Reply To: Fusion Oil

[nakile]

Woah, thread reset… I guess I need to explain better.

If the Focus Fusion experiment, or any of the various aneutronic projects for that matter, start to show great progress, public interest will grow. And with that will come a lot of skepticism and people digging deeper trying to uncover the “catch.” I can see carbon-11 becoming that catch. Here you have a very potentially potent (short half-live) beta emitter. When dealing with short half-lives, milligrams are a big deal. Then there will be the “what happens if somebody comes along and blows these up or crashes a car/airplane into them” concerns. These are important questions that need solid answers.

I’ve read many times that in the case of the Focus Fusion, it’s nine hours from shutdown to all the 11c generated decaying to background levels. People are going to want to know what to do, if anything, in those nine hours if there ever is a loss of containment accident.

How much is in each reactor will also determine how many of these you can have in one location before safety regulations get tougher. The higher the 11c in each the reactor, the lower the amount of units people will be confortable having in one area. If it’s high enough, then distributed deployment or mobile applications (ships/aircraft) might be a tough sell or even prohibited.

zapkitty wrote: Very small amounts of 11C are safely used in PET scans…

This is a great starting point. If 11c is used in PET scans, that means there’s a lot of data on direct human exposure, which would be the worse case scenario in a loss of containment accident. Its just a matter of getting the numbers.