Neutralizing radioactivity

Is it something to do with the possibility that levering the neutrons out of the nucleus is a lot more difficult than sending the neutrons in?

I do not know. But I think who ever figures this one out might be as rich as the guy/lady who finds the cure for aids...

Don't expect that individual to post on here!

Correct.

In the case of beta decay, it takes care of itself. Beta decay yields a negatively charged electron from the nucleus, converting one of its neutrons into a proton in the process. Just takes patience, and maybe some shielding, while waiting for it to happen.

And then what would we do with the big jar of extracted neutrons? You can't just leave those things laying around. They attract ants!

Because we add neutrons by shotgun tactics- blast the target until we get an effect.

If you added a positron and removed an electron and neutron (that as far as I know we don't know how to with any accuracy) you would still get the radiation energy release. Now with much effort the natural radioactive decay would be sped up to the rate of processing.

Processing a mole (6.022 x 10²³ ) of atoms would be kind of like processing all of the grains of sand on Earth and one mole of carbon is 12 grams. Now you can only process the radioactive atoms or you may make something worse from your non radioactive atoms.

So figure out how to remove only the atoms that have not beta decayed to process, process them by adding one element and removing two to a near perfect product output and deal with the radiation release of the process, then you will make billions if you can do it cheap.

That is as simple as I go.

I take it you are referring to nuclear fission. We don't add neutrons to the, already, radioactive atoms, we bombard them with slow moving neutrons and the impacts, somehow, stimulate fission. The fission emits slow moving neutrons, which trigger more fission events and you have criticality.

The radioactive atoms are formed under huge pressure and temperature in giant stars and in the doing of it they absorb huge amounts of energy. Separating off part of the nucleous is nuclear fission and it releases part of that stored energy.

To keep "easily" in perspective; note that we can easily change lead to gold or cellulose to starch.

It just takes a lot of energy

Here is a link showing lead to gold conversion.

http://chemistry.about.com/cs/generalchemistry/a/aa050601a.htm

This is the first result in a google search for "lead to gold" . There are many more.

Also, gold is a stable element. If it was "unstable" it would not be gold. It would be some other element.

i can find nothing in your link showing that the transmuted gold was a stable isotope

gold is not always a stable element. there are several radioactive isotopes of gold. halflives range from a few seconds to much much longer.

benbenben

i double checked, and as far as i can tell, no one yet has turned lead into a stable isotope of gold. i should say 'the' stable isotope of gold, as there is only one.

thr only successful transmutation into stable gold appears to be from an isotope of Mercury, exposed to a neutron flux.

all other transmutations result in radioactive...i.e. unstable isotopes of gold (of which there are several).

at any rate, you are almost right about gold, but you should have said 'if it isn't stable, then it won't remain gold' because it actually is gold for a while....but you don't have to trust me, just count the protons....

benbenben

Check the first reference in the Google search - where they refer to the reactor's lead shielding being partially turned to gold.

None of these references actually give the reactions so they don't say much, if anything.

Here the easy way. Just have someone give you a bunch of Pb-197 and sit around for three weeks. It'll be 99.6% stable gold at that point.

The reactions are here.

197 lead to 197 thallium to 197 mercury to 197 gold. or abbreviated ...197 lead... to stable gold

Nice decay chain source!

Helps when you go looking instead of trying to dig it out of some very dusty gray-matter closet you factor blue moons with.

I most likely have it on a book shelve here or over the shop in storage but the interactive on that web site was over the top. Thank you for the 197Pb to gold, that was my whole search criteria.

correct. this refers to lead being turned into a radioactive isotope of gold. an isotope which will later decay into another element.

as far as i know, no one has developed a way to transmute lead into the only stable isotope of gold.

Perhaps i am slurring my keyboard somewhat. let me put it another way. regardless of the amount of energy available for bombarding lead with high energy particles, no one can yet produce a gold ring you would want to wear on your finger.

the only transmutation of which i am aware to the isotope a reasonable person is familiar with and not be afraid to wear as jewlery; is from Mercury.

i was just curious if anyone knew of any new discovery... (no googling 'lead to gold', and getting a hit, does not qualify as documentation that stable gold was produced from lead....which was what i asked originally).

ok, how many more people would like to comment letting me know that their google search shows lead has been transmuted to gold?

benbenben

Benbenben, this is what I call the shotgun effect. Some of the lead will be turned into stable non isotope gold, it may be only a few atoms but how do you separate it out?

We do not do much processing of atoms one at a time. We shoot streams of atoms or atom parts at walls of atoms, streams of atoms or atom parts. The out put at best is a bell curve of reactions that some are so unstable the half life is measured in parts of seconds. From this sometimes we can filter out the reactions we desired.

Even using mercury the output will need to be filtered/processed to be able to keep it in your pocket without worry.

no...it will not turn into a stable isotope of gold..thats like saying 'some of the quail you shoot convert to turkeys... but just a small percentage...'

this is the process by which mercury converts to stable gold

Mercury 198 + 6.8MeV gamma ray 1 neutron + Mercury 197 (half-life 2.7 days) ----- Gold 197 (stable)

how do you propose lead is converted to stable gold? (other than the magic shotgunof infintesimal probabilities)

benbenben

You got it. I take it you check every atom in 6.022 x 10²³ atoms per mole to be sure.

As far as I know there is no atom by atom process. We don't pick one mercury atom up with the atomic force microscope and dip it in the gamma ray stream of 6.8MeV. A sample of highly pure mercury is placed in a vacuum containment chamber and a gate is opened exposing it to a gamma ray source that is just a bit higher than the needed 6.8MeV as practical. AKA shotgun.

