On Jul 27, 2009, at 3:12 PM, Jones Beene wrote:
Given that tritium is expensive, toxic, and tightly controlled and
that
there is no requirement for a gas
- and given that you are interested in Mills work and that
potassium is a
BLP catalyst, and that 40K is mildly radioactive and available in
enriched
form and has a low melting point.
Get hold of a potassium-40 isotope enriched sample, GM meters with
datalogging - some Raney Nickel, and measure the counts before and
after
impregnating the sample into the Raney Nickel using heat and vacuum
and
exercising due caution. Best to datalog both measurement over
several days
or even weeks.
The half-life of potassium 40 is 1.3 billion years. Such an
experiment would be much easier to run with technetium, which has a
half life of 66 hours. Technetium is manufactured on a daily basis
for hospital radiology clinics for various kids of uptake scans. I
had a heart scan based on positron emission from technetium. I was
shocked to see the reading on my geiger counter when I got home and
placed it near me. The radioactivity went away after a while.
It is not logical to expect a cavity effect to cause any detectable
change in the amount of 40K. It is only the *disintegration rate*
that should be affected while in the cavity. It is not easy to
measure that rate in-situ. Once out of the cavity, no difference
would be detectable because so little of 40K is eliminated in a
matter of days, even if the half-life is cut by a 1000 to 1 while in
the cavity. By using a short half-life isotope, the disintegration
rate post-cavity will be measurably affected if the in-cavity
disintegration rate is affected significantly.
Technetium can be chemically separated from whatever apparatus in
which it is used, and the before and after counts easily compared to
expected values.
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
