Gamma Burning

I have been thinking about a possible solution to the high cost of fuel. For one thing, we must forget about replacing gasoline (petrol) with ethanol. Food costs are rising nearly as fast as that of fuel and massive ethanol production would reduce food production by diverting agricultural land use. My idea is to tinker with the burning process itself rather than seeking new fuels. I would like to introduce my concept of "Gamma Burning", which is an artificial method of burning a material for the release of heat energy.

Let's consider the chemical bonds between atoms in a molecule. There are a few different types of bond, such as sigma and pi bonds. Carbon atoms in organic substances can also be bound by either single, double or, triple bonds. Each inter-atomic bond in a molecule contains energy. It is this bond energy that binds the atoms together.

When these bonds are somehow broken, the energy in the bond is released as heat. Digestion is actually a form of burning that does not produce a lot of heat, the calories in a food are essentially the sum of the energy in it's molecular bonds that are broken during the digestion process. A substance will burn when a flame is applied to it if the energy in it's molecular bonds is greater than the energy it takes to break the bonds. If it is not, the breaking of the bonds by the heat released by the breaking of other bonds will not be self-sustaining and the material will not burn.

The heat released by burning is the difference between that released by broken bonds and that required to break the bonds. My idea is that if we could come up with an artificial way to break the inter-atomic bonds in molecules to release their energy, we could obtain more energy from a material than conventional burning could deliver because the heat energy to break the bonds would not be required.

Now, let's consider gamma rays. These are electromagnetic waves just as light, infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray and, radio waves are. But gamma rays are the waves of the highest frequency and thus, the shortest wavelength and highest energy. Gamma rays are often found in the cosmic rays that continuously bombard the earth from space. What if we could generate gamma rays of a specific wavelength?

Gamma rays are electromagnetic waves like radio waves but of a much higher frequency. We know that radio waves are best received by an antenna which is half the wavelength in length. My belief is that if we could bombard a quantity of material with gamma rays that are twice the wavelength of the molecular bonds in the material that the bonds would absorb the full energy of the gamma rays and would thus be broken and release their heat. Gamma rays cause cell and gene damage in living things by breaking molecular bonds.

There is energy in the molecular bonds in any material but it is only useful to us if the material can be made to burn. The truth is that heat is a very crude way to break molecular bonds. It does so by causing the atoms to vibrate until the bonds between them break and release more heat energy to sustain the process. The infrared radiation of heat shakes the atoms to break their bonds but gamma rays of the right wavelength would be absorbed directly by the bonds themselves and snap them, thus releasing their energy as heat.

It is somewhat like pulling a string until it breaks as opposed to the much more efficient process of directly cutting it with a scissors. Also, a material will burn only if there are few enough electrons in the outer orbital of it's atoms to permit oxidation to take place. Oxidation is necessary to the burning process to carry away the atoms whose bonds have already been broken to release their heat to get them out of the way so that the process can continue. The usual oxidizer is, as the name implies, oxygen. Although it is not the only chemical that can act as an oxidizer.

I beleive it is possible for gamma burning to take place without oxidation. This means that we can take the loose atoms of a substance that has undergone gamma burning and recombine them into something else. This is not possible with conventional burning due to oxidation. We can manipulate matter by selectively breaking the bonds of a certain length while leaving the others intact. A substance can be vaporized and it's atoms rearranged by cutting it's molecular bonds without heat.

Remember that it is the carbon dioxide produced by the combining of a carbon atom from a burned fuel with two atoms of oxygen in the air during the oxidation process that causes global warming. If my gamma burning process can release the energy without conventional burning and oxidation, not only can we get much more energy from fuels because none of the heat energy will be needed to break further molecular bonds, but there will be no exhaust oxidation of carbon.

Gamma burning would also revolutionize space travel because no liquid oxygen or other oxidizer would be needed. In gamma burning, energy would be released much more rapidly than in conventional burning. The process would certainly provide far more energy than it would require to generate the gamma rays and would leave the released atoms available for other uses. But this only involves molecular bonds between atoms, it will not enable us to collect a pile of scrap metal and turn it into gold because this would require a change in the atoms.

Finally, I would like to speculate on what we might be able to do if we could create a laser using gamma rays instead of red or green light. A gamma ray laser, or GRASER as I will call it. We could point the GRASER at something and literally snap the inter-atomic bonds in all it's molecules, causing the object to cease to exist.