It seems to have become a truism that any change in the nuclear domain must involve an energy change that is orders of magnitude greater than an energy in the chemical domain. However, based on my reading of nuclear isomers there are few known instances where this truism does not hold. Since there is also great deal that is not known about nuclear isomers, chemical like energy changes might be even more common the nuclear domain.
Harry On Sun, Mar 12, 2017 at 8:43 AM, Eric Walker <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Mar 11, 2017 at 10:13 PM, Jones Beene <[email protected]> wrote: > > Converting anything into iron would be endothermic, and there is an >> electric arc to supply power, but hardly enough for transmutation ... of >> even a few ounces. > > > I agree entirely. Technically speaking, I suppose you could have iron as > an exothermic fission product, but there would be many other daughter > elements besides, and the release of energy through fission needed to make > the 4 tons of iron would be catastrophic, as implied by the nuclear bomb > example. And there would need to be tons of some heavy element to provide > the fuel. So the creation of iron (either from fusion or from fission) > seems far-fetched. > > But taken at face value, that seems to be an implication of the > Narayanaswamy claim that iron comes from something other than iron; you'd > need a nuclear process for that: i.e., fission, fusion, or some kind of > alpha or beta decay (for neither of which I could find any exothermic > pathway). So I conclude that Narayanaswamy is mistaken about the > production of iron, and that perhaps there's an accounting error that is > leading to the conclusion about excess iron, perhaps along the lines you > suggest. > > Eric > >
