Tritium

: Tritium ALSO decays by emitting an electron anti NEUTRINO.

That is not 'also'. The beta decay *means* production of an electron and an (anti)neutrino. We were once considering to participate in an experiment attempting to determine the neutrino mass with cryogenic microcalorimeters (maybe will still join some day), and the experiment was about measuring energy spectrum of the beta decay.

: Some years ago there was this upheaval about radio[*]active decay being variable, : and some professor suggested that it was linked to the neutrino flux of neutrinos coming from the sun : (so a seasonal effect ,and this was observed).

Wow, I don't recall ever hearing about such a thing. I seem to recall there has been an observed decay time change depending on how the atom is bonded chemically. This happens only when the dominant decay mechanism is capture of one of the orbiting electrons.

: Connecting these 2 dots, it seems to me that to test that, one can put a tritium source next to : say some thorium source, and should there then be a faster decay (more ticks on the counter)?

I think the neutrino flux you can produce with 3H will be completely and utterly negligible.

: Then if you read that wikipedia article, you see that that is EXACTLY how the : US nukes are constructed, except they use pluto[*]nium.

Boosting of nukes is related with neutron emission/capture, not neutrino emission/caputre, if I'm not missing something?

: is a neutrino thing, and THAT is why they use tritium, and THAT is why this professor, : who gave some secret away without knowing, mentioned neutrinos as a reason for the seasonal variations in decay.

I think they are two different effects, hence the professor did not reveal any secret. I feel, too, that if the seasonal neutrino effect is really there, it must be minuscule. It may be detectable, anyway, because the decay times can be determined with high accuracy by collecting enough statistics.

: So here is my next experiment. : Of course speeding up thorium decay (via some steps) to U233 that can be used in a gun type bimb,

Did you ever read the 'nuclear scoutboy' story?

: I was comparing the flux from a nearby tritium source a few mm away to : the neutrino flux from the sun, and given the attenuation versus distance : I think it should (the tritium) have a LOT of effect.

: And after all, in the recent CERN neutrino FTL experiment they could detect CERN neutrinos : hundreds of km away.

Their gear is *huge* compared with yours. But all the above is just my gut feeling - it would be better to check some actual numbers.

Regards, Mikko

As an alternative to your neutrino goals, consider the easy way to release neutrons into your kitchen. Place thorium next to beryllium. The thorium decays to send alpha particles into your kitchen. For every million neutrons that hit the beryllium, one neutron will be liberated to react with your kitchen with a half life of 888 seconds. If a neutron hits an onion, a sulfer atom can be transmuted into something truly stinky, along with a gamma ray!

radio[*]active

transmitter,

lighting,

not much good, or would it?

see the links,

variable,

neutrinos coming from the sun

tritium source next to

the counter)?

Probably not. The probability of a neutrino being captured by thorium, or by anything, is essentially zero. Neutrinos can pass through lines of lead.

anti-neutrinos

Nukes use tritium as part of a neutron generator, to seed the fission reaction.

One cool book: The Los Alamos Primer, a series of lecture notes used to initiate newcomers at the bomb lab. Hmmm, somebody got my copy.

And of course Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

John

You can't "detonate" a nuclear warhead without compressing the fissile material in it. That is achieved by exploding a chemical explosive that surrounds the Plutonium, creating an implosion that compresses it to about 2 X normal density. That is part of the safety system that prevents accidental detonation. The fissile material is well below critical mass in the normal state, only the compressed form is above critical mass. That compression only lasts for microseconds.

Jon

radio[*]active

transmitter,

and 3rd character),

tritium lighting,

not much good, or would it?

did see the links,

variable,

neutrinos coming from the sun

Many of these slightly dodgy claims tend to end up being demonstrated to be thermal drift with the seasons experiments. Most citations for this particular research seem to be on Creationist websites trying to pretend that the Earth is only 6000 years old.

A reasonable take on what was found by way of systematic variation is online at:

tritium source next to

on the counter)?

And the solar neutrino flux at the Earth is around 5x10^10 /m^2/s with only the direction of travel changing between day and night. Essentially they barely notice ordinary matter. A handful of isotopes have nuclei where favourable resonance effects allow rare events to occur with a detectable frequency.

the anti-neutrinos

The first stage fission reaction is already well alight by then. The technique is normally called a fusion boosted fission weapon. The D-T fusion enhancer is to provide a large pulse of extra neutrons to make additional uranium fission reactions run to completion.

