Halving Half Lives 406
An anonymous reader writes "PhysicsWeb is reporting that German scientists may have found a way to significantly reduce the radioactive decay time of nuclear waste. This could render the waste harmless in just tens of years and make disposal much less difficult as opposed to current standards. From the article: 'Their proposed technique - which involves slashing the half-life of an alpha emitter by embedding it in a metal and cooling the metal to a few degrees kelvin - could therefore avoid the need to bury nuclear waste in deep repositories, a hugely expensive and politically difficult process. But other researchers are skeptical and believe that the technique contradicts well-established theory as well as experiment.'"
This requires not storing in insulators? (Score:2)
It states that this occurs also when the device is stored in metal instead of an insulator.
Wouldn't this cause a larger issue with potential radioactive containment?
Re:This requires not storing in insulators? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This requires not storing in insulators? (Score:3, Informative)
why bury it all? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:why bury it all? (Score:5, Funny)
On the bright side, it would seriously reduce the lobbying strength of the AARP.
Re:why bury it all? (Score:5, Informative)
they took this container, put it into a rocket that was on it' side, and then launched it into a specially designed bunker.i.e a real think ass wall.
the container survived without a leak.
It is much easier to create a device that will survive a traunmatic event then it is to create one for people.
They could just send it down to the Mariennes trench. Naturally people with no knowledge of radiation, or the trench would complain about it.
Re:why bury it all? (Score:5, Funny)
The Marianas Trench [wikipedia.org]? Are you insane, man? Don't you remember what happened [imdb.com] last time we dumped nukes in the Pacific?
Re:why bury it all? (Score:2)
We culd always use Gojira to help us in our fight against terrorists.
Re:why bury it all? (Score:2)
Not the trench, though (Score:5, Informative)
Also, subduction zones aren't particularly stable and predictable, so the waste would likely spew about rather than being neatly sucked away. There was an article on New Scientist [newscientist.com] about this.
Re:why bury it all? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:why bury it all? (Score:5, Interesting)
Even the old crap we built 30 years ago is still pretty safe and pretty good. And the tech has only gotten better... while at the same time the coal stuff (though a better) is still poisoning the planet. Nuclear power = Green power.
Re:why bury it all? (Score:2)
the container was to be used to put radioactive material in space to be used for spacecraft fuel.
of course, peoples reaction to the sensialist reporting of radiation put that to an end. So now we have cool ion drives.
slow, slow ion drives.
Re:why bury it all? (Score:2)
There's way too much waste (Score:5, Informative)
Re:There's way too much waste (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:There's way too much waste (Score:3, Funny)
You could build a nuclear reactor to power the waste disposal facility.
Re:why bury it all? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikipedia disagrees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Space_
Re:why bury it all? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:why bury it all? (Score:2)
ICBMS are a complelty different animal and can't escape the earths gravity. In fact they are designed to be shot at a point in orbit and gravity does the rest.
Re:why bury it all? (Score:5, Interesting)
Your numbers are a bit off. A single Delta IV Heavy rocket can carry about 28,000 pounds to GTO, or about 20,000 to escape orbit, at a cost of around $250 million.
much harder than you think (Score:3, Insightful)
To really get rid of it by dropping it in the sun will require you to cancel out its orbital velocity relative to the sun, 66,000mph! You could reduce that so
Re:why bury it all? (Score:4, Insightful)
Keep in mind that you aren't going to load up a rocket to full capacity with nuclear waste. You need to contain it somehow, preferably in multiple boxes that will protect it in case of an accident on launch (or at least until it escapes Earth's gravity and the Sun's gravity takes over). Even then you're better off not loading it to capacity anyway, to make very sure you have enough lift and fuel to achieve its mission.
Also keep in mind that as far as I know all of our launch vehicles are designed to carry payloads into orbit, not all the way to the sun. Yes, we launch stuff to Mars and other planets, but not to the Sun. We would have to design and test a launch vehicle (even if just a second stage vehicle that would go from orbit to the Sun) specifically for the task at hand.
Finally, we have a large backlog of waste material that needs to go as well. This means more rockets to get the job done, which means more money. This also assumes we can't recycle some of the waste, which is a very real possibility.
Re:why bury it all? (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, I think throwing the stuff away is foolish. We need to store it in case we come up with a way to reuse it.
