[_Microft]

Thanks, so "charging" means activating stable cobalt to radioactive cobalt by neutron capture. This sounds very doable and is in line with what I expected for a project selected for the program.

I asked because of an experiment conducted by a german research institute at an accelerator in France. They modified nuclear states by using "shaped" x-ray pulses. I wondered if it were possible to store energy by making a nucleus undergo a transition to a meta-stable state (spontaneous emission is forbidden by a selection rule) but which could eventually be triggered by another pulse to extract energy again.

I hope my description of the process I imagine is not too far off, it has been a while since my nuclear physics course ;)

Here is the article and some discussion:

https://www.mpg.de/16449701/coherent-nuclear-excitations

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26190965