Post
by Richard Hull » Tue Oct 27, 2020 7:24 am
Yes that was when money was real money and carried its own weight in real value. 90% is a good activator for near mega mark fusors if one can't obtain 999 or better Ag foil.
Whether a blazing result or not, it alone, is enough to prove fusion. It is a pity so many first pass, DIY fusors, as so poorly powered and not operated well that activation is, often, just not possible.
On my Arduino box, to read beta activation within my moderator, I chose a 10 minute (60 10-sec counts). This tracks the full decay over time. In general, in a given flux, 5 half-lives period must be suffered by that which is to be activated to rather fully activate it. the Ag108 is a bit over 2 minutes, thus the 10 minute exposure. As seen in my Xcel spread sheets, I can capture the stepped decay of both the rapid 110 and the tapering off of the more leisurely 108.
The world's fare item, I have 4, and if you visited the atomic energy museum prior to 1964 you got a smaller, aluminum metal cased, plastic domed button with your dime in it. I have several of those as well. I see you have both of them in your fine video... They are (were) common on E-bay in the 90's.
Good work Mark! That was a great video with a clear explanation of your effort! The ORAU nuclear history museum is a great site to visit. Both Bill Kolb and I have contributed data to Paul Frame's effort to fully catalog much of the fine details related to our nuclear history and instrumentation.
I am struggling to obtain some rhodium, (the ultimate metal to activate), but it is now about $11,800 per troy ounce. Even a 1X1-inch ultra thin foil might cost $400! For those activating........ The easiest materials to activate are those with produced isotopes which are heavy beta emitters like silver, rhodium and indium. As Mark notes, he uses his 2" pancake GM counter, you can easily use a GM counter to detect betas. GM counters are cheap, so try and activate the easy ones that are principally beta emitters. Many worthy and nice materials are very low or non-beta emitters, but do produce copious gammas. A GM counter is of little use here, for the most part. A good Gamma ray spectrometer is needed to show off what might be a lot of nice gamma activation energies.
Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
Retired now...Doing only what I want and not what I should...every day is a saturday.
