LiAlH4 inhalation will change your mood quickly..how fast can you dial 000?
http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-…dbs+hsdb:@term+@DOCNO+648
LiAlH4
HUMAN EXPOSURE AND TOXICITY:
Causes severe eye and skin burns. This chemical is irritating to skin, eyes, and respiratory system.
Symptoms - spasms, inflammation and edema of larynx, and bronchi, pulmonary edema, coughing,
wheezing, laryngitis, nausea, and vomiting.
Solid will burn skin and eyes.
The hydrides of lithium react with moisture and leave behind hydroxides.
Alkali metal hydroxides are highly irritating to the skin/mucous membranes/eyes by caustic and thermal action.
Imagine this (below) in your eyes or nose. On your skin, you could get lithium catalyzed saponification (made into soap).
Of course lithium is an alkali metal and hence the saponification (making of soaps from ones body fats). Lithium also has significant combustibility, which should not be ignored.... read the Web to see that the MH370 missing jet had a pallet load or two of lithium batteries on board.
Further, lithium in ionic form is hormetic in modest doses apparently lengthening the lifespans of experimental animals. However, as the carbonate and presumably as other salts, it has the ability to damage kidneys.... so wash up before eating, wear a mask and so on, when handling lithium in any form. A further note, the less prevalent Li-6 isotope in an "aneutronic" reaction with a proton will give rise to Be-7 which does not instantly fission to alphas as Be-8 does, instead Be-7 has a 53+ day half life, with not only a radiation signature but the extreme toxicity of beryllium itself, regardless of isotope.
The routine exposure involved in working with Lithium in a small laboratory is very low compared to the LD50 dose. Most of the side effects you see mentioned are the result of the daily ingestion of pharmacological Lithium- a particularly popular treatment (especially in the USA) for people diagnosed as 'bipolar'. Compared with the toxicity of Nickel, with its known ability to cause hypo-allergenic shock and long term problems of nerve damage and skin and lung lesions lithium is candy. Given the choice between a daily intake of 100mg of Lithium Carbonate and 10 mg of Vale 255 Nickel I would take the Lithium every time.
ETA. I just checked, the LD50 dose of Lithium Carbonate for a rat is 525mgm. LD50 for those not familiar with the term is the dose that is fatal to 50% of the dosed population. Equated to a 70kg human that is around 10 teaspoons-full.
Fortunately you don't likely have to confront that choice. But, lithium by inhalation could easily exceed 50 mg / day. In someone with existing renal compromise, the result might be serious if not deadly.
If you read my post carefully (!) you'll see the least of my concerns is the low dose lithium, and in fact quite the contrary as I specifically mentioned "hormetic".
But, I'll take inhaled nickel any day in modest doses v. beryllium. And especially radio-beryllium! Few here have seemed to attend to the risks in opening a post run lithium containing cell, where if the run were successful, the dust or scraped residues could easily contain Be, Ni and Lithium.
BTW Nickel is most notably carcinogenic as the "sub-sulfide" in my recollection rather than as the metal. But transition metal carcinogenesis research has come a long way since that recollection was current.... so subject to revisions if I have the time and inclination. Personally I have experienced nickel-induced dermatitis, so I can easily sympathize with avoiding finely divided forms.
Alan Smith then wrote:
"ETA. I just checked, the LD50 dose of Lithium Carbonate for a rat is 525mgm. LD50 for those not familiar with the term is the dose that is fatal to 50% of the dosed population. Equated to a 70kg human that is around 10 teaspoons-full."
You need to get your toxicokinetics straight. Simply multiplying the rodent dosage by the ratio to a human body weight is one path to extreme errors. For one thing there is a general rule of thumb in toxicology that genetic variation between genera or higher phylogenetic orders is easily worth a factor of 10 and for safety 100-fold variation. Further the animal size alone, and the physiological peculiarities equate to potential great differences in cellular metabolic rates and hence potentially great differences in absorption, distribution, transformation, metabolism and excretion. Further there are likely tissue-specific issues to confront when making such naive multiplicative extrapolations. The kidney of a rat is NOT the equivalent of a little, high efficiency version of the that of a human.
