we're going to talk about einsteinium
there's been some really exciting news
about the chemistry of einsteinium
but really i need to tell you a bit
about the element first
so in our first video we told you two
facts
and obviously einsteinium has a slight
resonance for me one which you knew
already that my hair looks like
einsteins
and the second one is that einsteinium
was discovered as a result of a nuclear
explosion
it wasn't just any nuclear explosion
it was the first test of a hydrogen bomb
the so-called ivy mic test
which took place on an atoll coral
island
in the middle of the pacific as soon as
the bomb went off
planes were sent to fly through the
mushroom cloud to collect traces of any
radioactive elements that were formed
f-84 manned jet fighters are being used
exclusively on this operation
experience has proven that manned
aircraft are just as efficient
and much less costly to put in the air
than our drones for sample collecting
they collected them on filter papers
which were somehow fixed to the plane
those filter papers were then
processed at various laboratories
to look for radioactive elements the
reason why they were looking for these
elements
was because from those elements
they could work out what the density the
flux
of neutrons was when the bomb went off
so it was really secret when they
got these filter papers they managed to
detect
about 200 atoms of the element
einsteinium
which of course in those days didn't
have a name element
99 the reason they could detect them is
because you can detect
individual radioactive elements by the
particles they give out so you don't
need very much to show it's there
and we're talking about iv mic was 500
times bigger than the bomb that
destroyed hiroshima
and part of the coral island was
completely destroyed
blown away but quite a lot of the coral
was
left and they took some of the coral
from the island
and processed that to look for the
elements as well the initial discovery
was made by a colleague of glenn t
seaborg
called al giorzo but he brought in
some of his colleagues to process things
and i suppose i and probably you
imagine that these scientists did things
in a really meticulous way
but they had a meeting 25 years after
the discovery
and one of them gary higgins described
what actually happened and i was amazed
so i'm going to read it to you he was in
the lab
with his colleague stan thompson
and stan was a school mate of glenn
seborg
they'd been at high school together at
the age of 13
and seaborg describes stan thompson
as making as big a contribution to
nuclear science
as madame curie listen to what he did on
this
occasion as i recall
this is gary speaking one night we had
concentrated a barrel of coral
into a two liter beaker and we're fuming
it down with perchloric acid
and nitric acid to destroy all its
organic residue
i remember we'd both been sitting on
stools
holding cups of coffee and waiting for
it to go dry
when it went off that means it exploded
it didn't break the beaker but all the
radioactivity
including the heavy elements was now
scattered
on the walls of the hood the fume
cupboard and on the blotter paper
that we put down on the floor of the
hood stan
looked at it and said well
if it isn't fun it isn't worth doing
so we folded all the paper including the
sticky tape that we used to peel the
stuff
that's the radioactive material off the
wall of the hood
back into the beaker and started over
it wasn't until late afternoon that it
was all dissolved
i think that's amazing and it shows that
scientists are human professor if one of
your students had a beaker full of
radioactive heavy elements explode all
over their fume hood
would you encourage them to wipe it down
and put it all back in the beaker
i dread to think what would happen it
would be a major incident
not just for the building but probably
for the whole city
but in those days i think people
took a little more relaxed attitude to
these elements
looking at the physics of what was
happening in the bomb
because of the existence of element 99
they could calculate
how many neutrons were produced and this
was a huge secret
because the russians could have found
out about the bomb
of course the americans at that stage
didn't know the russians had their own
bomb
but even so therefore the discovery of
element 99
was kept secret and also element of a
hundred
fermium which was discovered at the same
time and it wasn't until two years later
that they were actually allowed to
publish
the paper and the paper
is really very short half of it
nearly is acknowledgement and the thing
i really like
is the first acknowledgement which says
the personnel
of lasl los alamos science lab
for the design and construction of the
thermonuclear mic
weapon i've never read a science paper
where they thanked somebody for
designing a bomb
the fact that los alamos had designed
the bomb
influenced their thinking about what
name they might give this element
and they went through a huge list of
these names
all of which i think are pretty porn
as names of elements but let me just
read some of them to you
los alam los alamium
los alamos las lume
alimosium las lucium euclasium
and then because the argon national lab
was also involved
they thought of argonium and then
phoenicium archonium eucalym
anilium and then because they were
elements 99 and 100
they thought of athenium i'm not sure
why etheneum
and centurium for a hundred but in the
end
they settled for einsteinium
after albert einstein and
there's there is a rumor which i read
somewhere and i can't find it again
that einstein was told about this
intention to name the element
before he died though the actual
official naming
was after he died originally they wanted
to give it the symbol e
but then they went for the symbol
es nowadays einsteinium
is not made by bombs but is made
in the reactor at oak ridge which you
will see on one of our other videos
where the design of the reactor gives
this very high intensity
neutron flux which is enough to create
einsteinium
but only very very small quantities
and the problem with einsteinium
is when you want to study its chemistry
just as the high radioactivity made it
easy to discover or detect
one a few atoms so that radioactivity
makes it really hard to study its
chemistry
because the atoms are decaying all the
time
and generating a lot of heat one gram of
einsteinium
would generate a kilowatt of power
that's
nearly enough to start boiling water to
make a cup of tea
so it's a lot of heat and of course it
will destroy crystals it will destroy
everything else
nevertheless people have discovered a
lot about its chemistry
they have found that you can make
einsteinium metal
by taking einsteinium fluoride and
reacting it with lithium
or with lanthanum and so you make
lithium fluoride or
lanthanum fluoride and einsteinium metal
they've made the oxide
and some other salts as well but what's
been really exciting
in the last few weeks that a paper was
published
in the journal nature in which
people have not only made a coordination
compound of einsteinium this is an atom
of einsteinium
surrounded by quite a complicated
carbon and oxygen molecule but they've
worked out its structure
even though it's so intensely
radioactive
and they've done this with only about
300 nanograms that's less than you can
see
of the element the way that they did
this
was that they managed to put the small
amount of this compound
into a plastic holder that was 3d
printed
and then they used a synchrotron that
produces
tunable x-rays and they took the
x-ray spectrum of this tiny sample
and from the wiggles in this spectrum
you can then
work out what atoms are surrounding the
endstanium
and show that in this compound
where the organic part has eight oxygen
atoms
in the molecule those eight oxygen atoms
are arranged around the einsteinium atom
rather like the corners of a cube
this is a magnificent scientific effort
because it's quite difficult to measure
the structures of these compounds when
they're not radioactive
and it demonstrates just how much
chemists can discover from really tiny
samples of compounds
and all being well this is just the
beginning
and we will know more about other
elements really radioactive elements and
their chemistry
you