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Why is the rods' gamma radiation dangerous? Because it has the ability to alter dna. Picture the amount of energy necessary to alter DNA! Why not simply build many oscillating circuits with rectifiers and harvest the energy?

Harvesting energy does not work with broadcasting stations cause the energy being transmitted is too low. But if radiation is powerful enough to destroy DNA, it should be a great power source.

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Techniques of harvesting useful energy from them aren't profitable at all. – Sachin Shekhar Dec 8 '12 at 4:11
Proof or it didn't happen. – Richart Bremer Dec 8 '12 at 4:16
I encourage you to do the yield calculation on the energy you could generate with this using a typical water turbine design similar to a nuclear power plant. Its quite easy. Mr. Shekhar is quite right. We don't need to prove it to you, we are not here to prove things for your connivence. Please look in a modern physics book and read up on nuclear power plant operation; you will clearly see why this is not profitable at all. Further, this isn't really a question that can be answered in the SE format, I think. – Dylan Sabulsky Dec 8 '12 at 4:47
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@DylanSabulsky I agree that the OP's tone is a little accusatory, but this is exactly the type of question we can answer. I may do so myself if I find the time to generate some concrete numbers, but there are other people on this site more experienced with these things, so I'll see if they come up with good answers first. – Chris White Dec 8 '12 at 4:52
Fair enough at @ChrisWhite, perhaps I was a bit quick to pick up on the tone. – Dylan Sabulsky Dec 8 '12 at 4:54

closed as not a real question by David Zaslavsky♦ Dec 8 '12 at 5:34

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

1 Answer

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a) The DNA is altered violently, not with gentle electromagnetic fields. A gamma ray acts as a particle at MeV energies and kicks off atoms and molecules from the DNA thus altering it.

b) Each nuclear decay that leads to a gamma is incoherent with the others and no classical macroscopic electromagnetic wave can be built up by the rods.

c) because of b) no circuits as you visualize them can be built . Even if one could produce synchonized gammas, their wavelength is too short even for nanotechnologies to work.

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good answer! very short and clear – Dylan Sabulsky Dec 8 '12 at 5:05
There we have the solution: f ~ 1/sqrt(RC). f is high, so R*C is to be low. f(gamma) = 3.0 * 10^19 hertz. Having synchronized gamma-rays and using capacitors and supraconducting materials, one can harvest gamma radiation energy. I am looking forward to the future. – Richart Bremer Dec 8 '12 at 5:05
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@RichartBremer but one cannot synchronize decays, period. Gamma rays from synchrotron radiation, if it can be done, will need a lot more energy to generate than can be harvested. – anna v Dec 8 '12 at 5:12

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