jwm@stdc.jhuapl.edu (Jim Meritt) (08/26/88)
In article <6413@ihlpl.ATT.COM> knudsen@ihlpl.ATT.COM (Knudsen) writes: }In article <1073@cfa183.cfa250.harvard.edu>, willner@cfa250.harvard.edu (Steve Willner P-316 x57123) writes: } }> Speculating on the economics of advanced societies is a dubious }> proposition, but it seems to me that transmutation would be }> economically more attractive because of the shorter payback period }> and thus the lower cost of capital equipment. In fact, I would turn } }Unless I'm missing something, we should be able to transmute }small quantities of elements with current technology. Guess what - current technology allows large-scale transmutation! There is no such thing as "natural" plutonium. Well, maybe a pound or two, but not enough to go out and mine. ALL of the stuff in our bombs and such is the result of transmutation. Disclaimer: Individuals have opinions, organizations have policy. Therefore, these opinions are mine and not any organizations! Q.E.D. jwm@aplvax.jhuapl.edu 128.244.65.5 (James W. Meritt)
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (08/26/88)
In article <6413@ihlpl.ATT.COM> knudsen@ihlpl.ATT.COM (Knudsen) writes: >Unless I'm missing something, we should be able to transmute >small quantities of elements with current technology. Remember that essentially all plutonium on Earth is made by transmutation. There's rather a lot of it about, too. (It is admittedly an unusually favorable case, since neutron bombardment of uranium suffices.) Many of the isotopes used in tracer work are also made by transmutation. >I once read that the Atomic Energy Commission built a huge >machine to make Pu out of U by bombarding it with protons, >using simple electrostatic acceleration... I'm not aware of that gadget, although it might have existed. There was, at one point, a proposal to build a large and specialized accelerator for making tritium; perhaps you saw a garbled report of that. Another possibility is that this was a garbled report of the Oak Ridge mass spectrometers, which were built to do uranium isotope separation (which they did quite successfully, but not as well as gaseous diffusion) but have been used since for gram-quantity isotope separation of other elements for research. -- Intel CPUs are not defective, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology they just act that way. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu