Theoretical Element Creator

[victory143]

Fusion in stars runs on Hydrogen which is then converted in to Helium. These elements get heavier and heavier as the star uses it's fuel. At iron the fusion process absorbs energy rather than releasing it. If there was a fusion reactor and we gave the reaction enough power, could we create any element on the periodic table? This is Theoretical and the energy requirements would be ridiculous.

[K^2]

There is no real way to run fusion past iron without supplying enormous amounts of pressure. When I say enormous amounts, we are talking star core collapse here, because that's how heavier elements are naturally created.

You can get heavier elements by smashing individual particles together, as is done at some accelerator facilities, but amount of matter you can generate that way is tiny.

[Cocoon90]

I guess every element and isotopes can be reproduced in laboratory. A few months ago a swedish team reproduced the element 115 (the what so called the UFO fuel). With a today's particle accelerator you can obtain nearly every element. CERN obtained 300 atoms of Anti Hydrogen a few years ago.. The "big" problem is that the quantity you get from a Lab experiment is calculated in atoms, so running a particle accelerator for very few atoms of for example Copper, it would be just a waste of power and money.. Nowasays fusion reactors are still in theretical phase, engineers and physicists are "still just studyng" the concept of Tokamak (ENEA in Italy for example is working on it, even Russia, China and others are working togheter for the ITER in France), others are more towards the laser induced fusion (NIF in California). Energy requirements are not ridiculous (not too much at least), since once the reaction takes place it should self sustain. The bigger problem is to reach this self sustainment. If we can reach this point maybe producing new matter wouldn't be so expensive and inefficient.

[Nuke]

the problem with super heavy elements at this point is there very short half lives. there is not much use in elements that decay so quickly. then you get the theoretical island of stability which should produce elements with long enough half lives to be of some use. since there is no known natural source of those elements, and the only means to produce them is not cheap, even if we find a use for them then it is unlikely they will be practical. proposed uses are more energetic nuclear fuels (totally impractical because of the energy needed to create the elements, though i suppose you could think of it in terms of energy storage), and more compact nuclear weapons (which might be useful to increase the isp of orion drive by making the warheads smaller without compromising yield). interesting stuff.

[Rakaydos]

Quantum dot masses are probably a better bet for simulating difficult to produce materials. A quantum dot simuates an atom by confining electrons within a quantum-scale area, where they begin to behave like the electron cloud of an atom. Since chemical properties are deturmined by the electron cloud, not the nucleas, it gains the chemical properties of the element it is copying.

[Brotoro]

...If there was a fusion reactor and we gave the reaction enough power, could we create any element on the periodic table? This is Theoretical and the energy requirements would be ridiculous.

We can't even get fusion reactors to work yet for the easy fusion reactions, so I don't expect we could get the them to operate at the conditions where such fusion reactions to produce super-heavy elements could occur.

Even in supernova explosions, very heavy elements are not produced by such fusion reactions. Supernovae produce very heavy elements via the r-process, which rapidly (hence the "r") adds neutrons (released by other nuclear reactions going on) to existing heavy nuclei to produce neutron-rich, very heavy nuclei that then beta-decay back toward the line of stability.

More recently, it has been proposed that the r-process can also occur in material thrown off during neutron star mergers, but I'm not aware of observational confirmation of this.

Edited February 4, 2014 by Brotoro

[Psycix]

We can create super-heavy elements by bombarding heavy particles with other particles. Most of them are highly unstable though.

[victory143]

I said theoretically not practically Brotoro. Thanks all the same.

[Brotoro]

I said theoretically not practically Brotoro. Thanks all the same.

Yes, and I pointed out that even in the most extreme natural cases we don't get those kinds of fusion reactions occurring. If it was theoretically possible to get those reactions to occur in an overpowered fusion reactor, we would expect to see them happen in supernovae. What we see is different…so I don't think it is theoretically something you'd get (let alone impractical).

[Anton P. Nym]

A few months ago a swedish team reproduced the element 115 (the what so called the UFO fuel)

I do so very much hope that there's serious talk of calling it Elerium...

-- Steve

[lajoswinkler]

There's no hope for the island of stability (such that those elements would have several years long halflifes), and even if there was any, we simply can't make enough of such atoms to make even a particle the size of a typical virus.

