A scientific research group named Actinides claims to have invented a process, which they call MBT, for transmuting uranium, thorium ore or nuclear waste into useful, valuable chemical elements on an industrial scale. They held a press conference in Geneva on 21st of June 2016 and claim to have patented the process in Russia.
Authors of the invention developed an industrial method of biochemical elements transmutation. That is, the artificial obtaining of certain chemical elements and their isotopes from other chemical elements with biochemical method. Without need of the reactors, cyclotrons, without use of enriched Uranium, heavy water, etc. Safe for environment and personnel. The method is possible to use for 100% deactivation of nuclear waste.
The method and the results are verified and confirmed by hundreds of tests on modern equipment. Analyses were carried out by independent experts - chemists - analysts, professors. Acts of analyzes available. The results are patented by Russian Patent Department, patent RU 2563511 dated 25 August 2015.
We have conducted more than 2000 experiments, and got stable results.
The method leads to obtaining various valuable and most valuable elements and isotopes, demanded in energy, medicine, industry. Among them Francium, Radium, Actinium, Protactinium, Americium, Berkelium, Californium, and various other isotopes. All of them in convenient form, favorable for separation and purification. Technology is ready for immediate industrial application. Our research was conducted with private money and the technology is 100% owned by the group. We can obtain these elements not in milligrams as in traditional method, but in hundreds of grams and even a Kilograms. Safe and extremely cost effective.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @03:37AM
So this is how it happens. The Eastern Coalition invents replicator technology first, and the American Empire bombs them in a jealous rage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @05:43AM
Agreed. I read this with extreme skepticism. Francium is so rare that the entire Earth has a very very tiny, almost unobtainable, amount of it. The only processes that can alter the identity of an atom are nuclear (fission, fusion, radioactive decay, and particle acceleration), these people are telling me a biochemical process is responsible for producing large amounts of Francium? Really? How? Seeing is believing.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @06:28AM
Skeptics like you retard progress.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @06:34AM
Unlike you gullible morons.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @11:28AM
Skeptics like you, retard. Progress?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MrGuy on Friday July 01 2016, @03:41AM
Name me one or two of the "independent experts" who verified this and maybe I'll consider it remotely plausible.
Probably not, though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @03:45AM
I smell an investment scam. I predict 'more funding needed' within the next year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @06:07AM
Leak news report... "the waste product of this process is one of the most stable heavy metals known... gold ... as it has no further proclivity to disintegrate to a more stable atom."
Leak news report... "Approximately 1,000 tons of nuclear material from Fukushima will be processed... funds acquired by selling the gold so generated as a waste product will be used to finance the project."
Leak news report... "Soon gold will be about as commonplace as stainless steel, however, its a poor metal for any mechanical use and will likely find use as a more economical replacement for solder."
Buy gold on the dip while the banker suits are in a panic.
(Score: 4, Informative) by butthurt on Friday July 01 2016, @07:02AM
In the real world, 56Fe is the most stable isotope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_binding_energy [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @09:41AM
Name me one or two of the "independent experts" who verified this
Have you ever heard of Boris [wikipedia.org] and Natasha [wikipedia.org]?
(Score: 3, Funny) by EvilSS on Friday July 01 2016, @05:49PM
Yea I'm pretty sure the only matter they are transmuting these isotopes into is FeCAl
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday July 01 2016, @09:10PM
Well, it could be fraud, or it could be a horrendous job of translation. I don't see any other possibilities. And the biological extraction of transuranics seems a bit implausible. Even the biochemical extraction would see dubious, as would concentrating them in a pure form in sizable chunks. (My estimate is that 5 pounds of any transuranic would degrade into reaction products too quickly to be useful for any purpose, except the versions that would become hot enough to melt. But I don't know that much about transuranics.)
That said, the biological extraction of various elements from waste is a known process that often works. It's not environmentally benign except in comparison to not doing so. And it usually isn't economic. It's environmentally benign in comparison to chemical refining or electro-chemical separation, but it also doesn't do the complete job, as the result is mixed with the bacteria that are doing the job, which need to be removed. Still, it's been used to good effect on, e.g., low grade gold ore, when the price was high enough. (I don't follow this, so I don't know how often that happens, or even whether it's now become standard practice.)
If this isn't fraud, then it sounds like an extremely poor translation of an improved method of biological extraction hyped up by a marketing exec who didn't understand either what he was talking about or it's limitations.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by Chromium_One on Friday July 01 2016, @03:49AM
If you're gonna scam like this, at least get someone to proof your ad copy.
When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Absolutely.Geek on Friday July 01 2016, @03:50AM
It has taken hundreds of years but finally alchemy is a real science.
