Here is another short-lived nuclide activation experiment, a good bit more successful than aluminum in getting decent data. Vanadium-51 has a thermal neut. capture cross section of 6.4 barns and the product, V-52, has a half-life of 3.76 min. It emits gammas of 1.434 MeV.
Lucky for me, there is a Chemistry Department right upstairs that has all this good loot. I have no idea where the thrifty layman could come across a good source of vanadium, but I don't think it makes a good activation material because of the short half-life. I picked ammonium vanadate for the experiment, and put about 75 g. of the solid into a 2" PE bottle. This was exposed to neutrons from the fusor for 10 minutes with 2" of water interposed between fusor and vanadate, and an additional 2" of water behind the vanadate.
Results are below. My peak is a few keV off the reported value but this is well within the uncertainty in the peak's centroid.
Hopefully more experiments will be happening shortly as the "grand tour" of activation continues.
-Carl
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2003-02-25 22:15 Vanadium Activation 
(Carl Willis) [Latest: 2003-02-27 08:47]