Nuclear Isomers

A typical reaction energy in chemistry, a few electron volt per atom, is almost negligible compared to the energy that can be stored in the atom's nucleus: a nuclear weapon that is light enough to be carried in an airplane or on a rocket half-way around the world can have the explosive energy of a million tons of TNT. It is therefore understandable that forward-thinking planners remain interested in innovative ways to make nuclear energy storage useful. At one time, up to the early 2000s, nuclear isomers seemed to be particularly promising. Nuclear isomers are meta-stable nuclei whose energy can be liberated by electromagnetic radiation, in addition to standard nuclear decay modes that could free up energy.

A vastly exaggerated (and, in our opintion erroneous) view of nuclear isomers' utility, comes up by googling for 'hafnium controversy'. One early hit is a Wikipedia page, written almost exclusively by a Prof. Carl Collins, now deceased. Before his death, critical comments and corrections to this 'hafnium controversy' page were almost immediately deleted by Prof. Collins, who thereby violated the premise on which Wikipedia is based, viz., correction of errors by the larger community.

We agree nuclear isomers are very interesting from a pure physics standpoint, but we do not think that nuclear isomers have any practical application as energetic materials. While in principle it may be possible that some other nuclear isomer has a vastly larger cross section for liberating energy without a corresponding decrease in its half-life due to other processes, we don't expect this to be the case. Some technical discussion of these matters are in the following publications:

For an account of nuclear isomers from a scientific perspective your best bet is to google for 'Carroll nuclear isomer'. This brings up many publications by J. J. Carroll, P. M. Walker, and their colleagues that are well-written, insightful, and, most important in this controversial field, scientifically reputable.