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
