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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: d:oug who wrote (36719)	7/6/1999 11:27:00 PM
From: Casaubon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116759

gold to mercury+heat to lead+heat , one charged particle at a time I think there are pockets of stability with respect to how the new nucleus will hold together. So, you can't just assume such a linear progression, I think. Also, these nuclear trasformations would still require extreme temperatures, just to make the single proton addition to the nucleus, even in a sequential fashion. The idea of cold fusion is to circumvent the extreme heat (energy) required to build up the size of the nucleus. I don't think this kind of stepwise approach is the answer. The trick is to identify a " nuclear transition state" (one could liken it to a particular vibration mode in a plucked string). Then, walk the nucleus up to the transition state, either through a series of gentle mode transitions, or some capture technique that locks the transition state in place (for an extremely brief amount of time). Once the "catalyst" is in the active state, the fusing nuclei (probably very low mass nuclei such as hydrogen, deuterium, tritium, or lithium) would be introduced to absorb the "trapped" energy in the activated catalyst. My guess is that the system would need to be "paired", in such as a way that the "nuclear vibration modes" would be nearly identical for catalyst and fusing nuclide, so the energy transfer could be accomplished efficiently. It occurs to me that this would probably require a minimum of third order reaction kinetics to be successful. You would probably want to bring the activated catalyst in proximity to both fusing nuclei simultaneously, in order to achieve a sucessful fusion event. It seems unlikely that you would get fusion if a single nuclei were brought into proximity of the catalyst and then left "activated" in search of another nuclei to fuse with. I, however, know very little nuclear physics, and these thoughts just represent a very obvious grandiose scheme to anyone who does know nuclear chemistry. In fact, I'm not sure if anyone knows of such a thing as discrete "quantum" states for nuclear reactions, although I don't see why they shouldn't exist. The time scale for such events would be very tiny, I would imagine.