With elements like einsteinium (Z=99), you put a small uranium target (might be in elemental form, but I'm not sure) into an intensive neutron flux and after a certain amount of time you chemically separate einsteinium from tons of other stuff. I think you get the hydroxide and then you heat it to get oxide. If you want it in elemental form, you reduce it with metallic lanthanum.

There's a photo of, supposedly, einsteinium taken from an old book.

I highly doubt this is elemental einsteinium. It's probably the hydroxide, oxide or some halogenide (chloride?). Even with 1 kW/g power density, that's not the reason it should glow like this. The photo shows radioluminescence, not incadescence, so I think this is a compound in the quartz test tube.

Why am I saying this?

This is einsteinium, atomic number 99. Fermium, number 100, has only been prepared as a compound in picogram amounts. Heavier elements have only been prepared as a certain number of atoms mixed into those neutron targets, later dissolved into a solution and you know they're there because of the statistical analysis of the properties of radiation emanating from the sample (all kinds of atoms are inside, decaying like mad).

Even with island of stability, we won't be able to do much better than fermium. These things will forever be out of our reach, unless we figure out a way to stabilize macroscopic amounts of atoms, which is science fiction and nothing says it will ever be anything else.

[Kryten]

Fermium, number 100, has only been prepared as a compound in picogram amounts. Heavier elements have only been prepared as a certain number of atoms mixed into those neutron targets, later dissolved into a solution and you know they're there because of the statistical analysis of the properties of radiation emanating from the sample (all kinds of atoms are inside, decaying like mad).

While most of the post is correct, elements above z=100 (Fermium) can't be produced simply through neutron bombardment, making the situation even worse. You have to fuse heavy ions together, and above a certain point you would need to use ions that are themselves superheavy elements. The likelihood of these fusion reactions is extremely low, and in many cases targets have to be used that are themselves highly unstable. A good example is the synthesis of element 117; the total process, including synthesis of the Bk¹⁴⁹ target from scratch, took a year and a half. They detected three element-117 atoms, and if the hadn't by that point they'd have had to stop the experiment due to decay of the target (half-life~a year).

[DaveofDefeat]

Sure you could, if you had the power of a supernova laying around.

[Brotoro]

When hoping to build super-heavy elements in a fusion reactor, you'll also run into the problem that at the very high temperatures required to get the nuclei moving fast enough (that's the 'thermo' in thermonuclear fusion) to overcome the Coulomb repulsion of these heavy nuclei you want to fuse, you are going to reach temperatures where the energies of the photons in your plasma are high enough to break apart the nuclei.

This photodissociation is important in the interior of very high mass stars -- the silicon fusion stage, for instance, does not involve fusing silicon nuclei together, but instead involves the fusion of silicon nuclei with helium nuclei that result from the photodissociation of other silicon nuclei. And as the iron core resulting from silicon burning contracts and is heated even more, it is the photodissociation of the iron nuclei (which ABSORBS energy) that leads to the core collapse and type II supernova.

The r-process of synthesizing very heavy nuclei during a supernova explosions does not run into this problem because the neutrons have no electric charge and are therefore not stopped by the Coulomb barrier.

The methods recently used by researchers to make super-heavy nuclei (such as element 115, for example) use an accelerator to speed up Calcium nuclei to the point where, rarely, one of them in the beam can fuse together with an Americium nucleus in the target to make a nucleus of element 115.

Edited February 5, 2014 by Brotoro

[John Crichton]

Fusion in stars runs on Hydrogen which is then converted in to Helium. These elements get heavier and heavier as the star uses it's fuel. At iron the fusion process absorbs energy rather than releasing it. If there was a fusion reactor and we gave the reaction enough power, could we create any element on the periodic table? This is Theoretical and the energy requirements would be ridiculous.

Theoretically? Probably yes. Practically, we simply don't have the necessary technology and power.

[lajoswinkler]

While most of the post is correct, elements above z=100 (Fermium) can't be produced simply through neutron bombardment, making the situation even worse. You have to fuse heavy ions together, and above a certain point you would need to use ions that are themselves superheavy elements. The likelihood of these fusion reactions is extremely low, and in many cases targets have to be used that are themselves highly unstable. A good example is the synthesis of element 117; the total process, including synthesis of the Bk¹⁴⁹ target from scratch, took a year and a half. They detected three element-117 atoms, and if the hadn't by that point they'd have had to stop the experiment due to decay of the target (half-life~a year).

True, I forgot about that part. Mendelevium (Z=101) was made by alpha particle bombardment of ²⁵³Es.