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday July 01 2016, @05:26PM
Oh, come on, it was only 27 years ago that the great scientists Fleischmann and Pons discovered Cold Fusion. That's not all that long a gap between that and this discovery of Cold Fission. Got to hand it to biology, must be some real clever bacteria that can accelerate fission of radioactive elements.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @08:10PM
Acidithiobacillus [wikipedia.org] was one species mentioned in the paper (thiobacillus ferrooxidans, but Wikipedia sent me redirecting elsewhere). I was hoping somebody else besides jcross had skimmed the paper and could say whether or not they might have found some quantum weirdness in thiobacillus bacteria that causes protons to move between atoms.
It definitely seems "pics or it didn't happen," though.
Another possibility is that nothing is being transmuted. Acidithiobacillus may just be good at leeching rare elements from samples. Biohydrometallurgy [wikipedia.org] was linked from my first link.
I'm not a biologist so I have no clue.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday July 02 2016, @04:58AM
It's not as extraordinary a claim as Cold Fusion. Nuclear power plants are designed to do exactly that at modest temperatures. Fission can be done at room temperature. Nevertheless, there are all kinds of other problems with the claims.
The main reason most nations do not have nuclear weapons is that radioactive elements, everything above bismuth, are extraordinarily rare and diffuse. Takes an awful lot of work to gather and concentrate. Where could bacteria have evolved to obtain energy from radioactive elements, what place could possibly have enough material for that? Maybe the center of the Earth? Caves that concentrate a daughter product of uranium decay, radon?
Another big problem is that the ionizing radiation these elements emit is extremely hostile to life. Some bacteria have evolved resistance to radiation. But the summary mentions francium, which is extremely unstable, half life of at most a mere 22 minutes. Francium can't be concentrated without it generating so much heat from rapid radioactive decay that it would vaporize itself.
(Score: 1) by nikit2h on Wednesday July 13 2016, @12:02AM
only traces of francium on the graf, nothing in the table
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @03:58AM
Stop making me think people will accept thorium energy. It's too painful to be baited over and over.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @04:09AM
Russian scams should stay in Russia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @04:12AM
That's it! Put the Iron Curtain back in place, rebuild the Berlin Wall, etc etc etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @04:49PM
We're going to build a wall and make East Germany pay for it!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @04:15AM
Zefram Cochrane was lucky the internet was destroyed by the time he invented warp drive, so he didn't have to read any of your snide remarks. He was already alcoholic and depressed enough about his crappy life.
Start up the Juke Box!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @04:19AM
http://youtu.be/U4WiyxXpyZc [youtu.be]
http://cd09.64.aac.jango.com/12/06/33/1206336870.m4a [jango.com]
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/steppenwolf/magiccarpetride.html [azlyrics.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by stormwyrm on Friday July 01 2016, @04:19AM
Everything we know about nuclear physics says that what they are doing is supposed to be impossible. An atom's element is determined by the number of protons it has in its atomic nucleus, and the number of neutrons is also important in determining whether an atomic nucleus is stable, otherwise it will decay into some other element that is. So you have to fudge with the protons and neutrons in a nucleus to effect a transmutation.
The only known way to change a neutron into a proton or vice-versa is via the weak interaction, which generally involves a lepton like an electron or positron interacting with a proton or neutron via beta decay reactions. Needless to say, this requires electrons with MeV energies at least, and you don't have anything like those in chemical reactions. Those energies are way beyond the tens of eV in stable chemical reactions.
To add protons or neutrons from a nucleus or to remove them from one is even harder, as you have to get a proton or neutron you want to add (or an agglomeration thereof) close enough to the nucleus for the strong nuclear force to take hold. For protons you have to get one of those very, very near the target atomic nucleus, fighting against electromagnetic repulsion the positive charges of the target nucleus and the proton all the way, until the strong force wins, at about 1 femtometre (10−15 metres). The energies involved in trying to do that are in the tens to hundreds of MeV, way beyond chemistry. Neutrons have no electrical charge, so there's no fighting electromagnetism there, but how the hell are you going to move a particle that is electrically neutral close to your target nucleus? And where do you get lots of neutrons for that matter? The only known ways of making them are from nuclear reactors. It does not seem to be possible to easily remove a proton or neutron from a nucleus, the only known way to make a large nucleus smaller is to induce alpha decay or by nuclear fission. I don't know if the former is even possible with the known laws of physics.
The site has the following:
The only way I could think of this as being even remotely plausible is if you created chemical bonds between alpha or beta-emitting radioisotopes and other elements and waited until their relatively close proximity effected some form of transmutation as beta particles (electrons/positrons) or alpha particles (helium nuclei) from the radioisotope element hit the nuclei of the other element and effected a transmutation. I can't see how this process can be stable or even practical.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @05:48AM
Or possible ...
