19th April: Plutonium

Today was the birthdate, in 1912, of Glenn Theodore Seaborg, the Nobel Prize winning chemist who was the co-discoverer of ten elements: plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium and element 106, which was named seaborgium in his honour. As plutonium is the one more people will have heard of, here are ten facts about plutonium.

1. It's silvery Grey in appearance, looking a bit like nickel, but tarnishes quickly when exposed to air and turns a dark grey,
2. Unlike most metals, it is not a good conductor of heat or Electricity. It is not magnetic, either.
3. Its melting point is 912.5 K (639.4 °C, 1182.9 °F); its boiling point is 3505 K (3228 °C, 5842 °F), and its atomic number is 94. Twenty different isotopes have been found which have half lives ranging from 80.8 million years to less than a second.
4. Plutonium was first produced and isolated on December 14, 1940 by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg and his colleagues, Joseph W. Kennedy, Edwin M. McMillan, and Arthur C. Wahl.
5. There had been a couple of newly discovered elements named after planets at about that time - Uranium was named after the planet Uranus and neptunium after the planet Neptune - so this group of scientists continued the trend, and named this stuff after Pluto, which was classified as a planet back then. Originally, it was going to be called "plutium", but Seabourg thought "plutonium" sounded better. He also chose the chemical symbol, which logically should have been "Pl" but he chose "Pu" because it sounded like what someone would say when they smelled something bad - "Pee-You!" He expected this to be challenged, but nobody else seemed to notice it was a joke and so Pu it became.
6. "Ultimium" or "extremium" were also considered as names, because, at the time, they really thought they'd discovered the last possible element on the Periodic Table.
7. Plutonium is the heaviest element to occur in nature as trace quantities. It used to be so rare that scientists didn't believe at first that it did exist naturally. There's a lot more of it about these days thanks to its use in nuclear weapons and nuclear power generation.
8. The Fat Man bombs used in the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945, and in the bombing of Nagasaki in August 1945, had plutonium cores.
9. To find out what effect plutonium would have on the human body, between 1945 and 1947 scientists did something quite despicable. They injected plutonium in to hospital patients who were terminally ill or very old, without their informed consent. It was all covered up until 1993, when President Bill Clinton ordered a change of policy and federal agencies made records of the experiments available. What the scientists did is now considered a serious breach of medical ethics and of the Hippocratic Oath. At one time, plutonium was used to power heart pacemakers! Not any more, needless to say.
10. As well as bombs and power, plutonium has been used to power spacecraft, such as the Pathfinder Mars robot lander and the Curiosity Mars rover. 

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