Artificial elements technetium

Gr. technetos, artificial) Element 43 was predicted on the basis of the periodic table, and was erroneously reported as having been discovered in 1925, at which time it was named masurium. The element was actually discovered by Perrier and Segre in Italy in 1937. It was found in a sample of molybdenum, which was bombarded by deuterons in the Berkeley cyclotron, and which E. Eawrence sent to these investigators. Technetium was the first element to be produced artificially. Since its discovery, searches for the element in terrestrial material have been made. Finally in 1962, technetium-99 was isolated and identified in African pitchblende (a uranium rich ore) in extremely minute quantities as a spontaneous fission product of uranium-238 by B.T. Kenna and P.K. Kuroda. If it does exist, the concentration must be very small. Technetium has been found in the spectrum of S-, M-, and N-type stars, and its presence in stellar matter is leading to new theories of the production of heavy elements in the stars. 

Some of the important properties of Group 7 elements are summarized in Table 24.1. Technetium is an artificial element, so its atomic weight depends on which isotope has been produced. The atomic weights of Mn and Re, however, are known with considerable accuracy. In the case of... 

Existence of technetium was predicted from the vacant position in the Periodic Table between manganese and rhenium. Noddack, Tacke, and Berg reported its discovery in 1925 and named it masurium. The metal actually was never isolated from any source by these workers. Its existence, therefore, could not be confirmed. Perrier and Segre in 1937 produced this element by bombarding molybdenum metal with deuterons in a cyclotron. They named the element technetium derived from the Greek word technetos, meaning artificial. 

Nuclear chemistry (radiochemistry) has now become a large and very important branch of science. Over four hundred radioactive isotopes have been made in the laboratory, whereas only about three hundred stable isotopes have been detected in nature. Three elements —technetium (43), astatine (85), and promethium (61), as well as some trans-uranium elements, seem not to occur in nature, and are available only as products of artificial transmutation. The use of radioactive isotopes as tracers has become a valuable technique in scientific and medical research. The controlled release of nuclear energy promises to lead us into a new world, in which the achievement of man is no longer limited by the supply of energy available to him. 

The element technetium (Tc) is not found in nature but has been produced artificially through nuclear reactions. Use the data for several neighboring elements in the table below to estimate the melting point, boiling point, and density of technetium. Compare your predictions with the observed values in Appendix F. 

All elements beyond bismuth (Z=83) are radioactive, and none beyond uranium (Z= 92) occur naturally on Earth. With increasing numbers of protons heavier elements have progressively less stable nuclei with shorter half-lives. Elements with Zup to 110 have been made artificially but the half-lives beyond Lr (Z=103) are too short for chemical investigations to be feasible. Two lighter elements, technetium (Tc, Z=43) and promethium (Pm, Z=61), also have no stable isotopes. 

Tc technetium, 43, 1937 from the Greek "technetos (artificial) because it was the first artificial element. 

Technetium is an artificial element obtained by the radioactive decay of molybdenum. Element 43, named technetium in 1947, had been discovered in 1937 by Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segre in a sample obtained from the Berkely Radiation Laboratory (now Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) in California (Perrier and Segre 1937, 1947). By bombarding a molybdenum strip with 8-MeV deuterons in a 37-in. cyclotron, a radioactive molybdenum species (half-life, 65 h) had been obtained which decayed by yff-emission to a short-lived isotope (half-life, 6 h) with novel properties, identified as technetium-99m (Segre and Seaborg 1938). 

Technetium is an artificial element, available as Tc (a P-particle emitter, fi = 2.13 x 10 yr) which is isolated from fission product wastes by oxidation to [Tc04]. Separation... 

The discovery of technetium in 1937 by the Italian scientists Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segre was an important affirmation of the configuration of the Periodic Table. The table had predicted the existence of an element with 43 protons in its nucleus, but no such element had ever been found. (In fact, technetium does not occur naturally on Earth, as all of its known isotopes are radioactive and decay to other elements on a timescale that is relatively small when compared with the age of the earth.) Perrier and Segre were able to observe technetium from molybdenum that had been bombarded with deuterons. They named the element technetium, from the Greek word technetos, meaning artificial. Technetium is produced in relatively large quantities during nuclear fission, so there is currently an ample supply of the element from nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons production. 

Element 85 was synthesized by D. Corson, C. Mackenzie, and E. Segre who worked at Berkley (USA). The Italian physicist Segre by that time had settled in the USA and was the only one in the group who had an experience in artificial synthesis of a new element (technetium). On July 16, 1940, these scientists submitted to the prestigious physical journal Physical Review a large paper entitled Artificial radioactive element 85 . They reported how they had bombarded a bismuth target with alpha particles accelerated in a cyclotron and obtained a radioactive product of the nuclear... 

