Thread:Charles Murray/@comment-47205-20150418092112

Of course, since it's a user subpage, it turns out it doesn't have an actual talk page. So here's a summary of what we discussed:
 * It's presumably a metal yet the picture is of a transparent crystal. This is possible if the plasma frequency of the metal is low enough, implying a low free electron density, but that constrains its chemical properties so you may want to use a different picture or say that it's of crystalline ansite.
 * A basic outline for the reaction, both for andasium → ansite and ansite → waste, is what we want to figure out: for plot purposes, you want it to be [a] easy to aquire and use and [b] a one-time release of energy.
 * [a] means that tradtional nuclear reactions are out. Radioactive decay triggered by high temperatures would work, but that seems implausible enough on its own, let alone when combined with the requirement that pure andasium is unreactive while ansite is the fuel.
 * If it's a chemical reaction, synthesising andasium itself will be hugely inefficient, as it would involve putting energy in to fuse the nucleus together, but only the chemical energy will be released. That doesn't really affect anything on the page except for making ansite synthesis even less practical.
 * A reversible reaction seems to be excluded by [b], but could work if the endothermic process occurs naturally, so then ansite is harvested or synthesised rather than processed from harvested/synthesised andasium.
 * If it's a non-reversible reaction, the andasium → ansite process should be a different kind of mechanism to that of ansite → waste, lest the process of ansite formation (which will have a high activation energy) accidentally lead to its combustion (which must necessarily have a lower activation energy as per [a]).
 * Thermal decomposition of ansite requires ansite to be a fairly complicated compound so that it doesn't decompose to pure andasium, or another product that can be easily returned to ansite, again as per [b]. 