Quantum-Nucleonic Reactor / Clean Power

[INRM]

I've heard of this, how does it work? Also, how much power does it produce in comparison to a traditional nuclear reactor, and how long is it's service life compared to a regular nuclear reactor...

INRM

[dacium2007]

From what I remember reading it works like this:

Hafnium has so many particles in the nucleus, that they can actually be said to contain two nucleus'. One has electronics in ground state etc, but the other is 'stable' with electrons actually far above ground state. When hit with x-rays the configuration can be forced to change - re-arranging the nucleus and allowing electrons to fall to lower states, this gives off huge amounts of gamma radiation, its meant to be 50 times more energy. The 'dead' atom that comes out then has a half-life or something like 30 days and breaks down into non-toxic atoms (can't remember reach ones). It has benefits in that it can't go critical as its not a chain reaction and is extremely clean. I don't think it can be used for power on large scale however. I think the only people taking it seriously are NASA and the air force to power planes/space veichles. I believe because you need so many atoms (like tonnes of it) which is expensive and hard to get as it exists only in compounds of very heavy minerals, it doesn't exist anywhere on its own. The power needed to extract it pure, is far to large, thus its only use for something like a battery, where you need a good power source and can spend a huge amount of energy to make the power source, thus the idea to use in plains that fly for weeks and space ships etc.

[Ziggurat]

two issues: first, this isn't an energy source, it's an idea for energy storage. Hf would have to be prepared in a metastable state first, which would cost considerable energy, before that energy could be released. There are only a few applications where storage density concerns really outweigh costs sufficiently to justify something like this even if it worked. Sattelites are one such application. Electric power generation for power grids is absolutely, positively, indubitably NOT one of them.

Second, there's considerable controversy over whether or not the proposed mechanism works at all in Hafnium.