Fission Nuclear Reactions of Medium-Weight Chemical Elements: Implications to Geochemistry
摘要
The geochemical evolution of Earth’s crust, ocean, and atmosphere is closely correlated to the occurrence of major tectonic events and due to low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR). By looking at the chemical evolution of the Earth’s crust over the past 4.5 billion years, one can observe sharp decrements in certain heavier elements, such as Fe, Ni, Mg, Ca, and increments in other lighter elements, such as Al, Si, Na, K, C, and O. Notably, these chemical discontinuities in the Earth’s composition have been found to occur during the periods of formation and of most intense activity of the tectonic plates. This suggests that LENR, in the form of phono-fission reactions, triggered by tectonic and seismic events, might explain the elemental changes at the planetary scale. Similar suggestions involving the fission of medium-weight atoms are proposed to explain the transmutations detected on the fracture surfaces of rock specimens after crushing failure in the laboratory. In this chapter, we make use of the enhanced version of Cook’s lattice model, presented in Chap. 23 , in order to investigate on the potential fission of the atomic nuclei involved in the geochemical evolution. The outcomes of these computational simulations provide new insights on the energy aspects behind the assumed fission reactions and on the expected fission fragments.