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Central claims: Brown-Paul

Source gap. The folder holds two documents. (1) The 1990 Tesla Symposium PDF bundles a symposium paper (clean text layer), the front page only of US Patent 4,835,433 (garbled in the text layer, but legible when rendered as a page image and transcribed), twelve figure sheets (legible as images; they carry the key equations, e.g. "Beta Flux >= i^2 R", but no component values or measurements) and a later self-reported CV. (2) The 1999 Wired item by Charles Platt, a short news piece with no data. Not in the folder: the patent body and claims (the only quantitative performance statement, 23 A at 400 V, comes from Google Patents, a [web] source), Brown's four cited papers (1987 to 1990), his 1991 to 1993 conference papers, and any record of the gamma-transmutation work beyond the Wired item. No document in the folder contains a measured power, efficiency or test data table, so evaluation rests on physics plus [web]/[memory]; later steps must say so where a conclusion rests on [memory] alone.

  1. A tuned LC tank circuit whose inductor core is radioactive (in the patent, a mixture of three alpha emitters; in the 1990 paper's experiments, Sr-90 beta sources) can sustain and amplify its oscillations and deliver net electrical power after a one-time start-up pulse (US 4,835,433, filed 8 Feb 1988, granted 30 May 1989; the patent example states 23 A at 400 V from a 1 mCi radium needle plus 200 g uranium plus 100 g thorium [web], with no input power or efficiency), and a mixture of three nuclides gives more decay flux than one nuclide alone.
  2. Ionizing radiation absorbed in a current-carrying conductor "amplifies" its current in proportion to source activity and lowers its resistance (the "Beta Voltaic Effect" in the "Burke Cell"; Fig. 4 lists "flux cutting" and "collapsing magnetic field" as mechanisms).
  3. A power density "on the order of" 0.25 W/cm3 is achievable from Kr-85 ("preliminary data suggests", no data; the paper does not say thermal or electrical), with better efficiency and less shielding than conventional radioisotope generators, and Kr-85 is "environmentally the most acceptable" isotope for power.
  4. Gamma irradiation can transmute long-lived nuclear waste (his example: half-lives of 24,000 years, which is plutonium-239's) into species safe within months, at under a quarter of the DOE's $150 billion estimate; Wired says Brown "showed" this, but no demonstration, data or test is on record (patent pending, company "Nuclear Solutions", tests "soon" at Illinois or MIT, DOE pilot plant under discussion).
  5. The heat from gamma-driven transmutation would generate more electricity than the plant uses, allowing a plant costing about $5 million (Wired, Feb 1999).
  6. The power of the resonant oscillator was measured by the voltage across a known resistor and an ammeter in series (Figs 9 and 11), with the 10 kV start-up supply and Class C amplifier "removed" after a few seconds; this is the paper's only description of how "net power" was verified, and it gives no phase or input-power measurement.