Fred,
Free neutrons are - pound for pound, among the most valuable commodities on earth (even if you can only weigh them theoretically). Far more valuable than diamonds or gemstones. So it is a bit of a surprise that any and all of these ideas on deuterium stripping are not being pursued more intently. Even the Fusor is ignored officially, and LENR advocates are generally ignoring the latest Mizuno work.
However, I think IF one can easily strip a very small percentage of metastable deuterons, then the most efficient use of the resultant free neutrons is going to be as "makeup" neutrons - to be employed in small, mass-produced rail-mounted subcritical reactors of about 20-50 MW each, fueled by natural uranium - but not exactly like the CANDU or newer ACR700 - which design is a pressurized plumbing nightmare and does not get the full benefit of an extremely "cheap" source of neutrons - although the worst kept secret in nuclear engineering is that there is a huge anomaly in how many free neutrons one gets from a deuterium moderator.
A total redesign, with an eye towards smaller, cheaper, safer, and no steam (direct electrical conversion) could have be done here in the USA anytime in the past two decades, were it not for the interests of the "club" dominated by the General Electric Company, which is second to only Halliburton-Big-Oil in political clout (and has been for 60 years previously). We have billions of dollars of sunk cost in an infrastructure of antiquated dangerous technology and subsidized enriched-fuel, dominated by GE, its minions at DoE and DoD and the other club-boys - and no willingness to change things. It is a source of amazement that some European country has not stepped-in with a better answer, but the unnecessary baggage and political problems for nuclear are even more severe there.
Jones
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, October 14, 2005 7:04 AM
Subject: Re: Impact Induced Deuteron Stripping in D2O?
Posted earlier:
>
> A gram per second of D2O at 3,000 PSIG 1,000 Deg F (~3600 Joule/gram)
> exiting a 0.0025 inch bore capillary tube (commercial item) at ~ 3,000 meters/sec ( ~0.7 eV kinetic energy)
> impacting a plate might result in low energy stripping of "metastable" deuterons.
>
A back-of-the-envelope calculation to see how many neutrons and 2.0 MeV Gammas
a steam power plant could produce based on one deuteron per 7,000 H2O molecules at a heat rate
of 10,000 BTU/KWe (About 8.33 lbs H2O/KWe).
At 1/7000 (~1.0e19 deuterons/gram) = 1e19*454*8.33 = 3.78e22 deuterons or possible stripped neutrons/KWe to
recombine with an H atom to form a new deuteron releasing a 2.0 MeV gamma with
a total energy of ~11 Megawatts worth of gammas.
OTOH. With one per million low energy "metastable" deuterons ~ 3.78e16 neutrons/KWe
and 11 watts worth of gammas. Still a lot in a 500 Megawatt (500,000 KW) power plant
FJS
