The failure of the master equation for the reactive systems
  Two crucial for the breakdown of the master equation arguments are put forward. The first one is related to the violence of a fundamental requirement to the notion of state (thermodynamical) variable, namely: a state variable is defined provided it is insensitive to the particularities of the spatio-temporal configurations upon which the averaging over the dynamical variables proceeds. The second one is related to a ubiquitous divergence of the scattering length in the low-energy limit. In turn, it makes the rates of all the elementary processes divergent as well. Though radically novel viewpoints to the low-energy limit and to the evolution ensure the boundedness of the rates and hold the notion of a state variable available, the master equation remains inappropriate. 
Maria K. Koleva