ALCHEMISTRY DISSION TOO SLOW SERIES

It should be obvious from this process that it currently costs much more money to create non-radioactive gold than you could ever earn by selling the gold. This is harder than it sounds because you can't separate out non-radioactive gold from radioactive gold using purely chemical methods. After a large amount of work, only a tiny portion of gold is created. Build a nuclear reactor to act as your source of neutrons.Therefore, in order to create non-radioactive gold that you can sell to consumers you have to: Furthermore, when radioactive gold undergoes radioactive decay after a few days, it is no longer gold. Radioactive gold is hazardous to humans and cannot be sold commercially. As should be obvious by this production process, much of the gold created from other elements is radioactive. Bombarding a platinum or mercury nucleus with neutrons can knock off an neutron or add on a neutron, which through natural radioactive decay can lead to gold. Usually gold is created from platinum, which has one less proton than gold, or from mercury, which has one more proton than gold.

ALCHEMISTRY DISSION TOO SLOW SERIES

The neutrons were generated by a series of nuclear reactions that were kick-started by the Harvard cyclotron particle accelerator. For example, Sherr, Bainbridge, and Anderson created gold in 1941 by shooting neutrons at mercury. We can get such particles either from radioactive decay, from nuclear reactions in a reactor, from the acceleration of slow particles, or from a mix of these techniques. To induce a nuclear reaction, we have to shoot high-energy particles at a nucleus.

The nucleus of a stable atom is very tightly bound together, so it is hard to get anything permanently into or out of the nucleus. The difficulty is that nuclear reactions require a lot of energy. You have to use nuclear reactions to create gold. The ancient alchemist dream of creating gold by simply reacting chemicals is therefore impossible. Chemical reactions change the number and shape of the electrons in an atom but leave the nucleus of the atom unchanged. As such, no series of chemical reactions can ever create gold. Adding or removing protons from a nucleus are types of nuclear reactions. The process is simple in principle but hard to do in practice. Or even better, we can remove one proton from mercury (which has 80) or add one proton to platinum (which has 78) in order to make gold.

In principle, we can therefore create gold by simply assembling 79 protons (and enough neutrons to make the nucleus stable). Every atom containing 79 protons is a gold atom, and all gold atoms behave the same chemically. Gold is the chemical element with 79 protons in each atomic nucleus. For this reason, we call a group of atoms with the same number of protons a 'chemical element', and we associate various properties with particular elements. All atoms with the same number of protons in their nucleus behave almost identically. Since most of an atom's physical and chemical properties are determined by the number and shapes of its electrons, and since the number and shapes of its electrons are determined by the number of protons in the nucleus, the nature of an atom is largely determined by the number of protons in its nucleus. All atoms are made out of a small nucleus containing protons and neutrons bound together, and a large cloud of electrons bound to the nucleus. But the process requires nuclear reactions, and is so expensive that you currently cannot make money by selling the gold that you create from other elements.Īll regular matter is made out of atoms. Yes, gold can be created from other elements. Public Domain Image, source: Christopher S.

Alchemistry dission too slow