From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Thu Feb 20 2003 - 13:24:31 MST
Apparently there is some controversy about this Hafnium nuclear-decay
phenomenon. Lawrence Livermore National Lab tried and failed to
reproduce the effect in 1991, according to this press release,
http://www.llnl.gov/llnl/06news/NewsReleases/2001/NR-01-08-05.html.
I don't know the current state of the controversy.
I also want to reiterate that this cannot be thought of as a source
of energy like petroleum mining, it is a form of energy storage
like Hydrogen gas. We can't run our economy off of mined Hafnium.
We could take energy generated by other means and (in principle)
store it in Hafnium for later release, assuming the effect is real.
The bonus is that the storage density is very large: one article,
http://physicsweb.org/article/world/12/5/3, claims that "one gram of
material could store several giga-joules of energy". It also mentions
space travel as a possible application for the technology.
As far as the decay products, the articles I have found claim that Hf-178
is stable. I think the only issue is that this "excited" Hafnium state
(generated artificially) will decay naturally back to the unexcited form,
still Hf-178, via emission of gamma radiation, so there is a radiological
hazard associated with the substance. This transition is the one they
describe as having a half-life of 31 years.
Hal
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