QuoteYou need to get your toxicokinetics straight. Simply multiplying the rodent dosage by the ratio to a human body weight is one path to extreme errors. For one thing there is a general rule of thumb in toxicology that genetic variation between genera or higher phylogenetic orders is easily worth a factor of 10 and for safety 100-fold variation. Further the animal size alone, and the physiological peculiarities equate to potential great differences in cellular metabolic rates and hence potentially great differences in absorption, distribution, transformation, metabolism and excretion. Further there are likely tissue-specific issues to confront when making such naive multiplicative extrapolations. The kidney of a rat is NOT the equivalent of a little, high efficiency version of the that of a human.
Mine are perfectly straight. I understand the toxology differences between a rat and a man are huge. My comment was meant to be illustrative for those who are not and used the word 'equates/equated rather than saying 'for a man this means'. As for an accidental intake of 50mg/day, 350mg/week gained while Lithium loading cold fusion reactors, they need lessons in lab technique.
Perfectly straightly mistaken?
And by the way, in US English we say "toxicology", I doubt the UK is much different in this regard for such an ISV term.
[I suppose your "toxology" might in theory mean the study of "arrows", toxon from Greek "arrow", which somewhat indirectly is the source of the word "toxin" and hence "toxic" and "toxicology".]
I understand the difference, of course. But my phone doesn't.
Few here have seemed to attend to the risks in opening a post run lithium containing cell, where if the run were successful, the dust or scraped residues could easily contain Be, Ni and Lithium.
The problem is that nobody has detected any induced radioactivity (you will surely correct me if I am wrong). So, if LENR is nuclear reactions (and the energy density speaks for that), we have a problem. Why do the reactions always en up with stable nuclei?
I would like to take up one point which was discussed but not resolved: If radiation (gamma, neutron) is part of the energy production, the radiation level is enormous and very easy to detect. If the radiation is "by accident", it may be more difficult to detect. But then it has no value as a proof of nuclear reactions. This has been the problem already from F&P: too little radiation compared with the excess energy.
And to you guys (or girls?) who test different reactors. Use energy dispersive systems with an MCA so you can identify gammas by their energy. In most cases you can also tell the difference between a proper signal and induced noise. Use non energy dispersive system (GM-counters etc.) only for safety measurements.
Quote from PeterI would like to take up one point which was discussed but not resolved: If radiation (gamma, neutron) is part of the energy production, the radiation level is enormous and very easy to detect. If the radiation is "by accident", it may be more difficult to detect. But then it has no value as a proof of nuclear reactions. This has been the problem already from F&P: too little radiation compared with the excess energy.
This is an excellent point. There is a class of indicators, like this, where attention to quantitative matters casts claimed results in a different frame. Much of the LENR discussion is in terms of binary "something unusual" or no, where "something unusual" be it radiation, excess heat, isotopic change, is taken as sure indication. That gives a lot of scope for a variety of measurement artifacts to seem like LENR.
Josh Cude here and elsewhere has made the point that marginal excess heat is taken as an LENR indication, and marginal radiation the same. Yet the levels expected for the same amount of nuclear activity vary by 1000000 between the two cases. If one is typically marginal we expect the other to be overwhelming.
You can get round this, for example, by claiming that LENR just does not produce radiation. But it is surely too much a coincidence that it produces radiation at 1000000X lower than normal levels - just enough to make it detectable but not conclusive when measured?
The lithium+proton interactions described in Lipinski-UGC are there claimed to give alphas at high energy from the prompt Be-8 scission, and these alphas are claimed and used by those researchers to assess the product and are claimed to yield the energy measured in their several devices with many different operational parameters. There are enough parallels between the Lipinski approach and the present round of Parkhomov and say Me356 replicators, to raise concerns. There are strong differences as well, but low energy proton beams (Lipinskis at say 100 eV) are not necessarily completely distinguishable from hydrogen ions in a plasma soup where the protons are excited and electronically activated to collision with lithium particles. The 6 to 7 % Li-6 normally present in natural lithium gives rise to Be-7 with a 53 day half life. Messing with the reaction chamber after that could be quite dangerous, as I mentioned. Of some interest may be that the Lipinskis do not mention this Li-6 + proton reaction in their 2014 WIPO application, or they may gloss over it..... for whatever reason. If their device works as well as they claim in some of the higher Q interations, then it may have been worth the cost to either start with completely Li-6 depleted lithium targets, or simply to neglect to mention this path in detail for some IP strategic or other practical reasons such as "safety perception" or possible site license requirements (I'm only guessing on that).
The lithium+proton interactions described in Lipinski-UGC are there claimed to give alphas at high energy from the prompt Be-8 scission, and these alphas are claimed and used by those researchers to assess the product and are claimed to yield the energy measured in their several devices with many different operational parameters.
