[NewCandle] now here's a curious thing

[Nick Reiter]

Hi all, 

I have something I need a brain or two to help me pick apart.  But it comes at the price of a backstory.

A couple of weeks ago, I had described the proposed experiment Sam Faile and I had designed, as one last test of the Casimir cavity foil roll hydrolysis LENR idea.  In this one, we had propsed to use a salt that was at least in part doped with a radioactive compound, such as the uranyl carbonate that had been described in a recipe format on United Nuclear's web page.  No longer having an EDS at my disposal, the proposed metric for seeing whether some low energy or anomalous nuclear alteration was occuring was to monitor the bubble bucket as the hydrolysis proceeded, using a Geiger counter.  If something dramatic was seen by the counter, it could (and would) still be possible to line up some EDS or ICP although at a price.

The experiment was delayed a bit, and eventually has proceeded (carefully) as a plan B version.

I had ordered some mid-grade ore from U-N, which I received in the mail with no ado.  I handed it off to a colleague with a ball mill, who proceeded to begin crushing it down in a wet slurry, for safety sake.  In the meantime, I went back to U-N's web page where the recipe was located, to make sure my written notes were right... and lo! it was gone.  Looks like Bob L. moved his website to another host, but in the process... the recipe page was taken down.  I sent an e-mail off to U-N, but got no reply.

I had a hunch the piece of ore I was having milled would not be enough, so I placed an order for another hunk.  I got confirmation of the order, but nothing since.

Regardless, I got the crushed ore back from my chum, and proceeded to do the extraction using the recipe as I had written it down.  The chemistry was correct, and I got about 800ml of a light yellow solution, however the concentration of U in the compund was paltry - at close range, hardly enough to make the Geiger counter budge above ambient.

Plan B was considered.  I had a jar of (probably 30 year old) uranyl acetate - which is not that water soluble.  However it was soluble enough that I could make a weak aqueous solution that ended up being a good "tracer".

So I made up about 4 liter of the solution and prepped my equipment, tools and safety items.  I added the solution to the bubbler bucket BEFORE adding the aluminum foil rolls, thus allowing me to get a baseline reading, through the long cross-section of the bucket.

When the solution was poured in, and the Geiger counter was allowed to stabilize, I got a nice steady reading of about 250 to 300CPM.  Presumably all gamma or high Xray, as I would not think alpha or beta would go very far in a liquid matrix.

So I began inserting the foil rolls, standing them upright.

As I did so, and noted that the solution was wicking up into the rolls and displacing air in fine bubbles, I observed that the Geiger counter reading began to climb, and stabilized at about 600CPM.

This is the opposite of what I expected - I figured that the mass of aluminum foil would slightly attenuate the CPM on the counter.

Would anyone care to chime in and tell me exactly what artifact I am seeing here?  I have to start by presuming it IS one, of course.  But it is also curious.

Now over the course of the past few days, there HAS been some drift in the CPM - first a little higher, then a little lower, and now back down to around 400 cpm.  Something does seem to be changing, either in the Al to oxide ratio, or due to the hydrolysis bubbling.  Or maybe I am plating out U onto the foil turns.  We will see.

But for now, my bigger puzzlement was the immediate action of the counter when the solution began wicking into the rolls.

Any offerings?

NR