I don't know what the yield percentages are but unless nuclear science has made some process changes I have yet to hear about (not to hard in the last three years) It is more of a statistical process yield.

Lead to gold would be a major restructuring at a level of almost easier to build the atom from scratch. Atoms seem to assemble in building block type patterns the sub structures in lead will need modified before it can become gold. Same types of basic parts, but a different sub structure. Have we done it? Who knows. Have we Not? same answer with a lower probability but greater than 0. The government labs that have the best understanding of this knowledge file it under national security. Maybe with reason or yet to be determined if there is a need.

As far as we know outside of a super nova mercury does not become gold in nature either. But we know so little and assume too much.

Brad

lead to stable gold is the equivolent of forcing two shegoats to hump, and expecting male lambs as offspring, due to some statistically infintessimal likelihood that if they humped enought the laws of the universe would conveniently give the goats a pass for effort....

regardless of what you have heard, the chances ofa gamg of chimpanzees in a room filled with typewriters, might eventually bang out the complete works of william shakespeare, are so small, that it is likely to never occur, regardless of the number of chimpanzees, typewriters, years or lsd doped bananas you add.

and so are the chances that you can strike lead with a high energy gamma or beta or neutron or positron or whatever and get stable gold.

if i remember correctly, even in supernovae, while gold might be turned into lead, it would be the rare exception that lead would be turned into gold...and if it were it wouldn't be stable.

i do enjoy your arguement that seems to suggest that calling something a 'statistical process' frees one of the necessity to proving the plausability of a hypothesized process.

"you see honey, the fact that my car was parked at the strip club, while i told you i was visiting my sick aunt.... that's more of a statistical process....a very complex shotgun effect"

benbenben

No two she goats (nannies)still lack the x chromosome. All the basic parts as far as I know are the same for lead and gold.

The complexities of a gross estimated 1000 possibilities of elements is no where of the magnitude of monkeys banging out Shakespeare.

My statement is lead can be made into gold given enough resources. You say it can't be done, fine. We can't seem to make gravity or change time either. Is this the absolute we will never get around? whatever. Of the 4,000 estimated civilization in the milky-way (that we now think is 25% larger) I don't think we have progressed high enough to make but general assumptions.

I believe the OP was referring to the use of transmutation of waste to benign matter. We already have the tech to reprocess spent fuel rods. We did it for the Japanese here. All the secondary waste is not possible at this time because we can not filter the radioactive atoms from the matrix and process them individually as needed, or cost effectively. 1000 years from now it may be simple or still not cost effective but well understood (if we grow up)

I'd love to know just why lead will never be made into gold. No we haven't done it yet (and published) and we don't know precisely why we can do it with mercury and not lead. We do have some ideas but hopefully we can bash enough atoms in our latest and greatest particle collider ( machine-gun shotgun) to have a better picture.

We are just beginning to understand the role of nuclear physics in chemistry, I would venture a guess that, barring another setback in civilization, in 100 years we will be able to make any of the elements from the basic parts. I don't see how it can ever be cost effective for common elements. Some yet to be unobtainium may be a commercially viable product.

Bottom line any transmuted gold costs orders of magnitude more than what you can get back out of it. Turning lead to gold is one of mankind's biggest wastes of time. Much has been learned from the Alchemy it spawned. In my opinion only the typing monkeys can compute if the effort has been worth the payback, but would we recognize the answer if we seen it?

And Ben relax a little. CR4 is fun even if I have little time for it now.

Yes! Please make all legal gold accessible only through reactors and particle accelerators!!! That way, my one ounce of gold should be worth, say, $500,000,000 per ounce! I'm rich! Weeeeeeee!!!!

ok...

i was curious if someone had indeed begun with lead and made stable gold. i hadn't heard of that and believe the feat is similar in complexity toprimate husbandy of lesbian nannies producing lambs....

i was narrow-mindedly thinking of lead you might recover from a mining operation.... naturally occuring fairly stable isotopes basically pb 204 and above.

i was failing to take into consideration any of the highly unstable isotopes of lead. While one would never have any appreciable amount of pb 197 in and of itself to begin (being so very unstable... 1/2 life estimates are as low as 1.5 micro-seconds)

i suppose it can be argued that because another element has a decay chain including a brief pass through highly unstable pb197, and ending in au 197 ...that it can be claimed that someone was able to produce stable gold from 'lead'.

i stand corrected. while i am not wholeheartedly in agreement, i have to credit this answer as being more than a possible coincidental banging of the keyboard....

So ...... while i am still don't expect to see the complete works of Shakespeare in the response, perhaps you might take a few minutes, brachiate back over to the keyboard and impress me by banging out an Elizabethan Sonnet... Will you?

who knows.... if you do, maybe you'll find out if that really is a banana in my pocket,...or if all the pant-hoots make me a little more than happy.

(just monkeying arounds)

benbenben

Accepted and I would have not looked if not the reference to it above. Besides your chain is too easy to pull. And did I say 1000 possible element variables, boy was I short.

Take it easy Benbenben

Brad

...yet, there are many radio-active waste around and no real answers to get rid of it...will we keep on dumping it on poor countries like Afrika?

Afrika is not a country. Africa is a continent. Who's dumping nuclear waste there? Give some facts.

Africa (naturally occuring continent) + k ------ = Africka ---- -c (23.6 Mev) = Afrika (highly unstable country)

ok, so no one has been able to make Afrika a country yet, but how do you know with all the probable civilizations in the universe, that one hasn'yt evolved enough to make this possible?

benbenben

p.s. 'reprocessing' spent fuel does not chance to 1/2 lives nor radioactivity of the constituent elements

Some of us paid attention in school...