In reply to Eric Walker's message of Fri, 20 Nov 2015 01:18:19 -0600: Hi, [snip] >The energy is produced as the lighter elements undergo a series of transitions >under successive alpha captures.
Even fast alphas produces only a trivial amount of alpha captures (e.g. 1/10000). This is primarily due to three things. 1) The alphas rapidly lose energy while ionizing other atoms. 2) They are repelled by the nuclei of other atoms. 3) Nuclei are small relative to the size of atoms. In order to overcome the repulsion, they need to strike another nucleus at high energy. The need for high energy implies that they must get lucky, and hit another nucleus before they lose too much energy to ionization. Even if they do collide, there is a good chance that the result will just be an elastic collision rather than a nuclear event. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