Re:why bury it all? (Score:3, Informative)
The sun's gravity is counteracted by the orbital velocity of the earth, from which said rocket is launched. It can't be counted on for a single erg.
Re:why bury it all? (Score:4, Informative)
No, because it's still carrying the Earth's velocity in orbit around the Sun with it. All launching it as greater than escape velocity means is that it won't go into orbit around the Earth; instead it will settle into another orbit around the Sun. If we launch it sunward, this orbit will tend to be somewhat tighter than Earth's -- but not a whole lot, and it will also be somewhat eccentric, which means there's a good chance of it intersecting Earth's orbit at some point in the future. Congratulations! You've solved the nuclear waste burial problem, and replaced it with the nuclear waste meteorite problem.
Re:why bury it all? (Score:4, Informative)
I have every confidence that the NASA guys could get a payload to the sun. It actually only takes high school physics (well, it also takes state-of-the-art engineering).
The problem is cost. You have to generate a delta-V of approximately the Earth's orbital velocity - that is 30 km/s. The parent post suggested that the Sun would do most of the work. This is incorrect - the sun will only do work once the craft has no solar orbital velocity - then it will just fall straight down into the sun. The real work is getting rid of 30 km/s of orbital velocity - if you don't do that the waste will just orbit the sun very close to the earth, and sooner or later it will come back (even if it had escape velocity - that just gets it out of earth's orbit - if it swings around the sun a few times and comes back at us it will still re-enter earth orbit).
The problem is trivial to surmount - you just need a really big rocket. But then again, keeping the waste on earth just needs a really big hole in the ground. The only real decision is which engineering project is more expensive or risky - and most likely it will turn out to be the hole in the ground.
Slingshotting it around a few times is not really a great solution - you still need a ton of energy to get to anything to slingshot off in the first place. The other problem is launch windows - if you want to do multiple slingshots then you have to be really patient for a window. The craft will also need a lot of course corrections - if you're going to launch thousands of waste containers that is a lot of manpower to keep them all on course (unless you just want to drop them on Venus - but even that needs accuracy if you don't want to risk slingshotting it back into solar orbit near the earth). So, maybe with some fancy slingshotting you might only need 15-20 km/s of delta-V - that is still a lot of impulse. The Saturn-V was good for about 7.5GNs - so that is good for about 300 metric tons of payload if you only need 15 km/s (plus escape velocity). Well, that is actually a major overestimate - it doesn't factor in the weight of the rocket itself (which is an exercise in calculus which I'm not bored enough to do). It certainly can be done, but you're talking about a lot of HUGE rockets.
All in all, the hole in the ground is probably the best bet.
Re:why bury it all? (Score:2)
Who modded parent offtopic???
Re: why bury it all? (Score:3, Funny)
If we pollute the sun we'll really be in trouble!
Re:why bury it all? (Score:3, Insightful)
Aside from the risks and costs of such a venture, here's an even more important question? How do we know that dumping material into the sun might not somehow affect the sun in some way?
Granted, it seems crazy to imagine it might, but who knows? I don't know if we have a lot of experimental data on the subject. If dumping heavy radioactive elements into the sun *did* have some long-term effect, it seems we'd be about as screwed as we could possibly be.
We mi
Re:why bury it all? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now as to the effect of dropping waste into the sun, consider both it's size and age. Radioactives are not that uncommon in space, and the sun is an awfully large target. Over 4 billion years, how much uranium do you suppose it's swept up? Hell, during the earlier days of the solar system, it's likely that entire planetary masses fell into the star. These things happen when a system forms. If a "stupid sci-fi apocolypse" scenario was going to happen, it would have done so already.
It's similar to the arguement that particle colliders could create black holes. Given that the same type of reactions occur naturally in the upper atmosphere as they do in a collider, we'd expect miniature black holes to form repeatedly over billions of years. The fact that none have destroyed the planet yet is strong evidence that it won't happen - and our current theories surrounding Hawking radiation says it can't happen anyways.
Remember that all the damage mankind has done to our home throughout history (pre and post industrial) has been climatic or ecological. These systems are delicate and respond strongly to even fairly minor human input, such as importing species into an evironment that they aren't native to. It's also worth remembering that climate change and mass extinctions have happened before; these kinds of destruction did not begin with human civilization, we've merely done more damage in a shorter time frame. In other words, we're effecienty destructive, but the type of damage we've caused isn't novel.
