I was reading a random tidbit on the web, and someone claimed that a Russian nuclear experiment accidentally turned the reactor’s lead shielding into gold. Googling only turned up woo sites.
Anyone heard of this? Is it even possible?
This puts the woo-hoo! into mere woo.
It is possible to turn lead into gold via nuclear transmutation, where you add or subtract protons from an atom by nuclear interactions/radiation (no, I don’t personally understand that myself). So yes, it is certainly possible. Unfortunately, the cost of the energy input required far outweighs the value of the gold produced.
This link references both Glenn Seaborg’s and the Soviet accidental instance of this near lake Baikal, neither of which I could quickly get confirmation on, so take with a lump of salt. This wikipedia page goes into more detail about nuclear transmutation in general
IIRC, the gold made that way is radioactive too. Paging Auric Goldfinger.
The wikipedia article Gold says that gold has been synthesized by bombarding mercury with neutrons, and adds that it’s possible to start with either mercury or platinum. It doesn’t mention that it’s possible to start with lead, and I’m dubious that (a) it’s possible to produce gold by irradiating lead, (b) that even if so, it’s possible to do this accidentally rather than by a carefully designed experiment, and (c ) that anyone would discover that this had happened if it were accidental, since the amount of gold produced would be microscopically small.
It absolutely is possible. No need to be dubious. It would be achieved via neutron capture, and yes, you’d only get a minute amount and it would be radioactive. And the cost of producing it, even if you could recover any of it, would far outstrip the value of the gold itself
That said, gold into lead is easier, though perhaps equally pointless.
others have already covered how it can be done (and the downsides.) Turning lead into gold on any large scale has been woo for millennia; alchemists 2,000 years ago were trying to do that. IIRC it was mostly because lead and gold were both about equally “heavy” so they thought it should be easy.
Lead is much less dense than gold, at around 11 for lead, vs. 19 for gold. There are very few things that even come close to gold in density, and of those, only tungsten (which was not known in antiquity) is not itself precious.
I’m doubtful it’s energetically possible since to turn lead into gold you would have to remove enough protons and neutrons from a lead nucleus to have a gold nucleus left, and the overall binding energy requirements would be greater. Lead doesn’t spontaneously decay into gold.
Apropos to nothing. A long time ago at a place I used to work that did, among other things, geodetics and control surveys, there was an in-house computer programs that converted plan bearings to astronomical units. The program was called pb2au.