Silent Hunter
Well-known member
Well, no, the entire page isn't relevant to the question asked.
What natural process will strip isotopes of their electrons rendering the assumption that the decay rates are constant to be invalid?
Aside from a basic chemistry primmer… perhaps this is what you are referring to :idunno::
| Decay Rates. Each radioisotope has a half-life—the time it takes 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 from- 427°F to + 4,500°F produces 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, we knew as far back as 1971 that high pressure could increase decay rates very slightly for at least 14 isotopes.([15]. H. P. Hahn et al., “Survey on the Rate Perturbation of Nuclear Decay,” Radiochimica Acta, Vol. 23, 1976, pp. 23–37. A few decay rates increase by 0.2% at a static pressure of about 2,000 atmospheres, the pressure existing 4.3 miles below the Earth’s surface. [See G. T. Emery, “Perturbation of Nuclear Decay Rates,” Annual Review of Nuclear Science, Vol. 22, 1972, pp. 165–202.] In another static experiment, decay rates increased by 1.0% at pressures corresponding to 930-mile depths inside the Earth. [See Lin-gun Liu and Chih-An Huh, “Effect of Pressure on the Decay Rate of 7Be,” Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Vol. 180, 2000, pp. 163–167.] Obviously, static pressures do not significantly accelerate radioactive decay.) 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 to measure 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 are similarly affected. This may be an electrical effect or a consequence of neutrinos[20] flowing from the Sun. Major corporations hold patents for electrical devices that on a small scale accelerate alpha, beta, and gamma decay, thereby decontaminating hazardous nuclear wastes. An interesting patent awarded to William A. Barker is described as follows:[21] When a Van de Graaff generator generates 50,000 – 500,000 volts across radioactive material for at least 30 minutes, alpha, beta, and gamma particles sometimes escape. This large negative voltage is thought to lower each nucleus’ energy barrier. While these electrical devices can safely decontaminate hazardous radioactive material by accelerating decay rates, they are expensive and have decontaminated only small samples. Many nuclear scientists do not understand why they work, but a few pages you will. Clearly, the common belief that decay rates are constant in all conditions is false. 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 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? |
Hardly a smoking gun.
Far from being rickety constructs full of sources of error and unproven assumptions, radiometric dating techniques are actually on a very sound theoretical and procedural basis. To destroy that basis, creationists would have to destroy much of chemistry and a lot of atomic physics too. The periodic table is the bedrock on which modern chemistry is built. The constancy of the velocity of light is a basic axiom of Einstein’s theories of relativity, theories which have passed every test physicists could devise. The constancy of radioactive decay rates follows from quantum mechanics, which has also passed every test physicists can create. In short, everything we know in chemistry and in physics points to radiometric dating as being a viable and valuable method of calculating the ages of igneous and metamorphosed igneous rocks.
To charge thousands of chemists all over the world with mass incompetence also seems to be beyond the bounds of reason. Radiometric dating has been used ever more widely for the past forty years. The dates produced have gotten steadily more precise as lab techniques and instrumentation has been improved. There is simply no logical reason to throw this entire field of science out the window. There is no reason to believe the theory is faulty, or to believe that thousands of different chemists could be so consistently wrong in the face of every conceivable test.
Further, radiometric dates can be checked by other dating techniques. When they are, the dates almost always agree within the range of expected error. In cases where the dates don’t agree, it’s always been found that some natural factor was present which selectively affected one or the other dating method being used.
Creationists are forced to challenge radiometric dating because it stands as the most powerful and most damning evidence against their idea of a young Earth. But in the end, they are reduced to saying that "radiometric dating must be wrong, because we know it happened this way." And that is not a scientific position. If theory says it happened this way and evidence says it happened that way, theory must be revised to fit the evidence. Creationists won’t do that. That reveals creation ‘science’ to be a sham, and not any kind of science at all. - http://answersinscience.org/RadiometricDating-Woolf.htm
... large changes to a half-life require elaborate, expensive, high-energy equipment (e.g. particle accelerators, nuclear reactors, ion traps). Therefore, outside of specialized labs, we can say that as a good approximation radioactive decay half-lives don't change. For instance, carbon dating and geological radiometric dating are so accurate because decay half-lives in nature are so close to constant. - https://wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2015/0...lf-life-of-a-radioactive-material-be-changed/
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