Stuff like igniting the atmosphere and other doomsday scenarios capture our imagination, but are massively implausable. Nuclear weapons are merely the most powerful weapon made to date; far more powerful explosions have occured in the past due to asteroidal collisions. The fear was unfounded then, but was taken seriously nonetheless.
We've seen the amount of damage we can do to the biosphere, and thereby overestimate just how much harm we can do to other pre-existing systems.
If a doomsday scenario can happen naturally, then I will worry about it happening accidentally due to human error (a good example would be anti-biotic resistant bacteria, or global warming). If it can happen due to human malice, then I will likewise worry (nuclear war comes to mind). If it can't happen accidentally, or should already have happened without our help, then I wouldn't worry about it.
Re:why bury it all? (Score:3, Insightful)
Only a person who:
A) Has no idea how heavy uranium is
B) Has no idea how much fuel it takes to put even a pound into orbit
C) Doesn't understand sheer idiocy of strapping a large amount of radioactive matter to a gaint fuel tank
would suggest such an idea.
(It's not that I'm calling the poster stupid. Just his idea. It's like a man who knows nothing about electricity asking why you can't stick a fork in a wall outlet.)
The idea is deeply flawed on man
Re:why bury it all? (Score:3, Interesting)
The cheapest safe approach to space disposal i
Um (Score:4, Insightful)
In order to get the radiation down to safe levels, you have to out-radiate everything up to that level. Same radiation, doesn't matter if it takes the normal amount of time or less.
Re:Um (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Um (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Um (Score:2)
Meanwhile, you are going to be releasing a fair amount of energy doing it this quickly.
I've also heard about methods that focus on bombarding the substance with more radiation, a sort of 'tipping the scales' type operation.
Re:Um (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, the temperature of the storage device poses a major problem (if we have to supercool it, then harnessing the radiation as a heat source is right out). Assuming we can't do this at a higher temperature, and I don't understand the article well enough to make a guess here, then we'd have to find a way to convert the energy output of the waste into usable power without heating the storage vessel to the point where the accelerated half life drops back to normal.
I wonder if there is some way to allow the radiation to escape the waste storage vessel and transfer it's energy into something useful...
Re:Um (Score:5, Insightful)
It is easy to shield high level waste. Water will work just fine. If you only have to store it for a few years then it really becomes a simple problem.
The sad thing is I doubt that this could work they way the say it will. It really needs to be tested.
I could understand if they used a good neutron emitter like beryllium. When an Alpha particle hits that you get neutrons. The neutrons could then cause an increase in decay type reactions, if it was captured by a nuclei of the the substance that you wanted to degrade. Even that is a big maybe since I am just thinking of ways it could work without doing any math.
Even then it seems like you wouldn't get anything like what this guy is claiming.
1-100 Years of Liquid Helium vs. 1600 years (Score:2)
Re:1-100 Years of Liquid Helium vs. 1600 years (Score:2)
True, but if you cut the storage time by something in the middle, say 20 to 60 years (within the scope of the claims) then you are not looking at storage facilities, but management facilities, whereby you are moving out older, safe material to bring in fresh waste. This means a permanant structure and constant monitoring, something that salt mines don't necessarily h
Re:Um (Score:5, Informative)
My question about doing this on a large scale, is how are you going to keep this much material cool enough to reduce the half life assuming that this works in the first place? Alpha emission of transuranics has around 6.5 MeV of energy per particle, which translates into a large amount of heat for not so large amounts of material. The coolant material to waste ratio would be enormous! Also, the refrigerant energy to do this would probably render the entire process even more inefficient than the current idea of reprocessing (remember that reprocessing has lots of particularly nasty chemicals associated in large quantities). Since alpha emitting isotopes are neutron rich, meaning they are either fissile or fissionable, they can be used as fuel. Why destroy fuel when you can burn it? At worst, continue MOX reprocessing as is currently done. At best, fuel some RTG's for space exploration. In my mind, this type of research is "neat" at best, but if the purpose is trying to force schrodinger's cat back into the bag, they can forget it now that global warming is becoming a hot issue with nuclear power the sole possibility for continuing the current growth rate of electricity demand (way too many puns there, I apologize).
