Can we separate heavy elements, say uranium or plutonium, into lighter elements, say hydrogen and helium? Can we combine elements like hydrogen and helium into uranium and plutonium?

How much effort, research, and dollars are being spent on these two practices?

One can imagine an infinite year life expectancy on Earth for all humans, animals, and plants if these two practices were perfected.

First you can talk to jesus, I think he can add subtract atoms at will !

posted by GreatTech
Can we separate heavy elements, say uranium or plutonium, into lighter elements, say hydrogen and helium? [Edited by Don W]

Others have already responded. May I add? Uranium is #92 on the Periodic Chart. The last of the naturally occurring elements. Or so we thought. As the early work on nuclear bombs progressed - the Manhattan Project - it was discovered there is some plutonium (element #94), as well as its precursor, neptunium, #93, found in nature. That is, naturally occurring. One poster pointed out the normal life of an average star produces all the elements up to and including iron. #26 on the chart. Elements above iron on the chart are made only in super-novas. That is, exploding stars as opposed to dying stars. Because our bodies contain many elements above iron, some evolutionists say we are products of exploding stars.

The rarest element is astatine, # 85, symbol, “At,” estimated to be not more than 25 gm (.9 oz.) on the planet. The most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, by weight, is oxygen. Element #8. The element hydrogen, OTOH, is Number 10 of the most abundant, by weight, but element #1. We’re talking about the earth’s crust, not necessarily the whole planet. The interior of the earth may contain a sphere about 1,500 miles across, made up of molten nickel and iron. From hence cometh our magnetic field. Without which there would be no life on this planet. Element #14, silicon - sand - is number two in abundance, and element # 13 aluminum - but aluminium in England - is the 3rd most abundant element. Iron is the 4th most abundant element.

Alchemy was the medieval effort to transmute elements. Usually they were trying to make gold out of lead or some other so-called base metal. Copper, tin, etc. I suppose it is theocratically possible to do that, but it would cost much more than either gold or lead. I also suspect you could start with a ton of lead and end with an ounce of gold, too.

That is the current problem with the popular hydrogen gas solution to fossil fuel prices and contamination. Someone will say that you can break down water into oxygen and hydrogen with a 9 v. battery. Which is true. The problem is scale. The 9 v. battery will produce enough hydrogen to make a small “puff” when lighted with a match. The amount of hydrogen gas needed to run a motor car is so many orders of magnitude greater that it would take 100os of 9 v. batteries to get enough to run just a few minutes. Possible, but impractical. There is no cheap way to replace gasoline, and no way at all that will ever be cheaper.

Oops. Yeah, porky is right, I must have misread something in the original question. Fusing hydrogen and helium into uranium isn't going to happen. Fusion itself is possible, though, for certain.

I thought we had adopted a "convention" that we'd use 13.4 billion years as the time since the Big Bang.

New York Times for May 26, 1999
Hubble Telescope Yields Data for Recalculating Age of Universe
In an analysis of recent observations and other research, Charles H. Lineweaver, an astrophysicist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, put the age for the universe at 13.4 billion years, plus or minus 1.6 billion. The estimate took into account low values for the mass density of the universe and the presence of a "missing energy" source like the cosmological constant.

Other links
www.space.com/scienceastronomy/earth_age_040817.html - 45k - Jun 4, 2006 -
www.evolutionpages.com/age_universe_astro.htm -
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/352563.stm

Thanks for the link, Liberal1984. I never knew why it was that iron was the element at which stars started collapsing. When I was taking a thermodynamics class for my engineering degree, my prof mentioned that part about iron. When I asked him after class why it was that when fusion went past iron that the star collapsed, he didn't know. The explanation in that link makes perfect sense, though.