This reaction came up partly since it would explain why there is no detectable external radiation. The two alpha-particles are indeed stopped in the reactor and there is no gamma-radiation. Indirectly, however, we get gamma-radiation from the reactions created by the moving alpha-particles. One would easily detect neutrons from 7Li(alpha,n)10B and gammas from 7Li(alpha,alpha')7Li. If there is Ni in the fuel we would also observe gammas from Coulomb excitation in the Ni isotopes. These are all very well studied reactions.
The problem is that nobody has detected any induced radioactivity (you will surely correct me if I am wrong). So, if LENR is nuclear reactions (and the energy density speaks for that), we have a problem. Why do the reactions always en up with stable nuclei?
As you mention, a correction should be made here. Not speaking to experiments involving lithium, the topic of this thread, there are multiple reports of small amounts of induced radioactivity, either (1) during a live run or (2) over a period of a few hours or perhaps days afterwards. These reports can be found in ICCF proceedings, on lenr-canr.org and in patents. Following are a few examples of (1):
http://www.google.com/patents/US5076971
http://www.google.com/patents/US8801977
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/DashJeffectsofg.pdf
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/DashJchangesint.pdf
Are these reports reliable? That's for readers to decide. Simple artifact in each case? This is a question I find fascinating.
Why do the reactions always end up with stable nuclei? If we go along with some studies, they don't in every instance. But even if there are short spells of induced activity which then die down, we might speculate with some reason that in transitioning from a higher-energy state to a lower energy state, the daughters would generally be more stable, after everything has settled. All of this of course means that the absence of the kind of long-lived activity that arises from neutron activation can be used to rule out the presence of large amounts of neutrons.
About the matter of marginal excess heat being brought about by reactions that produce 1 million times more energy per reaction, mentioned by Tom above, I don't see why this is a sticking point. In order to obtain such a result, what is needed is a patchy release of energy, a little here and a little there, whose release ends up destroying the environment that triggered it. Maybe I'm missing the point.
If there is Ni in the fuel we would also observe gammas from Coulomb excitation in the Ni isotopes. These are all very well studied reactions.
Can you cite two or three specific mainstream studies concerning Coulomb excitation that you have personally read that you believe to be directly relevant to the question of whether energetic charged particles can be excluded a priori from NiH LENR experiments?
Can you cite two or three specific mainstream studies concerning Coulomb excitation that you have personally read that you believe to be directly relevant to the question of whether energetic charged particles can be excluded a priori from NiH LENR experiments?
I haven't time now to check your references but I bet they use primitive equpment (e.g. GM-counters).
There are hundreds of references with Li and Ni reactions, most show actual spectra:
R Y Cusson, Levels in 11B from 7Li(α, α)7Li and 7Li(α, α')7Li∗(0.48), Nucl.Phys. 86 (1966) 481-508
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s…icle/pii/0029558266904925
L van der Zwan and K W Geiger, The 7Li(α,n)10B
differential cross section for α-energies of up to 8 MeV, Nucl.Phys. A180
(1972) 615-624
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s…icle/pii/0375947472908834
Gy Gyürky, Zs Fülöp, E Somorjai, G Kiss and C Rolfs, Absolute resonance strengths in the 6,7Li(α,γ) 10,11B reactions,[/i] The European Physical Journal A 21 (2004) 355-358
http://link.springer.com/artic…40%2Fepja%2Fi2003-10212-2
P H Stelson and F K McGowan, Coulomb excitation of the first 2+
state of even nuclei with 58 < A < 82,Nucl. Phys. 32
(1962) 652--668
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s…icle/pii/0029558262903681
L W Fagg, E H Geer, and E A WolickiI, Coulomb Excitation of V, Ni, Ga, and Rb, Phys. Rev. 104 (1956) 1073-1076
http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRev.104.1073
Peter, I will take a look at those references, which I assume you have read, and will assess them for relevance to the kinds of NiH experiments I am familiar with. One detail I note is that they look at Coulomb excitation by energetic alpha particles in lithium and in even nuclei with 58 < A < 82. The point you make here about Coulomb excitation is a good one and is worth keeping in mind. The tentative conclusion, then, is that there are few energetic alphas in the NiH experiments that I am aware of, with the possible exception of Piantelli.