Re:Um (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Um (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not completely sure what you mean, but if you want to extract the radiation energy from the cooled atoms it's impossible. Alpha particles will give off all their kinetic energy within micrometers and there's no way to stop it from heating the alloy. (Which you want to keep cold or the effect will stop).
If it had been neutrons it might have worked - they can often penetrate several meters through the right substances, and it should be possible to set up neutron-stopping elements inside some system wher
Re:Um (Score:3, Insightful)
Two words: "Breeder Reactor" (Score:3, Informative)
"Use of a breeder reactor assumes nuclear reprocessing of the breeder blanket at least, without which the concept is meaningless. In practice, all proposed breeder reactor programs involve reprocessing of the fuel elements as well. This is important due to nuclear weapons proliferation concerns, as any nation conducting reprocessing using the traditional aqueous-based PUREX family of reprocess
Re:Um (Score:2)
Re:Um (Score:3, Informative)
Gamma would do next to nothing.
Alpha not to much.
beta I am not sure about.
neutron is the problem but then you would tend to get deuterium and maybe some tritium.
deuterium is harmless as acts as a moderator and tritium is very useful and has a very short half-life of around 11 years.
Re:Um (Score:3, Informative)
It depends on the kind of radiation, if it receive gamma radiation, it will become hot or even ionize. It may gather electrical charge (and beccome hot) from betta radiation. Alpha radiation may convert tiny amounts of it into lithium 5 or magnesium 20 that would almost instantameous (I'm not sure the latter one would even happen) decay by betta or neutron emissions, but since the material would probably encapsulated, the alpha radiation would never reach the water. Or it can change into hidrogen 2 (quite s
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Um (Score:2)
What an interesting idea. Use this process to create managable energy.
I am intreged.
Re:Um (Score:2, Insightful)
There is no panacea and I doubt this is one. Any material to shield radioactivity will also become radioactive. Heck, even fusion isn't completely clean, I think one of the project goals of ITER is to find ways to manage the radioactivity of the components for when it is dismantled.
Re:Um (Score:2)
What a bullshit statement. It completely depends on many things, such as the products of radioactive decay for the element/isotope combo you are talking about, and to simplify it into that all encompasing statement is meaningless.
Re:Um (Score:4, Informative)
The real risk is some of the (radioactive) material getting stuck on the containers. I'm sure that's far more manageable than all of the original waste.
Re:Um (Score:3, Informative)
You forgot neutrons.
Neutron activation [wikipedia.org].
Re:Um (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right. But (as other posters have said) it is [probably] a good tradeoff. In my laboratory, we use ozone to purify water (read: kill bad things therein). It's nasty stuff, but it's so reactive (therefore lethal to buggies) that it disappears really fast. We used to use chlorine, which wasn't nearly so nasty, but which stuck around for much, much longer than the ozone. If you can deal with the reactivity during the worst of the reaction (at the very beginning), then you're pretty much home-free. Constant exposure to low-level chemicals (or radioactivity) which you might not know about is most likely much worse than very quick exposure to high levels of the same stuff which you DO know about.
Re:Um (Score:3, Interesting)
And from Wikipedia:
There is a great deal of evidence to show that ozone at the earth's surface can harm lung function and irritate the respiratory system. Ozone has been found to convert cholesterol in the blood stream to plaque (which causes hardening and narrowing of arteries). This cholesterol product has also been implicated in Alzheimer's disease, suggesting a link between the inflammatory response associated with head injury and Alzheimer's. Air q
Re:Um (Score:2)
If we can reliably shield the radiation released by the high-speed decay, then we can dispose of waste in a maintainable facility over a few decades -- we can monitor the facility, make repairs, transfer waste from a damaged container to a new one, etc. -- instead of trying to build something and hope it doesn't leak over the next 1600 years.
So while the danger posed by a containment failure is greater (since more radiation
Re:Um (Score:5, Funny)
Actually it matters quite a bit. There are plenty [wikipedia.org] of places [wikipedia.org] where all that radiation would be hardly noticed, and if the timescale is lessened to something managable by today's governments, we will be able to avoid the monumental task of warning future generations [doe.gov].
I'd say that's quite a big win, if this pans out.
Re:Um (Score:5, Insightful)
I just think it's a shame the Integral Fast Reactor project got canned back in Clinton's day. If it hadn't been shut down, maybe nuclear waste wouldn't be nearly as huge a problem now...
Half the half-life? Super! (Score:3, Funny)
Kerning (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Kerning (Score:2)
No, their government allows them working models.
