Chemically and Electrically Assisted Nuclear Reactions and YEC

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@stcordova

This is well known and was a embarrassment to paleontologists who were telling physicists this would be a good source for their various experiments requiring vast amounts of carbon-14-free sources.

Wait, you’re saying physicists had no idea of how to assess how much C14 there should be in ancient carbon materials, so they went and asked paleontologists because they couldn’t do the calculation themselves?

ROFL. No mate I’m pretty sure nuclear physicists were perfectly capable of calculating how much C14 there should be in ancient carbon materials if there has been no contamination or in situ production.

It did turn out, though, that they neglected to consider in situ production.

But what an unbelievably fatuous talking point to suggest that paleontologists have somehow embarrassingly mislead the physics community.

Contamination and radioactive origin are ruled out, and I’ve examined this in detail.

That’s flat out incorrect. In fact I have personally made you aware of an entire chapter in a PhD thesis, devoted to estimating the amount of in situ production of C14 in ancient organic carbon, due to local sources of radioactivity in the surrounding crust. I believe I wrote a post in another thread on this forum about the same subject. Here it is: Snelling: Recent Carbon Dates for Cretaceous Wood - #10 by Rumraket

@Rumraket

Of course he’s likely to be quite wrong about that, no matter how strongly he insists this isn’t the case.

But even were it the case, in situ C14 generation is a known fact. It has been shown that even several hundred million year old samples contain non-neglible amounts of intrinsic C14. That C14, however, turns out to be continously generated by (among other things) neutron radiation from nearby radioactive elements in the rocklayers between which the carbon of interest(be it coal, diamond, natural gas, tars, crude oil or whatever) is found.

It was something of a mystery for a time why such old carbon sources contained C14 as it was thought (correctly) that the cosmic radiation responsible for generating atmospheric C14 could not penetrate the crust to the depths in which coal, oil, diamond and so on is found. However, in calculating the expected C14 contents of ground fossil hydrocarbons, geologists had apparently neglected to consider intrinsic neutron radiation generated by the slow continous decay of radioactive isotopes usually found in the types of rocks where one also find fossil hydrocarbons(1):

A PhD thesis(1) was written a few years ago in which it is shown that intrinsic C14 production by neutron radiation is unavoidable and in fact does fully account for the observed levels of C14 in (for example) fossil hydrocarbons:

This could account for the misleading carbon ages Snelling declares with great and irrefutable conviction couldn’t possibly be due to contamination in his “carbon dated” fossils.

(1) Resconi, E. (2001). Measurements with the upgraded counting test facility CTF-2 of the solar neutrino experiment Borexin.