Firestorm v1: Origin

DC's first volume of Firestorm was ended prematurely after only 5 solo issues. The young story was finished as a Flash backup. 
I must tip my hat to Conway and Milgrom for creating one of DC's most powerful characters. Despite being under used and under appreciated Firestorm has been at the heart of big stories, most recently Forever Evil. 

Firestorm is one of the more unique characters in all of comics since fuses two people together to become the super being. Professor Martin Stein and high schooler Ronnie Raymond. This unlikely pair were merged together by an explosion at a nuclear power plant. Ronnie went to the plant to protest the plant and a terrorist group planted a bomb. Ronnie and Stein were in proximity of one another at the time of the explosion. This somehow (by defying all science) created a human-fusion reaction to create Firestorm. 
As Stein and Ronnie are fused as Firestorm, Ronnie has complete control over the body and Stein merely has a back seat. Stein is there primarily to aid in teaching Ronnie the science he needs to know to wield his awesome powers. Stein being a nuclear physicist, he knows a few things about science and manipulating subatomic particles. 

Firestorms powers give him the ability to transmutate matter! What is transmutation, you ask? Well, it is the transformation of one element to another. This is was alchemists tried to do for hundreds of years by turning lead into gold. Does transmutation happen? Yes! Nuclear reaction cause elements to to break down (fission) or combine (fusion) to make new elements. This is the whole basis for our nuclear energy, the controlled reaction of Uranium-238 into many different nuclei until it stabilizes into an isotope of lead. There are several types of radioactive decay, however, not all of them result in transmutation. You can look below and see the decay of U-238 and the types of radioactive decay.

Firestorm is called the Nuclear Man and it seems he is powered by nuclear reactions. How can he obtain so much power? Nuclear reaction are the most powerful reactions that we can yield. Fission, the weakest, and Fusion, the strongest, give off immense amounts of energy. The energy given off is due to mass defect, which is the mass lost to energy during the nuclear reaction. The strong force, which holds the nucleus of an atom together, wields an incredible amount of energy as the nucleus is extremely dense and houses a high concentration of protons. However, by changing the amount of neutrons in a nucleus it causes a change in the strong force by weakening it enough to make the nucleus unstable. Unstable nuclei is why radioactive elements exist. 

Firestorm, somehow, causes nuclear changes in atoms to transmutate them from one element to another. Changing neutrons can cause an atoms nucleus to be unstable but it is the number of protons that give an atom its identity. Carbon has 6 protons in its nucleus, oxygen has 8 and uranium has 92. It is unclear of Firestorms method of causing transmutation. Is he causing nuclear decay? Is he, somehow, chaining subatomic particles at will? Both? Neither? It is unclear exactly how his powers work. In the real world you cannot simply turn a taxi into water, as shown below. A taxi is made of countless atoms that are mostly metal (remember this comic was written in the 70's) and to turn it into water the metal (mostly iron) has nearly triple the number of protons (26) as water (1 proton for each hydrogen and 8 for oxygen. 10 total). To be a superhero Firestorm must conceal the energy from radiating and harming the public, so he must use his powers carefully.   

Thank you for reading. 
Join in more Firestorm fun later as I will dissect the science used in the first volume.