The true neutron initiator was traditionally polonium wrapped in beryllium (and at the time a closely guarded secret).

It was because of the British nuclear weapons dependence on Po210 that the radioisotopes that escaped from the fire at Calder Hall in the UK were kept secret. Thank heavens for Cockcroft's follies on the chimney stacks or we would have had our own Chernobyl levels of radioactivity escaping. It was pretty bad as the radioactive iodine and xenon was gaseous and no appropriate preventative measures were taken locally.

I wonder if Jan would like to buy some dilithium crystals ;-)

I am told they are really good for making warp engines.

On a sunny day (Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:39:22 +0200 (EET)) it happened Okkim Atnarivik wrote in :

physics.org simple article about this subject:

Perturbation of Nuclear Decay Rates During the Solar Flare of 13 December 2006

Analysis of environmental influences in nuclear half-life measurements exhibiting time-dependent decay rates

The Russians were of course first, a much older paper from them: Fine structure of histograms of alpha-activity measurements depends on direction of alpha particles flow and the Earth rotation: experiments with collimators.

Have fun

On a sunny day (Fri, 18 Nov 2011 06:59:37 -0800 (PST)) it happened Globemaker wrote in :

Neutrons? Look up 'fusor'.

On a sunny day (Fri, 18 Nov 2011 08:04:20 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

anti-neutrinos

You do not really think they would publish the TRUTH now do you? Anyways I appreciate you good intentions in recommending those books. Those Los Alamos guys are masters of dis-information. I have read about those tactics, including were they f*cked up the periodic table for many years after WW2.. to hide stuff they discovered.

On a sunny day (Fri, 18 Nov 2011 12:11:41 -0600) it happened Jon Elson wrote in :

You fail to see the point, that what you mention is old hat. The 'critical mass' decreases as neurtino flux increaes, that is my point. So the opening you have is no longer effective.

radio[*]active

transmitter,

and 3rd character),

better.

tritium lighting,

not much good, or would it?

did see the links,

variable,

neutrinos coming from the sun

tritium source next to

on the counter)?

the anti-neutrinos

Even they were dodgey. I heard an estimate that about 10 neutrons were created in the critical time window, and that a fizzle was possible because of the small number of initiator neutrons. Apparently modern gadgets use electronically pulsed neutron generators as initiators, much more reliable. That's what I was referring to.

Tritium boosting is a different thing, which happens after ignition, as you point out.

You can buy small commercial neutron generators, basically small particle accelerator/fusion things.

There's also a way to use some piezo crystal effect to make neutrons, in a TO8 can or something.

John

The probability of neutrinos interacting with any given amount of matter is extremely small, and I believe you can probably find published figures for the interaction rate in the open literature.

You could do at least a coarse validation for these published numbers, by assuming that they're lower than the truth, and figuring out what is the highest neutrino-to-matter interaction rate which would not be detectable as an obvious increase in the background radiation rate.

So... with those thoughts in mind...

Do you have a numerical estimate for the number of neutrinos that you would have to hit a standard nuclear-weapon core (either uranium or plutonium) with, in order to increase the number of "spontaneous" fissions to the point at which the core would actually approach critical mass without having to be compressed or otherwise triggered in the normal way?

How much tritium (or other neutrino emitter) would you have to use, to deliver the necessary amount of neutrino flux?

How close do the largest and most neutrino-creating-efficient particle accelerators available today, come to delivering the required neutrino luminosity?

I could almost believe that a sufficiently luminous beam of *neutrons* of the proper energy level might be able to push a non-critical mass into a "criticality accident". Actually triggering a high-alpha chain reaction - enough to cause even a small nuclear explosion - seeme unlikely, though (none of the criticality accidents on public record have done this, according to Wiki).

But neutrinos? I really doubt it. The interaction probabilities are many orders of magnitude too low.

If I recall correctly, some calculations have shown that a nearby Type II supernova explosion could put out a strong enough pulse of neutrinos to have very obvious effects at Earth's surface... a visible flash of "ghost light" in our eyes, and a detectable increase in the cancer and mutation rates. But, once again, I believe that the numbers don't add up for the thesis that such a neutrino burst would be anywhere near the density required to cause a criticality accident in chunks of sub-critical fissile material.

Jan Panteltje wrote: : physics.org simple article about this subject: :

Sounds unbelievable, but people seem to be seriously studying the effect and trying to rule out the causes.

