How Does Einsteinium Work?

Einsteinium is a heavy, radioactive element that only exists on Earth when humans create it. Learn how it was first discovered and what we're still learning about it in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/einsteinium.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Lord
vocal bomb Here. On November one of nineteen fifty two,
a team of American scientists working for the US military
through the switch on a strange three story structure code
named ivy MIC. It was the world's first hydrogen bomb,

(00:24):
a new breed of nuclear weapon that was seven hundred
times more powerful than the atomic bombs they had deployed
during World War Two. The bomb test took place on
a tiny toll named in a Wee Talk in the
Marshall Islands of the South Pacific. When ivy MIC was detonated,
it released ten point four megatons of explosive power, which
means it was roughly the equivalent of ten point four

(00:46):
million tons of TNT. The bomb dropped in Hiroshima, for comparison,
produced just fifteen kilotons. The explosion utterly vaporized the atoll
and produced a mushroom cloud three minds or five kilometers wide.
Workers in protective suits gathered fall up material from a
neighboring island and sent it back to Berkeley Lab in

(01:08):
California for analysis. There, a team of Manhattan Project researchers
led by Albert Giorso isolated just two hundred atoms of
a brand new element containing ninety nine protons and ninety
nine electrons. In nineteen fifty five. The researchers announced their
discovery to the world and named it after their scientific hero.

(01:29):
It's called Einsteinium. Einsteinium occupies atomic number ninety nine on
the periodic table, in the company of other very heavy
and radioactive elements like californium and berkeleyem Some such elements,
notably uranium, exist in meaningful qualities on Earth at two
point eight parts per million. There's more uranium underground than

(01:52):
gold above. Others, including einsteinium, are too unstable to be
found in nature. All of our samples of them have
been synthetic. That is, created artificially by doing something like
exploding a hydrogen bomb or slamming subatomic particles together in
a reactor. When we think of radioactivity, we often think

(02:14):
of the effect that it has on us. How radium
or uranium can make us very sick. That's because of
the type of subatomic particles or waves that they give
off as they break down on an atomic level. So
what makes an element radioactive In the case of einsteinium,
and its neighbors at the bottom of the periodic table.

(02:36):
It's the sheer size of their atoms for the article.
This episode is based on how Stuff Works. Spoke with
Joseph Glitch, a pharmaceutical chemist who has worked extensively with
other radioactive elements used for medical imaging. He explained, when
elements get to be a certain size, the nucleus of
the atom becomes so large that it disintegrates. What happens

(02:58):
is that it spits out neutrons and or protons and
electrons and decays down to a lower elemental state. So
you get two effects out of this process. First, you
have those sub atomic particles or electromagnetic waves that the
element emits. These can be alpha particles, beta particles, gamma rays,

(03:18):
or other types of radiation. Some types are relatively harmless,
while others can inflict damage on human cells and DNA.
A second, as the element breaks down, you wind up
with different isotopes of the element. Isotopes are forms of
an element that have different atomic weights. An atom's atomic
weight is the number of protons plus neutrons in its nucleus.

(03:43):
Just for example, the einsteinium collected in the South Pacific
in nineteen fifty two was an isotope called einsteinium two
fifty three, which has ninety nine protons and one hundred
and fifty four neutrons. But these isotopes don't last forever.
They each have a different half life, which is the
estimated time for half of the material to decay into

(04:05):
a new isotope or a lower numbered element. Altogether, Einsteinium
two fifty three has half life of just twenty and
a half days. Uranium two thirty eight, on the other hand,
has a half life of four point four to six
billion years, which explains why it's the most common isotope
of uranium found in nature. It has major staying power.

(04:27):
One of the hard things about synthesizing heavy radioactive elements
like einsteinium in the lab and by lab we mean
highly specialized nuclear reactors, is that such large atoms start
to decay very quickly. Bleach said, As you create bigger
and bigger elements and isotopes, it gets more and more

(04:48):
difficult to keep them around long enough to see them.
That's why there was so much excitement recently in the
chemistry world when a team of scientists successfully held onto
a sample of short life of einsteinium long enough to
measure some of the chemical properties of this ultra rare element.
The scientists, led by a team out of Berkeley Lab,

(05:09):
waited patiently for a tiny sample at einsteinium two fifty
four produced by the Oakridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The
sample weighed in at two hundred and fifty nanograms that's
just two hundred and fifty billionths of a gram. It
had a half life of two hundred and seventy six days.
When the COVID nineteen pandemic hit in twenty twenty, the

(05:30):
research was sidelined for months, during which seven percent of
the sample degraded every thirty days. Their breakthrough was the
creation of a molecular claw, so to speak, that could
hold a single atom of einsteinium two fifty four in
place for long enough to measure things like the length
of its molecular bonds and at what wavelength it emits light.

(05:53):
Both of these measurements are critical to understanding how einsteinium
and its heavy cousins could potentially be used for things
like cancer treatment in the future. Today's episode is based
on the article Scientists unlock secrets of h bomb element
Einsteinium on how Stuffworks dot Com, written by Dave Ruse.

(06:14):
Brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership
with Howstuffwork dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang.
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