Bloomberg Businessweek USA - 02.09.2019

Berkeley physicist

Edwin McMillan

discovered

element 93

Element 100 was a

byproduct of the Ivy

Mike nuclear test in

the Pacific Ocean

Russian chemist

Dmitri Mendeleev,

inventor of the

periodic table

Co-discoverers

Albert Ghiorso (left)

and James Harris

at Berkeley

Element 109 was

posthumously

named for physicist

Lise Meitner

A particle beam

target used to

create new elements

in Darmstadt

Physicist Kosuke

Morita announcing

the first element

discovered in Asia

81

scientists picked through the raw data, they learned it had been

rigged to produce results. Ninov maintained that he never fal-

sified anything, but he was nonetheless fired in 2002. In the

years thereafter, scientists elsewhere discovered elements 113

through 118, and Gates traveled to Darmstadt to collaborate in

some element-hunting expeditions. But Berkeley launched no

searches of its own. “We kind of shied away from that,” she said.

“It could have been part of the fallout from the 118.”

Gates’s mendelevium experiment is typical of the kind of

research into known superheavies that Berkeley now con-

ducts. “Pretty much the only thing we know about these ele-

ments is how to produce them, and how long they live, and

how they decay,” she said. “What we don’t know is everything

else.” She fits her projects into the windows in the schedule

left by the cyclotron’s other main function: auditioning micro-

chips to see how well they withstand radiation before they’re

installed on satellites. The chip testing keeps the facility funded;

in May, Boeing, Blue Origin, and NASA had all paid for chunks

of cyclotron time. That was the mandate from the Department

of Energy, Gates said. Even if Berkeley’s scientists wished to

pursue new elements, it would be difficult to commandeer the

particle accelerator for long enough to run their experiments.

Enlarging the periodic table requires time and money,

and scientists have to be prepared to see both resources

wasted. In his new book,Superheavy: Making and Breaking

the Periodic Table, Kit Chapman, a British science journal-

ist, recounts how the Berkeley team spent a month trying

to confirm GSI’s discovery of 112, running the cyclotron for

$50,000 a day, only to find that their magnets weren’t prop-

erly tuned. In the mid-2000s, Vanderbilt University physicist

Joseph Hamilton was working with a Russian team to syn-

thesize 117, traveling often to Dubna. They needed a berke-

lium target, so he turned to Oak Ridge National Laboratory

in Tennessee, which makes superheavies for commercial

and research purposes—actinium for cancer drugs, califor-

nium for the oil industry, plutonium to power space mis-

sions. What would it cost to provide enough berkelium for

the experiment? The estimate: $3.5 million.

Hamilton waited instead for Oak Ridge to get a large order for

californium so he could buy the berkelium that would emerge

as a side product. “Every three months, for three and a half

years, I called them to ask if they’d had any orders,” Hamilton

says. The eventual price tag was still about $600,000. He wrote

a research grant for most of the cost, then offered a Berkeley lab

a buy-in to the experiment for the remaining $100,000.

Hiromitsu Haba, a nuclear chemist at Riken, a research insti-

tute in Japan, says that to create just three atoms of element 112

over nine years cost $3 million in electricity bills, supplies, and

salaries. Riken is government-funded, but Haba’s team defrayed

the expense by pitching the prestige of the project to the com-

panies that supplied the hardware, giving them a chance to be

involved in an historic mission. (The companies offered dis-

counts or sponsored slices of the budget.) Until Riken ran down

its quarry and named it nihonium, Haba says, “out of the 100

ORIGINS OF THE ARTIFICIAL ELEMENTS

Discovered by ● Germany ● Italy ● Japan ● Russia ● U.S.

TENNESSINE

MOSCOVIUM

LIVERMORIUM

RUTHERFORDIUM FLEROVIUM

CALIFORNIUM

EINSTEINIUM

PROMETHIUM

AMERICIUM

CURIUM

NEPTUNIUM

TECHNETIUM

FERMIUM MENDELEVIUM DUBNIUM MEITNERIUM

HASSIUM

DARMSTADTIUM NIHONIUM

LAWRENCIUM

COPERNICIUM

1937 1950 1970 1990 2010

NEPTUNIUM, DUBNIUM, BERKELIUM: COURTESY LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY (3). FERMIUM: COURTESY NATIONAL NUCLEAR SECURITY ADMINISTRATION/NEVADA SITE OFFICE. MEITNERIUM: SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION ARCHIVES. DARMSTADTIUM, PLUTONIUM, SEABORGIUM: SCIENCE SOURCE (3).
NIHONIUM: FRANCK ROBICHON/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK. BOHRIUM: A. ZSCHAU/GSI HELMHOLTZZENTRUM FUR SCHWERIONENFORSCHUNG. ROENTGENIUM: MICHAEL PROBST/AP PHOTO. OGANESSON: COURTESY LLNL.

DATA: ROYAL SOCIETY OF CHEMISTRY

Element 118 is

named for physicist

Yuri Oganessian

(left)

Former German

minister Annette

Schavan at the

naming ceremony

German physicists

celebrate discovering

bohrium (shortened

from nielsbohrium)

Element 106

was named after

Berkeley’s Glenn

Seaborg

A partial gathering

atBerkeley of

element 102’s

co-discoverers

A measuring device

that was part of the

184-inch cyclotron

at Berkeley

Fat Man, the bomb

detonated over

Nagasaki, contained

element 94

PLUTONIUM BERKELIUM NOBELIUM SEABORGIUM BOHRIUM ROENTGENIUM OGANESSON