[NewCandle] last of the pixies

[Nick Reiter]

Hello, all,

A quiet fall here so far, hope all are off working on the early projects of winter.

As I had mentioned a few weeks ago, my beloved SEM system was crated and sent across the ocean to balance books for beancounters.  Alas and woe.  I was fortunate to be able to get in a little last EDS work on some possible meteoric specimens for Horace before I had to shut it down...

I also did some 11th hour EDS on one other "pixie reactor" foil (the salted water aluminum foil roll hydrolysis series).  This last, Pixie 22, had a couple of surprises.  The salt used was ferric citrate, about .2M in water.  The hydrolysis was minimal - maybe a half liter of water eventually was consumed, and the erosion of the foil was likewise very slight.  However by this time, we were looking for any last interesting traces of new element species to indicate cavity low energy transmutation, more than winning hydrolysis gas evolution.

On a number of scans I took by EDS, mainly on the inner roll foil surfaces, I found a surprise - lead Pb.  Iron to lead?  Granted, gold would be nicer, but the signal in several places was nearly 1% atomic.  Peaks were quite discernible, and not at energies of summing artifacts.  I'll send one quite interesting plot to Keith shortly.  Probably one of the three or four elmental traces close enough to the boundary of noise level as to be compelling to me.

I have begun the laborious task of compiling the highlights of this year long experiment into a summary report.

One last pixie remains in the bag.... even after EDS capability has departed!

Sam Faile and I had discussed the possibility of using another metric to look for cavity low energy nuclear activity - a radioactive salt and the use of a good Geiger counter to look for anomalous changes in decay rate.

One possibility that presented itself was uranyl tricarbonate, maybe blended with a halogen salt.  However a quick check with the guru of home nuclear, Bob115, indicated that all sales of water soluble radioactive compounds was now NRC regulated.  You can still buy uranium and thorium ore, and thorium alloys, but the water soluble compounds now require NRC registration.

BUT.... bless his pointed UFO retroengineering head, Bob Lazar points out that a fabulous loophole exists in that there is no regulation against making your own water solubles from ore, for personal experiments.  A recipe for making the very compound we were looking for, for our experiment, is on a United Nuclear web page:

http://www.unitednuclear.com/extract.htm

All one needs is baking soda, some sodium carbonate, and crushed uranium ore.  And Bob will cheerfully sell you all you need of the latter.

So thats the approach I have taken.  In the process right now of having the ore chunk I bought ball milled.

We will see what happens!

Best of wishes to all,

nr