水トリーの発生・進展に伴う微弱放射線の検出 Detection of Weak Radiation Involving Generation and Progress of Water Tree

It is well known that generation and progress of water tree in XLPE cable are remarkably influenced by inorganic impurities. We have investigated the behavior of them in water tree and reported the experimental results as follows: i) the anomalous increase or decrease in several kinds of inorganic elements was observed in water treed XLPE samples, ii) a distinctive relationship was found for the mass numbers for the elements, iii) the isotopic content of the elements such as Zn deviated over 6% from the natural abundance. These results suggest that water tree is concerned with unknown phenomena e.g., cold fusion or nuclear transmutation in condensed matter. In order to study the relationship between water tree and these phenomena, we attempted to detect neutron, γ-ray or X-ray involving generation and progress of water tree in XLPE samples. For the experiments weak and burst-like radiation seemed to be low energy γ-ray or X-ray was often detected by BF3 and/or CdZnTe counter. The radiation tended to be detected from the samples in which a lot of water trees were generated by supplying inorganic cations abundantly.