Transuranium Element

The Transuranium Highway would appear to be coming to a dead end for two reasons. Chemists do not have large enough samples of the heaviest transuranium elements to use as targets in their cyclotrons, and the materials are so radioactive anyway that they only last for seconds or at most a few minutes.

Element 110 has been made by a slightly different trick—shooting medium-weight atoms at each other. The nuclei of these atoms can fuse together and hopefully stick, to make a nucleus of a transuranium element. In November 1994, a group of nuclear chemists at the Heavy Ion Research Center at Darmstadt, Germany reported that by shooting nickel atoms (atomic number 28) at lead atoms (atomic number 82), they had made three atoms of element 110 (=28+82), which lasted for about a ten-thousandth of a second.

In spite of this gloomy picture, nuclear chemists are trying very hard to make much heavier, "superheavy" elements. There are theoretical reasons for believing that they would be more stable and would stick around much longer.

The Transuranium Highway may be still under construction.