Display MoreDaniel_G there is an old video clip, on Bob Rohner's website, showing Joe Papp "filling the buckets" with Thorium powder. It was in the workshop at Papp's house - and Tom was there watching the process. Although Papp was using some kind of glove box, the rest of the conditions were certainly not "radiologically safe". Back in my nuclear days, if I had seen that I would have had the entire workshop closed down, sealed for later decontamination, and had the staff hauled-up in front of a safety and disciplinary panel. n.b. The guys in the Thorium lab, at the site I was at, even had to have their urine collected for analysis - in case of possible ingestion (ingestion of alpha emitters can lead to various cancers, as you probably know).
As I mentioned in another thread, a while back, the use of an alpha emitter in an aluminium vessel, in contact with the gas, is a curious feature of Papp's engine. This would be one method of spraying secondary neutrons into the gas - so how did he learn of the technique?
PostRE: Model Development and Programming ForumA little aside about Joe Papp, and the source of his ideas…
I always find it interesting to look at how, or where, any particular researcher or inventor could have gathered the information that led to their ideas. Nowadays lots of information is available via a few keystrokes, but in the pre-internet days you really had to have some direct sources of information – either through an area of work, higher education, general publications, personal experimentation, or via friends/relatives.
Joe Papp…
This is at least one piece of evidence that Papp was attempting to promote some kind of nuclear process within the cylinders of the engine. The problem is, however, that coming from Papp it could have just been another bit of diversionary showmanship.
Frogfall I think the answer can be found here: https://app.aws.org/technical/facts/FACT-27.pdf
Thorium is often used to make the plasma arc easier to start in TIG welding. This would make perfect sense here and probably a lot safer if Bob used thoriated tungsten electrodes rather than the thorium buckets that Papp used.