We aren't allowed nuclear reactors here so we are falling massively behind. But at least it's safe... for the children.
Except for the bears that is.
Re:Kerning (Score:2)
Or are you posting from Iran?
Re:Kerning (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy: General education level, good science classes in high school, social image/reputation of science and scientists, and an absence of religious bias against science.
Niels Bohr was Danish, FWIW.
Re:Kerning (Score:2)
Re:Kerning (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Kerning (Score:4, Informative)
They spend a lot of money on nuclear physics. It's the same reason why the United States has such great computing research compared to its population.
Re:Kerning (Score:2, Informative)
On the other side: Beer might help...
I'm not sure about the working models that feepness mentioned either. Nuclear radiation is only allowed to gain energy and for medical reasons, no warfare whatsoever, so I guess there are lots of countries with more possibilities to explore nuclear energy.
And a couple of years ago our government even decided to shut down all
Re:Kerning QWZX (Score:2)
"German" is not a race, no matter how nazi your brain.
The whole notion of distinct "races" is contrived. Even skin colors aren't that neat, which is what we usually reduce "race" to. Our species family tree is very interwoven, and overall differences are superficial.
Besides, "brain capacity" doesn't equate to "nuclear engineering". It's an academic tradition, or some cultura
Re:Kerning QWZX (Score:3, Insightful)
"Eugenics" isn't a theory. It can't be "disproven". It's a political pseudoscience.
Affirmat
We cool it to a few degrees Kelvin... (Score:5, Funny)
"How do you power your cooling process?"
"With that nulcear power plant in the next town over."
Re:man, that old lie (Score:3, Insightful)
Woah, slow down... competition for silicon??? While it is true that silicon prices are high, it has nothing to do with the computer industry - in fact, silicon prices have dropped tremendously due to the massive scale with which it is produced. If not for consumer electronics, they probably never would have built these multi-billion dollar fabs that produce these new gigantic wafers. You'd still be using the little tiny wafers that they used in the 60's, and solar technology would still be priced out of ev
How long? (Score:3, Interesting)
-matthew
Doubling halve life (Score:3, Informative)
And also, first we need to build a fusion reactor to have energy to cool that shit.
Energy-balance? (Score:4, Insightful)
I had a system (Score:2, Interesting)
Does that count?
One problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Even if this works, it will be tough. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Even if this works, it will be tough. (Score:3, Funny)
It All Makes Sense... (Score:2, Funny)
Joules in - Joules Out (Score:3, Insightful)
Nuclear energy is roughly as follows: Ore is mined -> ore is refined -> Energy is extracted from fuel -> Spent fuel is prepared and kept in a single degree kelvin fridge for several years. -> Safe spent fuel is disposed
How many Joules does it take to keep the spent fuel at that low temperature for so long as compared to the energy extracted? Is there an orders-of-magnitude difference?
Advantages to gaming (Score:2, Funny)
What a waste (Score:5, Interesting)
We can achieve the same goal by allowing the reprocessing of nuclear "waste". PBS had a good interview [pbs.org] on the subject, which mentions that power generating reactors are only permitted [pbs.org] to extract less than 1 percent of the energy. This is what leaves the "waste" highly radioactive.
I keep putting the word waste in quotes, because it's more like a nuclear fuel reserve than an unusable energy source. Use all the energy, and the half-life of what's left is a few decades.
Re:What a waste (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the USA isn't (yet) using this technology, but the Chinese are [wired.com]. Even Toshiba [nukku.net] has one of these super-safe "pre-fab" tiny reactors, that are intended for distributed use. By distributing power generation, you eliminate many of the grid effects (like blacking out a significant portion of the country when there's a problem). Oh, and as a byproduct, you also get a plentiful supply of hydrogen. It's a crime that instead we are burning coal - releasing more "natural" radioactivity than any reactor ever has, as well as poisoning our seafood with mercury [ornl.gov].
I don't understand your response... (Score:3, Informative)
Your post talks about prefab reactors, like the French have been using for years and are improved further (it seems) with pebble-bed designs. These are not breeder reactors.
Also, the US has used breeder reactors. Fermi 1 even operated for a short time as a commercial breeder reactor.
Why do you turn one thing into another?
