From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Wed Feb 19 2003 - 19:25:26 MST
I was looking at this article thru glazed eyes when this caught my attention and prompted these questions:
1) Feasible?
2) Economical
3) Comparatively safe? Yeah, if we get solar goosed up into real production,we go with solar. I am for that too, and wind and biomass. But will these aforementiond systems really replace all other sources. Can they. If not, is this another example of the Military achieving what commerical development couldn't???
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993406
http://www.utdallas.edu/research/quantum/Tutorial.htm
Quantum Nuclear Reactions for permanently flying unmanned air
vehicles UAV's
<<The AFRL now has other ideas, though. Instead of a conventional fission reactor, it is focusing on a type of power generator called a quantum nucleonic reactor. This obtains energy by using X-rays to encourage particles in the nuclei of radioactive hafnium-178 to jump down several energy levels, liberating energy in the form of gamma rays. A nuclear UAV would generate thrust by using the energy of these gamma rays to produce a jet of heated air.
The military interest was triggered by research published in 1999 by Carl Collins and colleagues at the University of Texas at Dallas. They found that by shining X-rays onto certain types of hafnium they could get it to release 60 times as much energy as they put in (New Scientist print edition, 3 July 1999).
Tightly controlled reaction
The reaction works because a proportion of the hafnium nuclei are "isomers" in which some neutrons and protons sit in higher energy levels than normal. X-ray bombardment makes them release this energy and drop down to a more stable energy level.>>
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