The topic we have entered into pertains not just to Coulomb excitation and energetic alphas, however, but regards induced radiation more broadly. That includes beta decay and electron capture. Given what materials are commonly used in the live runs in NiH experiments, it makes sense that there would be no possibility for energetic alpha particles, for there are generally no actual or potential alpha emitters. But there is often an actual or potential beta emitter, or a nuclide that might decay by way of EC. Do you have references you have personally read (and not just found in a search) that exclude a priori from NiH experiments the possibilities of EC and beta decay in the range of, say, 0-5 MeV? Obviously there are few to no positrons, so we need not consider beta+ decay, and we are required to assume that this channel is competitively suppressed. I do not think this is an unreasonable assumption to make, given the unknowns.
About the methods of detection used in the references I gave, here is the pertinent section from this paper by Dash et al., which clarifies one specific case:
QuoteTwo uranium discs were exposed to hydrogen plasma, and two others were exposed to deuterium plasma. The mass of each disc was determined before and after these exposures. Before exposure the mass of each disc was about 1 g. Erosion which occurred during glow discharge reduced the mass of each disc. Glow discharge was performed with flowing gas at about 5 torr. The current during glow discharge was about 5 mA and the voltage was about 500 volts. Alpha, beta, and gamma measurements were made on each of these samples after the exposures, along with measurements on a control, which was a uranium disc from the same foil and of the same size, but which had not been exposed to plasma in the glow discharge apparatus. The alpha measurements were made with a Ludlum 43-5 alpha probe. The beta measurements were made with a Ludlum model 2000 GM counter. By placing a one mm thick aluminum plate between the detector and the sample, it was possible to detect the continuum of high energy gamma and x-rays. Gamma and x-ray spectra were obtained with an EG&G ORTEC 92X gamma ray spectrometer. Radiation measurements were made periodically over a time span of about one year. The uranium specimen with ~ 550 hour exposure to deuterium plasma and the control specimen were examined with a scanning electron microscope (SEM) and analyzed with an energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS).
As can be seen, they used several kinds of detector.
Peter, I will take a look at those references, which I assume you have read, and will assess them for relevance to the kinds of NiH experiments I am familiar with. One detail I note is that they look at Coulomb excitation by energetic alpha particles in lithium and in even nuclei with 58 < A < 82. The point you make here about Coulomb excitation is a good one and is worth keeping in mind. The tentative conclusion, then, is that there are few energetic alphas in the NiH experiments that I am aware of, with the possible exception of Piantelli.
You make it more difficult than necessary - nuclear physics is exceedingly easy.
It is really very simple: All charged heavy particles moving with MeV energies cause CE in even-even nuclei and in most other nuclides. You just need an E2 component in a transition from the ground state. And you don't need to pass the Coulomb barrier! The excited state will decay with gamma.
About the uranium paper. The results are sensational and will give a Nobel prize if correct. It would need independent confirmation. I do not think that will happen. Changing half lives in nuclear physics has been looked for many times without luck. It would of course be nice in we could shorten the half lives of trans-uranium elements.
I don't see how shortening the half lives of elements helps. Sure, the end products should be stable-ish, but the massive increase in radioactivity caused by "speeding up decay" sounds rather nasty and a route for atomic bomb makers to salivate over.
Given what materials are commonly used in the live runs in NiH experiments, it makes sense that there would be no possibility for energetic alpha particles, for there are generally no actual or potential alpha emitters.
I don't understand what you are saying there, Eric. I assume you are talking of strictly Ni-H systems. It appears few of the recent efforts qualify as strictly that. Instead we are seeing a lot of lithium present. Surely Li-7 is not "an alpha emitter", but its proton adduct Be-8 is solely that. I mentioned recently the parallels between the Lipinsky Li + p system and these thermal "Ni-H" with lithium devices such as you are discussing. Peter Eckstrom is pointing out, it appears, that high MeV alphas are not [likely] present in those systems, otherwise we would be seeing neutrons and gammas... if I am reading his point correctly.
Kindly bring us up to speed on your conclusions. It will help the field, it will advance the work, it will educate, inform, disarm critics and disabuse many of us of illusions all at once.
About the uranium paper. The results are sensational and will give a Nobel prize if correct. It would need independent confirmation. I do not think that will happen. Changing half lives in nuclear physics has been looked for many times without luck. It would of course be nice in we could shorten the half lives of trans-uranium elements.
Unfortunately, no Nobel possible, John Dash just passed on: http://www.infinite-energy.com…rces/john-dash-pases.html.
Perhaps workers at Mitsubishi will now take the laurels.
