1958

Nobelium

• A team at the Nobel Institute in Sweden
• thought for a while they had made it.
• Ghiorso’s team at Berkeley
• said they made it.
• A team at Dubna said Berkeley was mistaken
• and they made it first at Dubna.
• The Swedish team had bombarded curium
• with carbon-13,
• producing alpha radiation
• from the decay of some heavy element
• but it turned out
• they had produced radioactive thorium.
• The Berkeley team bombarded curium
• with carbon-12,
• using their new heavy-ion accelerator
• and thought they had detected fermium
• from the decay of 102; however,
• later tests showed it was californium.
• The Soviet team bombarded plutonium
• with oxygen-16, and uranium with neon,
• and they also detected fermium
• but the half life for the presumed element 102
• was longer than expected,
• so the confusion continued until 1967.
• It is generally accepted
• that both the American and Soviet teams
• discovered element 102,
• but the name for it
• that the Swedish team proposed
• is the one that stuck.

Atomic number 102

• The chemical behavior
• of nobelium in aqueous solution
• has been studied although some uncertainty
• about its ionization potential has not been resolved.
• It has not been possible
• to prepare nobelium in bulk
• so its bulk properties can only be predicted
• according to its position in the periodic table.

Heavy stuff

• Sometimes a good idea
• slips away like nobelium isotopes
• with half lives of less than a minute.
• Sometimes half of a good idea
• sticks around for fifty eight minutes
• like nobelium-259.