Nextbigfuture: LENR= Stripping Reaction from Nickel Isotope

[olivier]

Um, I thought Ni64 was a stable isotope.

Sure it is. It is the Ni65 produced by the neutron capture which is short-lived.

[Skipjack]

My source was Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_nickel

This article says:

Nickel-64 is another isotope of nickel. Possible sources include beta decay from cobalt-64, and electron capture from copper-64

Your source looks a lot more credible, Dan. So I guess Wikipedia is wrong (that happens). In this case this is good.
According to your link roughly 1% of the Nickel on this planet is Ni64.
That also means that at a price of roughly 10,000 USD per ton of Nickel, you get 10 KG of Ni64 for 10k USD. Or 1000 USD per Kg.
That is waaaaaay less than the 100k for 5 grams, that you listed Dan.
Ist the price of extraction of the Ni64 from the rest of the Ni, really so high?
What if it does not have to be 100% pure? I would guess that the price will go down rapidly (exponentially?) the less pure it needs to be?

[Axil]

In the advancement of human knowledge, if the Ni64 transmutation via LENR proves true, it will be a great step forward in broader understanding of obscure nuclear processes. But its impact on world energy production will be minimal. Burning U238 will still be king of the heap.

Some day when natural copper becomes rare and is hard to extract for the earth, Ni64 transmutation might be worth something economically. On the other hand, turning lead into gold might be very attractive for jewelry production but would be real bad for the gold market.

Making Ni60 cheaply would be great boon for both the fusion and fission energy reactor sector because of its resistance to alpha radiation damage.

[nextbigfuture]

http://isotope.info/wp-content/uploads/ ... ts-use.pdf

Seems like centrifuges or laser enrichment is needed.

Should be somewhat easier because of the greater mass differential between nickel 64 and nickel 58 and nickel 60.

I only talked about the cost of the enriched stuff because of the tests needed to prove the theory.

There is no indication that there is reason to go there to apply the energy generation. Unless there was some application say for space where you wanted to get rid of the extra weight of extra nickel that is not actively doing stuff. If the enriched stuff worked a lot better for some reason then there could be a reason to go there.

I guess I should have left that part out since it is confusing the basic premises.

Nickel 64 is about 1% of regular Nickel and a theory is that is the basis of reactions for many types of LENR. This should produce some detectable and veriable things if true. The reactions are subtle enough that they were not obvious before. They seem to fit with several important experimental LENR results. Not all LENR involve nickel but several very interesting ones do.

[chrismb]

Given that nickel-62 is the lowest of all isotopes in nuclear energy, I am surprised that its close buddy nickel-64 would give up much energy. The best that nickel-64 could do is to end up having lost 2 neutrons.

However, I have always poo-poo-ed any notion of cold fusion of deuterium but I have no reason to doubt (and have gone so far as to suggest) some 'activation-fission' process. Fission happens at any temp, so why not... but nickel-64 would surprise me as a candidate in that process.

[D Tibbets]

My source was Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_nickel

This article says:

Nickel-64 is another isotope of nickel. Possible sources include beta decay from cobalt-64, and electron capture from copper-64

Your source looks a lot more credible, Dan. So I guess Wikipedia is wrong (that happens). In this case this is good.
According to your link roughly 1% of the Nickel on this planet is Ni64.
That also means that at a price of roughly 10,000 USD per ton of Nickel, you get 10 KG of Ni64 for 10k USD. Or 1000 USD per Kg.
That is waaaaaay less than the 100k for 5 grams, that you listed Dan.
Ist the price of extraction of the Ni64 from the rest of the Ni, really so high?
What if it does not have to be 100% pure? I would guess that the price will go down rapidly (exponentially?) the less pure it needs to be?

The Wikipedia article is misleading. I assume it can be produced by the reactions mentioned, but they neglected to say that it makes up 1% of natural nickel. The cost of purified nickel64 is presumably due to the difficulty of separating it from the rest of the nickel, not it's abundance. I'm guessing there is not much demand for it, so there may be significant room for cost improvement with mass production. Also, as mentioned, the purity may only need to be pushed a certain amount to obtain some desired energy density. EG: 1-2% for a hand warmer, 20% for an off grid power plant, 80% for a satallite or interplanetary probe.

Dan Tibbets