Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1477036-20130529030726/@comment-1298029-20150507222918

Don't worry about it, some of these people have zero physics sense. E.g. quoting from above, "Lets not forget that palladium is METAL that was powering arc reactor at first, if one metel can power arc reactor then why another can't ?". The poor grammar aside, only someone who knows absolutely nothing about physics, chemistry, and/or engineering could seriously say something like that. Gee, why does plutonium (a metal) power a nuclear reactor, while iron (also a metal) does not? Maybe they're not the same thing?

You can hardly have Tesseract energy in something that never came into any sort of contact with the thing. Nobody ever understood the Tesseract enough to replicate its effects; all the weapons were, AFAIK, just charged from the Tesseract as if they were batteries charged from the wall. At least that's the way I understood it. In any case, Tony built the original mini reactor with nothing more than some conventional weapon parts, and a very shoddy workshop. I can't see any Tesseract magic in there.

As for the reactor's mechanism, I found this:

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-theory-concept-behind-the-Miniature-Arc-Reactor-built-by-Tony-Stark

written by a real-world engineer based on an actual process, with only a bit of sci-fi license.

According to that, the palladium acts as a source of free electrons which are circulated around the reactor's ring, then collide again with the palladium, catalyzing its beta-decay into silver and rhodium. The reactor does not radiate because the radiation essentially loops between the core and the ring inside it, but it does convert the palladium core into rhodium and silver, which fits both the need to swap cores and the apparently incurable poisoning that gave Tony varicose veins on the chest: too much silver in the bloodstream shades skin blue, and rhodium is both toxic and so rare that the effects of its toxicity are practically unknown, which would explain why Tony says doctors don't know how to help him. The question remains why the metals from the spent core cannot be isolated from Tony's system, but maybe it has to do with the reactor being right in his damn chest.

About any metal powering the reactor: not really, you need pretty special properties. Whatever the new element is, it must have similar properties to allow for an equivalent reaction, only without the production of toxic by-products. Apparently, the new metal also has higher potential power output.

As for the reactor's bluish glow, in the case of this mechanism it would be Cherenkov radiation, which occurs when energetic photons pass into a medium with a relatively lower speed of light (such as heavy water used for reaction containment around nuclear reactors vs. the vacuum inside the reactor itself).