Spokavriel wrote: Could have sworn people were making it work with short half life manmade radioactive materials. Been too long since I looked it up.
Oh, that can be done. I've done it myself, as long as you'll accept Helium-3. And I've transmuted palladium into silver as well. But it took a lot of equipment, a lot of electricity, and produced minuscule amounts. It was ridiculously expensive.
But that's
nuclear chemistry, not regular chemistry. You can get useful stuff that way - there's americium-241 used in smoke detectors, cesium-137 used in radiation therapy, iodine-131 used in thyroid therapy, and the like. Some natural radionuclides are used, like radium "seeds" implanted in cancers. But most need either a nuclear reactor, or a particle accelerator. Helium works best with a proper natural gas well, which can probably provide more helium in a minute than a nuclear reactor could do in a day.