Posted: Jun 27, 2011 10:15 pm
atrasicarius wrote:rainbow wrote:Sure. The 'reaction' is not however supposed to be between nickel and nickel(endothermic), but between nickel and hydrogen(possibly exothermic)
...but then they're not exactly showing the reaction mechanism here, so who knows?
IIRC, if the end result is anything larger than iron, the reaction is endothermic, so it shouldn't matter. Iron is the ideal state that nuclear reactions always want to move towards.
You would have to end up with an isotope of Cu with a greater binding energy per nucleon than the starting isotope of Ni. As you say, the details of the reaction don't matter at all. Only the end result matters with respect to it being exothermic or endothermic.