(Score: 2) by TheB on Friday July 01 2016, @11:05AM
Could chemical bonds shape the electron shell and a particle beam of a specific energy level force a decay?
After reading the article I have no clue what they are talking about.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @01:27PM
I wonder if all those breathless CRISPR stories we get come off as just as obvious schemes when poorly translated to russian.
(Score: 2) by jcross on Friday July 01 2016, @01:32PM
We don't have to guess how they're claiming it's done. I'd be interested to hear your (or anyone else's) commentary on the patent.
PDF of English translation of Russian patent: http://bt-isotopes.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/PATENT_en.pdf [bt-isotopes.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 01 2016, @04:43AM
It uses "claim/claims" everywhere. Unfortunately, no media outlet seems to have taken notice of this presentation.
Here is a real uranium story: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08929882.2016.1184528 [tandfonline.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday July 01 2016, @06:06AM
It ain't April Fools so what is this obvious snake oil scam doing up?
Chemical processes simply do not have the capability to touch the nucleus of the atoms involved in a reaction. No. No way. Nope. Do not invest! Zero point energy is, if anything, more plausible than this. Leave this with the electric universe and other crackpot loons.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @01:51PM
It ain't April Fools so what is this obvious snake oil scam doing up?
This is an ACTUAL good laugh, not a forced one.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Friday July 01 2016, @06:11AM
if it was real, they would have already made some Francium and sold it. [about.com]
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday July 01 2016, @07:07AM
One can only assume they're moving on to make antimatter, strange matter, dark matter, and black holes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @09:46AM
You forgot "it won't matter" ;-)
(Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Friday July 01 2016, @08:46AM
Surely we're a technical enough group to have some
basic understanding of nuclear physics. This is so clearly bogus that it's an embarrassment to give it oxygen.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Demena on Friday July 01 2016, @09:08AM
They make no claim to transmutation that I can see. They are talking about the biological remediation of nuclear waste. This is entirely possible although I do not speak for their claims. Poster and commentators got it wrong. Please retitle or remove.
(Score: 3, Touché) by wonkey_monkey on Friday July 01 2016, @11:48AM
The word "transmutation" is all over their website.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Friday July 01 2016, @06:19PM
Biological remediation of nuclear waste is very very different than what the patent here is claiming. Those efforts have been focused on changing water soluble radionuclides into insoluble ones, mainly via REDOX reactions that occurring inside the studied microbe. This way the dangerous isotopes become much easier to remove from the environment as they precipitate out. The patent from this article is focused on actually modifying the nucleus of the elements involved to transmute them to new, more desirable elements. While I would love for this to be true, I have serious doubts. If it is true it would open up entirely new fields in microbiology and biochemistry.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @02:53PM
A little man in a bottle?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @04:14PM
yes, school book and wikipedia say that transmutation of
a element on the periodic table requires adding neutron, protons or change one into the other.
so stop and finish.
however, life is preeetty strange. for example there have been experiments were one petridish sample influenced another petridish sample even though they where for all purposes separated from each other.
one could assume that life can generate some kind of "field". also there was this one guy who said that if monkey on a remote island figure out something then other monkeys far away on the mainland suddenly figure out the same stuff (no internet required).
there are some parallels in human history about scientific discoveries.
one can argue that it all HAD to happen, calculus and jet engines and all...
maybe? there are more dimensions then just space and time and maybe in the very small space there are latent wormholes that "don't" work until some living cell make the correct shape and presto the separate "wormholes" accumulate enough in one point to start working?
of course, if this claim WERE true then this would shine a very nasty light on the nuclear fission industry. who is to say that "somehow" life-force-energy is not embedded in the same space as the space that harbors fissioning atoms and thus act like a life-energy-force drain/sink?
also, francium is very rare because it's a super conductor at room temperatur ^_^
p.s. there was soemthing about tachyons but i forgot about that ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @04:51PM
Is this electric universe?
(Score: 2) by joshuajon on Friday July 01 2016, @04:39PM
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday July 01 2016, @08:42PM
There have been documented cases of life forms doing the seemingly impossible (chemosynthesis, bending space-time). This could be one of those heretofore unknown species using a previously undiscovered process. My only question is where are they going to get enough spice? [wikipedia.org] Uh, I mean spice. [wikipedia.org]
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @10:48PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corentin_Louis_Kervran [wikipedia.org]
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=biological+transmutation [duckduckgo.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @11:22PM
What BS. I bet they accept donations via bitcoin..