At 09:06 AM 3/26/2010, Peter Gluck wrote:
Nice to hear from you, Terry. The trouble is that 0.1 mm is too thin, Pd overheats, melts- losses, problems etc. Can you calculate the surface temperature of the metal at a heat release of 100 Watts per square centimenter?
Doesn't that depend on the heat sink? Heat is released in a volume, though a thin one, perhaps under 25 microns, my sense. The temperature of that volume will depend on how rapidly the heat is conducted away. The Arata approach is to use nanoparticle palladium to get very high surface area. The operating temperatures I've seen have only been a few degrees C, which is too low to be useful. Yet.
My impression is, again, that this catalyst gets damaged, heat begins to drop off some time after 3000 minutes, and there is way too little data yet to say more. If the reaction is confined to specific sites that are cheap enough to create, held in a matrix that keeps a reaction in one site from destroying an adjacent one, it might only take a little palladium, and you'd have a nuclear battery. I'm looking forward to seeing what Miley has going.
Again, there is the biological approach. Deinococcus radiodurans is phenomenally radiation-resistant, it was discovered when irradiated meat sometimes spoiled anyway. If Vyosotskii is right, this little beastie can manage a transmutation trick with deuterium and manganese. Other reactions might be possible, and he's done a lot of work, and it deserves attention. So we might be able to *culture* a low-level reactor. Could work for heating, which is a major consumer of power. Not all power generation need be at high temperature.
However, to my mind, all the practical application ideas are mostly in the realm of speculation. I take seriously the reports from Energetics Technologies, but I have real difficulty imaging scale-up to a practical application. Fortunately, the world community, and even some individuals, are quite a bit smarter than me. I hope that within a decade, we do understand what's going on, and then engineering practical applications will become much easier.
