (nuclear batteries) working on the betavoltaic effect.

The maximum energy of beta-particles in the 63Ni emission spectrum is 65 keV, which is much lower than the threshold of radiation damage in the semiconductors intended for use – silicon and gallium arsenide.

If Rossi was using say 80% enriched Nickel 62 and then the device was producing a neutron flux then the Nickel 63 would be generated and would then give off energy and decay to Copper

The centrifugal technology used presently in Russia for separation of stable isotopes makes it possible to prepare enriched isotopes of more than two tens chemical elements including nickel. The volatile compound, nickel tetrafluorophosphine Ni(PF.,) is used as a working substance in separating the nickel isotopes. The nuclear-physical characteristics of nickel-62 and nickel-63 do not allow one to obtain the nickel-63 content in the in-reactor irradiated target more than 30% of the initial amount of starting nickel-62. The real economic reasons restrict this figure to 15-17%.

Eventually, we have the not very efficient, but expensive, process of irradiating the very expensive target. This process is a-priori incapable of producing the highly-enriched nickel-63 at reasonable cost. The problem can be solved if the target nickel is charged into the channels of industrial and/or power reactors of the RBMK and ADE type with medium-level neutron fluxes of (2-5)’lO13 – 2’IO14.

The inexpensive use of these reactors in comparison with ultrahigh-flux neutron sources allows a long-term campaign with a charge of many kilograms of nickel enriched in nickel-62 (but not considered as “highly-enriched”). The centrifugal technology makes possible large-scale separation of nickel isotopes similar to production of depleted zink to be added to the coolant of power reactors.

The post-irradiation enrichment of the irradiated target in nickel-63 with the use the centrifugal separation technology provides the basis for the production of nickel-63 in desired amounts with a required concentration. The characteristics of the sequence of the basic technologies: fabrication of a nickel-62-enriched target + irradiation in a nuclear reactor + enrichment of nickel-63 have been calculated.

The Russians were considering implementation of large-scale nickel-63 production based on the scheme considered will make it possible to create a radionuclide source of electric energy of milliwatt range with a service life of 30-50 years.

NASA Zawodny and Dennis Bushnell believe about LENR could use 1% of the Nickel mined to produce current world energy at a price four times cheaper than coal

Zawodny at NASA says that low-energy nuclear reactor (LENR) uses common, stable elements like nickel, carbon, and hydrogen to produce stable products like copper or nitrogen, along with heat and electricity. “It has the demonstrated ability to produce excess amounts of energy, cleanly, without hazardous ionizing radiation, without producing nasty waste,” said Joseph Zawodny, a senior research scientist with NASA’s Langley Research Center.

“There are estimates using just the performance of some of the devices under study that 1 percent of the nickel mined on the planet each year could produce the world’s energy requirements at the order of 25 percent the cost of coal,” according to Dennis Bushnell, the chief scientist at Langley.

NASA researchers are working on producing the reactions by vibrating lattices of nickel saturated with hydrogen ions at high frequencies. Right now, those vibrations require more initial energy than the reactions produce, the same problem that has stymied efforts to produce fusion reactors. But Bushnell offers this summary of the state of low-energy nuclear reactors:

* Something real is happening.
* The weak interaction theories [including Widom-Larsen] suggest what the physics might be.
* There are efforts ongoing to explore the validity of the theories.
* There are continuing Edisonian efforts to produce devices mainly for heat or in some cases transmutations.
* There are efforts to certify such devices.
* NASA LaRC has begun LENR design studies guided by the Weak Interaction Theory

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