What makes pure potassium more reactive in water than sodium?
Saturday, June 27th, 2009 at
9:39 PM
I was watching mythbusters and they were re-enacting a McGuyver episode and trying blow a hole in a wall with sodium and water. When the sodium wouldn’t work they tried potassium and the mini explosion was bigger. What is it about potassium that makes it more reactive?
Its it it’s molecular weight, its electron configuration?….
p.s neither worked and they ended up using C4 lol
Filed under: Water
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it’s sort of a complicated chem answer, but the short answer is one atom of potassium is bigger than one atom of sodium which means it will exchange electrons more freely and is thus more reactive…as you head down that column of the periodic table, each successive element is more reactive