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General Science / Could beams of neutrons be used to find gold?
« on: 26/09/2012 23:14:57 »
Is there any safe way to produce a collumated high energy neutron flux?
If there is, I have an idea for a specialized gold metal detector.
Imagine if you will, a gold metal detector designed to find only gold using radiation. This gold metal detector would not use a standard search coil such as used in normal metal detectors. Instead, the search coil would be replaced with a device that could produce safe, local, collumated high energy neutron flux that could penetrate the ground and transmutate natural gold into radioactive Au198, which could then be detected with a standard radiation detector using a discriminator window around the Au198 energy level. Au198 has a short half life of about 2 and a half days, so it wouldn't take long for the radioactive gold to become safe enough to market. The nice thing about this gold detector would be that it would not detect anything but gold. No more digging up aluminum beer cans, hot rocks and pull tabs. NORM may be a problem if Au198 energy level is similar in strength to Thorium, Potassium or natural Uranium but these might be rejected through the use of clever analysis of multiple discriminator windows.
Sadly, the only way I'm aware of to produce such a neutron flux also produces a deadly massive fireball.
Any thoughts?
If there is, I have an idea for a specialized gold metal detector.
Imagine if you will, a gold metal detector designed to find only gold using radiation. This gold metal detector would not use a standard search coil such as used in normal metal detectors. Instead, the search coil would be replaced with a device that could produce safe, local, collumated high energy neutron flux that could penetrate the ground and transmutate natural gold into radioactive Au198, which could then be detected with a standard radiation detector using a discriminator window around the Au198 energy level. Au198 has a short half life of about 2 and a half days, so it wouldn't take long for the radioactive gold to become safe enough to market. The nice thing about this gold detector would be that it would not detect anything but gold. No more digging up aluminum beer cans, hot rocks and pull tabs. NORM may be a problem if Au198 energy level is similar in strength to Thorium, Potassium or natural Uranium but these might be rejected through the use of clever analysis of multiple discriminator windows.
Sadly, the only way I'm aware of to produce such a neutron flux also produces a deadly massive fireball.
Any thoughts?