Patents have been awarded to major corporations for electrical devices that claim to accelerate alpha, beta, and gamma decay and thereby decontaminate hazardous nuclear wastes. However, they have not been shown to work on a large scale. An interesting patent awarded to William A. Barker is described as follows:21
Radioactive material is placed in or on a Van de Graaff generator where an electric potential of 50,000 – 500,000 volts is applied for at least 30 minutes. This large negative voltage is thought to lower each nucleus’ energy barrier. Thus alpha, beta, and gamma particles rapidly escape radioactive nuclei.
While these electrical devices may accelerate decay rates, a complete theoretical understanding of them does not yet exist, they are expensive, and they act only on small samples. However, the common belief that decay rates are constant in all conditions should now be discarded.
Creation Science
They have no answer.....they acknowledge that the decay rates would have had to have been sped up....yet they do not address the amount of heat and energy released and how that would have affected the planet.
That is a huge leap to state the constant decay rates should be discarded.
This is not science this is mostly suppostition and conjecture.
Decay Rates. Each radioisotope has a half-life—the time it would take for half of a large sample of that isotope to decay at today’s rate. Half-lives range from less than a billionth of a second to many millions of trillions of years.
14 Most attempts to change decay rates have failed. For example, changing temperatures between -427°F and +4,500°F has produced no measurable change in decay rates. Nor have accelerations of up to 970,000 g, magnetic fields up to 45,000 gauss, or changing elevations or chemical concentrations.
However, it was learned as far back as 1971 that high pressure could increase decay rates very slightly for at least 14 isotopes.
15 Under great pressure, electrons (especially from the innermost shell) are squeezed closer to the nucleus, making electron capture more likely. Also, electron capture rates for a few radioisotopes change in different chemical compounds.
16
Beta decay rates can increase dramatically when atoms are stripped of all their electrons. In 1999, Germany’s Dr. Fritz Bosch showed that, for the rhenium atom, this “decreases its half-life more than a billionfold—from 42-billion years to 33 years.”
17 The more electrons removed, the more rapidly neutrons expel electrons (beta decay) and become protons. This effect was previously unknown, because only electrically neutral atoms had been used in measuring half-lives.
18
Decay rates for silicon-32 (32Si), chlorine-36 (36Cl), manganese-54 (54Mn), and radium-226 (226Ra) depend slightly on Earth’s distance from the Sun.
19 They decay, respectively, by beta, alpha, and electron capture. Other radioisotopes seem to be similarly affected. This may be an electrical effect or a consequence of neutrinos
20 flowing from the Sun.
Patents have been awarded to major corporations for electrical devices that claim to accelerate alpha, beta, and gamma decay and thereby decontaminate hazardous nuclear wastes. However, they have not been shown to work on a large scale. An interesting patent awarded to William A. Barker is described as follows:21
Radioactive material is placed in or on a Van de Graaff generator where an electric potential of 50,000 – 500,000 volts is applied for at least 30 minutes. This large negative voltage is thought to lower each nucleus’ energy barrier. Thus alpha, beta, and gamma particles rapidly escape radioactive nuclei.
While these electrical devices may accelerate decay rates, a complete theoretical understanding of them does not yet exist, they are expensive, and they act only on small samples. However, the common belief that decay rates are constant in all conditions should now be discarded.
We can think of a large sample of a radioisotope as a slowly-leaking balloon with a meter that measures the balloon’s total leakage since it was filled. Different radioisotopes have different leakage rates, or half-lives. (Stable isotopes do not leak; they are not radioactive.)
Some people may think that a balloon’s age can be determined by dividing the balloon’s total leakage by its leakage rate today. Here, we will address more basic issues: What “pumped up” all radioisotopes in the first place, and when did it happen? Did the pumping process rapidly produce considerable initial leakage—billions of years’ worth, based on today’s slow leakage rates?
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