Toshiba's design uses liquid sodium as a co
Re:What a waste (Score:3, Informative)
Coal contains about 3ppm of uranium. Ordinary soil contains about 1.8ppm of uranium [speclab.com]. Coal may be an enviornmental disaster due to its chemical and kinematic properties, but a radioactive pollutant it is not.
Re:What a waste (Score:3, Informative)
That's great when the coal is unburned. Once you burn away the organics, the remaining ash (10% coal weight, typically) is around 30ppm. Even if you aren't concerned about the fact that at least a small percentage of particulates make it past the scrubbers resulting in higher ambient radiation directly
I thought this was about fast reactors (Score:5, Informative)
Pity about 'nuclear dampers' (Score:2)
It was supposed to increase or decrease decay of nuclear materials -- at a distance.
A fun use of such a device is to neutralise an enemies nuclear arsenal and then starting a war with them. They then fire their nukes which does... nothing much at all.
If only we could have these in the real world.
Or at least a bio-engineered organism that eats black powder...
wait for the real fallout (Score:4, Interesting)
Too Expensive to Measure (Score:4, Insightful)
But there's scientific hope for better engineering that could change that. The extra energy more quickly removed from the spent fuel in this process could possibly be harnessed. That would mean that nuclear fuel not only is made safe in manageable durations, like less than a century, but more of its potential energy is available right away, or during the lifetime of its "soft landing". The combination of greater efficiency and closed-ended management does transform at least that part of nuclear's currently unacceptable cost basis.
As long as we're redesigning these reactions, we should do it all in space. There's plenty of microtemperatures out there; microgravity can make operations more energy efficient; security is less fuzzy; accidents have less exposure to vulnerable facilities, ecosystems and organisisms. It's still risky and expensive transporting fuel out of Earth's gravity well, but that's a lot more addressable by failsafe engineering than terrestrial proliferation.
watch those beta electron emitters (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, the effect on beta electron emitters could turn out to be even more useful. Using this effect to dispose of alpha emitters is a problem because the decay process emits heat, but you could use the same phenomenon to preserve your 12-year-half-life tritium, since you're suppressing the process that would be heating it up.
not plausible (Score:5, Informative)
- fission
- alpha emission
- electron emission
- positron emission
- electron capture
(I don't include gamma emission, because, although it does occur frequently in the aftermath of one of the types of decay above, it generally has a very short half-life, so it typically doesn't affect the time it takes for an entire decay chain to go.) Processes 1-4 are all purely nuclear, and don't depend in any way on the surrounding electrons. Process 5 does depend on the surrounding electrons, and, e.g., can't occur in an atom that's been completely ionized down to the bare nucleus. However, when it does occur, the electron that gets captured, with extremely high probability, is one of the ones in the innermost electron shells (known as the K shell in nuclear physics). That's because the K-shell electrons are the ones whose wavefunctions overlap the nucleus the most strongly. If you embed the atom in metal, or cool the substance it's embedded in, it has very, very little effect on the K-shell electrons. The electrons in the surrounding substance aren't going to get into the act, either, basically because of the Pauli exclusion principle.breeder reactors (Score:3, Informative)
Even if we could dispose of the current high-level radioactive waste using this technique, it would still be irresponsible. Non-breeder reactors use only a tiny fraction of the energy stored in the nuclear fuel and throw away the rest, and that's an unacceptable waste.
Re:Um, no (Score:2)
Guess what? The quote above is from the actual article and would have told you that your post was irrelevant. Closer free electrons = more strong/weak nuclear interaction.
Re:dumber than an arkansas hound dog, these guys (Score:2, Redundant)
Re:dumber than an arkansas hound dog, these guys (Score:2, Informative)
Why is this modded informative? Has the poster or the moderator actually done this experiment? Have they even Read the Fine Article?
d00d! (Score:5, Insightful)
FYI, radioactive decay isn't caused by thermal energy. Notice the lack of a term for temperature in the relevant equations [wikipedia.org].
> how does some of what passes for scientific papers get accepted, anyway? box tops? there's a lot of stuff that the mass media picks up on and publicizes that just can't stand the smell test.
One might ask a similar question about Slashdot moderation.
Problem from Maxwell's Equations (Score:3, Insightful)
Furthermore, charges aren't polarized-- fields are. Aren't you trying to set up some kind of polarized electric (or magnetic-- you say a material is polarizable, which seems to indicate magnetism) field?