: Perturbation of Nuclear Decay Rates During the Solar Flare of 13 December 2006 :

Also published in Astroparticle Physics, it seems. I don't know the journal, but it seems to have the quite respectable 3.8 impact factor. Cited 20 times.

: Analysis of environmental influences in nuclear half-life measurements exhibiting time-dependent decay rates :

This has also gotten published, in NIMA A it seems.

If an observable amount of beta decay time variation were indeed caused by the annual variation of the earth-sun distance, the interplay between the solar neutrinos and decay physics should be extraordinarily strong. Not possible within known physics I would say.

De Meijer et. al. seem to have shown that reactor-produced neutrinos do *not* affect decay times. Fischbach et. al. have analyzed the MESSENGER satellite, with beta-decaying Cs-137 onboard, and with its Earth-Mercury orbit leading to much larger distance-to-sun variation than the annual variation on Earth. Both papers are published in 2011, this all seems to be rather new stuff.

I doubt the effect is real, but intriguing stuff anyway.

Regards, Mikko

Go away, racist idiot.

the anti-neutrinos

You really are a raving loon sometimes. Here is an article from Life Magazine from 1946 detailing the work of the Plutonium lab.

You won't find much info during WWII for obvious reasons. And afterwards who did what and certain key details were deliberately kept hidden to try and prevent other nations obtaining nuclear weapons.

You will have to be a lot more specific if you want to be taken seriously. But for nuclear physics we probably would have had to wait a lot longer for all the rare earth f-block elements to be isolated in pure form. Didymium glass was known to be made with a mixture of two elements for a good while before anyone could chemically separate neodymium and praesodymium. You cannot blame the bomb makers for that.

You can blame them for making it very obscure who discovered what exactly in the nuclear binding energy relationships. Some bits of that are still classified for reasons that escape me. The main trick to making a nuclear device go are now well known and semi working prototype designs could be bought on the black market from "rogue" Pakistan scientists if you were into that sort of thing and well funded. Iran and North Korea were good customers of his. The latter now demonstrably has the bomb so we can deduce that the plans are viable.

Very tricky ally to have is Pakistan.

On a sunny day (Fri, 18 Nov 2011 13:34:04 -0800) it happened snipped-for-privacy@radagast.org (Dave Platt) wrote in :

I don't know the answer to all your questions, but I will try the experiment I described. It will have to have a big effect for me to even acknowledge I see something. And then I will take it from there (or not if I see nothing).

The experimenting is just fun in itself, maybe there will be some other effect. like the time warp side effect I found in some other experiment. It is all learning.

On a sunny day (Fri, 18 Nov 2011 19:01:48 -0800) it happened Hellequin wrote in :

VOTE WHITE HOUSE CAST YOUR WHITE HOUSE VOTE

LOL

On a sunny day (Fri, 18 Nov 2011 08:04:20 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

I want to add to that: If Los Alamos made a public statement that tomorrow would be a clear sunshiny day, then I would make sure I packed an umbrella. If they made that statement TWICE, then I would look up the price of rubber boats on the web. If they made that statement a third time, I would go re-read the bible about Noa's Ark.

Do you remember red-mercury? They send this poor guy, who was presented as 'one of the inventors of the atomic bomb', all over the world, and he appeared here on TV spelling out the extreme dangers or 'red mercury'. Honey pot (attracts terrorists), so every terrorist would now ask for 'red mercury'. LOL Dunno if that poor guy was involved in any bomb related research, probably was a janitor blackmailed into playing the puppet on a string part.

So, let's write a book how to exactly make the bomb..??? ??? And we execute Rosenberg (was that not his name) for telling the Russians about it?

What have you been smoking lately?

I remember this Dutch finance minister, who went top the US, got offered some job in banking IIRC.

The reporter kept asking him: Will interest rates go up? He replied 'Yes interest rates will go up, a lot' (3 times). I looked at my software and thought: 'no way'.

Puppet on a string, and the strings became so visible. Same sort of show.

Spoils the show if you can see the strings so well does it not? Some buy the puppet show however.

That little green guy in Star Wars was very popular too.

On a sunny day (Sat, 19 Nov 2011 09:31:40 +0000) it happened Martin Brown wrote in :

Should that surprise us? :-) LOL

the anti-neutrinos

Actually, yes.

John