Historical research guide · 0876 · 2018
Isotopic and Elemental Composition of Substance in Nickel–Hydrogen Heat Generators
K. A. Alabin · S. N. Andreev · A. G. Sobolev · S. N. Zabavin · A. G. Parkhomov · T. R. Timerbulatov
In one minute
Alexander Parkhomov’s team, working with physicists from three Russian Academy of Sciences institutes, opened four of their own nickel–hydrogen heat generators and sent the contents out for analysis. The reactors — named AP2, Protok-6, VV3 and KV3 — ran from six days to six weeks and produced between about 100 and 790 megajoules of heat beyond what they were fed, one of them measured on a flowing-water calorimeter good to better than three per cent. The question the paper asks is what the substance inside looks like afterwards. The answer comes in two halves. The isotope ratios of nickel and lithium came back close to natural, with one exception: an Uppsala University analysis of the AP2 fuel in which the lighter lithium isotope more than doubled. The elements themselves, though, changed a great deal, and not only in the fuel — boron, cerium, copper and a long list of nuclides appeared in the ceramic tube and in the powder that collected around the core.
Connection
Chapter 12 is about what happens inside a loaded metal lattice when hydrogen is driven into it, and this paper is one of the few in that literature that treats the after-the-run analysis as the experiment rather than an afterthought. It also gives chapter 1 a working example of the evidence ladder in use: the authors calculate in advance how much excess energy a reactor must release before an isotope shift could even be seen, then measure against that line and report what fell on each side of it.
From the source
Before looking at any sample, the authors set the detection threshold: because releasing one megajoule through a proton capture on nickel consumes only about six times ten to the seventeenth nuclei, the appearance of isotopes absent from the initial fuel becomes detectable at roughly one megajoule per gram of fuel, while shifting the ratio of isotopes already present far enough for a conventional mass spectrometer to resolve it takes excess energy above one hundred megajoules per gram. That line explains why Alan Goldwater’s careful analysis of the GS3 reactor, at about fifty megajoules per gram, found no isotope change, and why the Lugano test at 5,800 megajoules per gram would have been well past it.Section 2, Estimation of Possible Changes in the Isotopic Composition of Fuel
Four reactors of different designs were run and analysed, with integrated excess energy from about one hundred to 790 megajoules: AP2 with 640 milligrams of nickel and 60 milligrams of lithium aluminium hydride, about 150 megajoules over six days; Protok-6, measured on a flowing-water calorimeter with an error better than three per cent, holding excess power between 20 and 65 watts for seven weeks for about 100 megajoules; VV3 at up to 330 watts for 790 megajoules; and KV3, loaded with 1.8 grams of nickel powder and no lithium aluminium hydride at all, hydrogenated from the gas phase, at 100 to 200 watts for about 400 megajoules.Sections 3 to 6
Across all four reactors the isotopic composition of nickel came back close to the natural ratio and differed only slightly between samples, and the increase in the nickel-62 fraction reported from the Lugano test was not seen in any sample here — which the authors attribute to the Lugano excess energy production being about sixty times greater than in these runs. Lithium could not be measured reliably after the runs because its concentration in spent fuel fell below about one part in ten thousand.Section 4, Table 3; Section 5, Table 5; Section 6, Table 8; Conclusion 2
One analysis stands apart and the authors publish it rather than setting it aside: an ICP-MS measurement of AP2 spent fuel at Uppsala University showed the lithium-6 fraction rising from 7.4 to 15.4 per cent and noticeable shifts in the nickel isotope ratios, while the Vernadsky Institute’s measurement of the same reactor’s fuel showed the lithium-6 change only within measurement error. The team’s own reading is that the change may be distributed unevenly through the sample volume, and that low lithium concentration makes the measurement hard.Section 3, Table 1
The elemental picture changed far more than the isotopic one, and it changed outside the fuel as well as inside it: boron rose sharply, along with nuclides at atomic masses 43 to 53, 64 to 83, 107 to 130 and 198 to 208 in the ceramic tube that held the fuel, while the powder that accumulated between the inner and outer tubes carried 6.3 per cent cerium-140 against a starting fuel content below one part in a million, plus iron, sodium, potassium, silicon, calcium, scandium and a great deal of tungsten.Section 4; Section 6, Table 7; Conclusions 3 and 4
The authors separate what migration can explain from what it cannot. Tungsten and rhenium plainly come from the heater coil, but at the measured coil temperature of 1,700 degrees Celsius the vapour pressure of tungsten is below ten to the minus tenth pascals — far too low for evaporation and condensation to move that much metal — so more complex processes involving hydrogen must be at work. And cobalt, cerium, gallium, germanium, arsenic, selenium, cadmium and tellurium appeared in quantity while being virtually absent from both fuel and structural materials. The KV3 fuel gained about twenty milligrams of copper, which two proton captures on nickel-62 and nickel-64 would produce along with about 200 megajoules — consistent with that reactor’s 400 megajoule excess, although the isotope shift those reactions predict falls inside the measurement error.Section 7, Discussion, Eqs. 3 and 4
The way in
https://doi.org/10.70923/001c.72467How to cite it
K. A. Alabin, S. N. Andreev, A. G. Sobolev, S. N. Zabavin, A. G. Parkhomov, T. R. Timerbulatov (2018) Isotopic and Elemental Composition of Substance in Nickel–Hydrogen Heat Generators doi:10.70923/001c.72467