Environmental Radioactivity

The Laboratory of Environmental Radioactivity has targets that complement its lines of work about the environment:

• Measure and assess levels of radioactivity in the national environment, including the location and environment of research reactors that exist in the country.

• Evaluate the exposure of humans to radioactive products present in the environment.

• adequate information on monitoring radioamblental.

• quality control radiological high consumption of food and certification of products exported to the request for outside users.

• Measuring the environmental factors that are part of the food chain and incorporated elements radioambientales in humans by inhalation.

How to generate energy from nuclear waste

The medieval alchemists sought to transmute lead into gold. Today, inside nuclear reactors something similar happens: uranium bombarded with neutrons becomes other lighter elements such as technetium.

The problem is that these wastes are radioactive for thousands or millions of years.
What to do with them? One possibility is used as fuel for another type of reactor, called subcritical because the nuclear reaction is not maintained by itself, as in conventional power plants. The new, the neutrons provides a particle accelerator added to the reactor.

This is achieved by reducing the mass of waste and radioactive shorten their lives just a few hundred years.
Kyoto University has set up the laboratory KART, which will study the feasibility of this idea, whose creator was Cario Rubbia, Nobel Physics and former director of the Research Center for Particle Physics CERN in Switzerland.
It is the third time that seeks to promote this project was tried in 2004 in Italy and in 1997 at Aragon. On both occasions was canceled for political reasons: it does not sell nuclear.

Solar panels that work the 24 hours

The dream of environmentalist and users that search alternatives to cheapen costs and to guarantee electricity, still during the cuts, it can be a reality. And everything thanks to the development of a group of investigators from National Idaho Laboratory, in USA.

Since you began to use for the electricity generation, the solar energy has been an alternative font whose use has gone growing in an exponential way. And here we have already seen different alternatives, as the impelled one for Google.

The problem is that the production of solar facilities is still something expensive, what end up reducing your market to a niche for some few ones. For if you were little, your strength is quite reduced, what involve that they are not too many the devices that can be fed this way: in consequence the depreciation of this type of investments is more dilatory.

But that can be to change thanks to Steven's work Novack, of National Idaho Labortory that affirm book credit desarollado a new type of solar panels. Thanks to the nanotechnology, the surface of these panels is printed with minuscule nano antennas that can capture the infrared radiation that are plentiful during the day but that, still during the night, you are present.

This would allow to obtain solar energy the 24 hours, something that will surely contribute to make much more income-producing the facilities of this type. And not alone that, but rather the grade of energy absorption achieved this way climbs until 80%, against 40% that are the habitual one with the solar fabricated panels with silicon. If that wasn't enough, the method invented by Novack will allow the production of solar panels that you/they can bend, reverting them extremely practical for your transportation and easy installation.

The difficult only aspect up to now is the one of being able to transform the energy obtained in electricity, since the nano antennas has each a very little strength and your value is given on the whole by your work. Certainly that in this aspect they are working the scientists. When they have solved it finally we will be able to have solar really actual and economic panels.

The nuclear Energy and The Cold Fusion

In front of the fission energy that is currently the used in the world, an important part of the efforts of the scientists is centered in investigating the great alternative, inexhaustible and clean: the fusion energy, and in short in a variant of the same one: the cold" "fusion.

We know that the nuclear fusion currently more developed and investigated it is the one that binds the isotopes of hydrogen (tritium and deuterium) through high temperatures (a hundred million grades). It is the call warm fusion.

This immense heat is necessary to expire the force of electrostatic repulsion of the isotopes (when having the electric same imposition), exciting them in such a way that you/they end up uniting, creating a new state of the matter: the plasma.

Given the difficulties to procure those temperatures and, mainly, to confine the plasma (for magnetic confinement or for inertial confinement), the cold fusion has been investigating that is able to create energy without heating necessity.

The experiment of Fleischmann and Pons.-
As it usually happens in science, the first results were achieved by chance. 1989 two American chemists' of the University of Utah (Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons) March 23 assured in a conference achieved book credit the cold fusion by means of a plain genius and through the electrolysis, with a bar of flanked paladio without stopping of platinum, submerged in water weighted sample (rich in deuterium).

With this system, applying an electric current, the deuterium separates the oxygen of the water and he/she accumulates in the paladio bar. Arrived a point, the cores of the deuterium and of the paladio they melt to room temperature, causing the nuclear reaction that releases energy, detected by the emission of neutrons.

Fleischmann and Pons that came developing the experiment from 1984 with funds of the Department of Energy of U.S, assured obtained book credit the equivalent one to 1 energy watio for cubic centimetre of water, what would represent 1 million times more than what you/they showed the measured emissions of neutrons and some 50 times more than the utilized energy.

However, the scientific community didn't believe such results, trying by all possible means to reproduce the experiment without success.

It is more, if those data were correct, the released neutrons would have killed to the whole scientific team that was present in the experiment, that which didn't happen (fortunately).

The extraneous of the case is that it has not reproduced this result again and it is more, the two scientist wanted to publish the experiment in the magazine Nature (it is the investigators' standard to publish their results in magazines scientists to give them to know and to grant world relevance to the same ones), but they didn't achieve it when not responding to the logics questions of the scientific teams of the publication.

The experiment of Scaramuzzi.-
In spite of the failures of the scientists and to that one says consequently that the cold fusion was not possible, retiring several controls and labs of its investigation, few weeks after the announcement of the Americans, the Italian Professor Scaramuzzi changed some elements of the experiment and, although it didn't achieve the energy "obtained" by Fleischmann and Pons, yes it demonstrated that the fusion in cold is possible.

Their experiment deleted the electrolysis and it substituted the paladio for a titanium ball. Submerging the titanium in gaseous and achieved deuterium a balance between the pressure of the gas and the temperature, the fusion was gotten. The professor Scaramuzzi measured 491 issued drives of neutrons when he/she only hoped to register 30.


The cold fusion at the present time.-
Inside the investigations routed to achieve practical and profitable long term results, the technique of the sonoluminiscencia is applying that consists basically in the emission of light for the submitted liquids to ultrasounds.


The future of the cold fusion.-
In spite of being the black sheep in the investigations it has more than enough fusion, of being procured similar results to those of Fleischmann and Pons, it would suppose it a revolution in the energy fonts.

A single liter of fuel would satisfy the energy necessities of an entire building during several years, or of a family during all its life.

Also, the energy of cold fusion, doesn't not only infect and it is inexhaustible (as that of warm fusion), but rather it is also very much cheaper of procuring. All the nations could have their generating plants and you could end up even thinking of vehicles moved by nuclear fusion, generating portable teams, atomic inexhaustible battery, airships and ships that didn't need to refuel, etc.

And going further on, it could even favor the colonization of other planets.
However, with the feet in the floor must wait still some more years to see the first results, if it is that the controls put true interest in the cold fusion and the particular economic interests of energy companies don't prevail and of those same controls in relation to the current fuels.