Recent content by mesa

Hello all, I came across a video I shot with my kids from when fidget spinners were popular (dating the clip). I thought it was an interesting shot likely showing the Magnus Effect that some of you may find interesting. We spun the fidget up with compressed air to a fairly ridiculous RPM and...

Nice, looking into it more.

Good information as always Astronuc, I'll have to dust my copy off when I get into work tomorrow. This seems inline with the paper Alex A referenced.

Great source, and a fun paper in general, you don't see proposals like these too often anymore.

Indeed, yes.

Hey guys, about how far do fission products travel on average in UO2? This will obviously be a fairly short distance, but does anyone have any ideas or links to information on this?

That's about what I expected, the NiF is a joke when it comes to fusion claims.

I'm not holding my breath. The NiF has a history of talking about 'breakthroughs' in fusion to the media, for example: https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-breakthrough-nif-uh-not-really Where is the PEER REVIEWED publication for this announcement?

It went very smoothly. TSA did a thorough check on the device (as they should) and asked some good questions. Very professional and scored at least a solid B+ in my book. I travel often with a lot of strange looking equipment so usually my only dissapointment is when some of the checked bags are...

Well, the good news is I did manage to get the spectrometer/geiger counter on the airplane: The bad news is it was a bit of a failure... I forgot to reprogram the detector to run a long duration gamma spec and instead was set to the 'roll window' for the crud burst and failed fuel...

I want to add CZTs for a handle/wand detector but I'm still fighting Kromatek on selling us stripped down versions (most the electronics removed so we can use our own without having to buy theirs - they are very expensive for what you get). These appear to be great room temperature detectors for...

No check sources on the machine and the battery is just a standard Dewalt cordless drill unit - pretty common to bring in your carry on. Any guesses as to what gamma peaks may be present?

So we have been working up a portable gamma spectrometer for monitoring for fuel leaks and the crud burst at commercial nuclear power plants. I am planning on taking it with me to the lab tomorrow to run it through its paces and had a thought; it would be fun to get some measurements at 30,000...

I enjoyed the paper so much I printed a copy for my collection, thank you Astronuc.

Hello, I am looking for something a bit out of my wheelhouse today, gamma light sources (10 MeV or higher on the max energy threshold). Does anyone here have experience or more information on these machines? Are they typically electron accelerators utilizing a tungsten or tantalum target? I am...