All the artificial elements are, of course, radioactive, and the first to be prepared was technetium. It was produced in vanishingly small quantity in 1939 by Segre and Perrier by bombarding element 42 (molybdenum) with deuterons for several months. It was also detected the following year among uranium fission products. A few years later, the same source yielded promethium, the missing rare earth element. 

Three of these elements were soon discovered (they were named scandium, gallium, and germanium by their discoverers), and it was found that their properties and the properties of their compounds are very close to those predicted by Mendelyeev for eka-boron, eka-aluminum, and eka-silicon, respectively. Since then the elements technetium, rhenium, and protactinium have been discovered or made artificially, and have been found to have properties similar to those predicted for eka-manganese, dvi-manganese, and eka-tantalum. A comparison of the properties predicted by Mendelyeev for eka-silicon and those determined experimentally for germanium is given below. 

In 1946, Segre and Perrier proposed the name technetium with the symbol Tc for the element they had discovered. The fact that technetium was the first element that had been prepared in a technical way lay behind the choice of name, from the Greek technikos (artificial). At a meeting in Amsterdam in September 1949 the International Union of Chemistry changed its name to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. On the same occasion the old name masurium Ma was officially replaced by the new name technetium Tc for element 43. In 1951J. C. Hackney published a review of the chemical properties of the now established element technetium [28.4]. 

This book presents a unified treatment of the chemistry of the elements. At present 112 elements are known, though not all occur in nature of the 92 elements from hydrogen to uranium all except technetium and promethium are found on earth and technetium has been detected in some stars. To these elements a further 20 have been added by artificial nuclear syntheses in the laboratory. Why are there only 90 elements in nature Why do they have their observed abundances and why do their individual isotopes occur with the particular relative abundances observed Indeed, we must also ask to what extent these isotopic abundances commonly vary in nature, thus causing variability in atomic weights and possibly jeopardizing the classical means of determining chemical composition and structure by chemical analysis. 

Prior to 1940 only the naturally occurring actinides (thorium, protactinium and uranium) were known the remainder have been produced artificially since then. The transactinides are still being synthesized and so far the nine elements with atomic numbers 104-112 have been reliably established. Indeed, the 20 manmade transuranium elements together with technetium and promethium now constitute one-fifth of all the known chemical elements. 

Nucleosynthesis is the formation of elements. Hydrogen and helium were produced in the Big Bang all other elements are descended from these two, as a result of nuclear reactions taking place either in stars or in space. Some elements—among them technetium and promethium—are found in only trace amounts on Earth. Although these elements were made in stars, their short lifetimes did not allow them to survive long enough to contribute to the formation of our planet. However, nuclides that are too unstable to be found on Earth can be made by artificial techniques, and scientists have added about 2200 different nuclides to the 300 or so that occur naturally. 

All isotopes of technetium (Z = 43) are unstable, so the element is not found an Avhere in the Earth s crust. Its absence left a gap in the periodic table below manganese. The search for this missing element occupied researchers for many years. It was not until 1937 that the first samples of technetium were prepared in a nuclear reactor. In fact, technetium was the first element to be made artificially in the laboratory. To date, 21 radioactive isotopes of technetium have been identified, some of them requiring millions of years to decompose. 

Rhenium (75) was discovered in 1925 by Ida Tacke and Walter Noddack as the last naturally occurring element. The first artificially produced element was identified by Emilio G. Segre in 1937. Ernest Lawrence detected technetium in a molybdenum sample, which he had bombarded in his cyclotron. All elements discovered since then have been generated artificially. 

The discovery of the elements 43 and 75 was reported by Noddack et al. in 1925, just seventy years ago. Although the presence of the element 75, rhenium, was confirmed later, the element 43, masurium, as they named it, could not be extracted from naturally occurring minerals. However, in the cyclotron-irradiated molybdenum deflector, Perrier and Segre found radioactivity ascribed to the element 43. This discovery in 1937 was established firmly on the basis of its chemical properties which were expected from the position between manganese and rhenium in the periodic table. However, ten years later in 1937, the new element was named technetium as the first artificially made element. 

Nuclear reactions involving technetium have been actively studied until today. Our interest in the nuclear chemistry of technetium is based on various reasons. Technetium was the first artificially produced element in the periodic table, a weighable amount of technetium ("Tc) is now available, and 99mTc is one of the most important radionuclides in nuclear medicine. In addition, technetium is an element of importance from a nuclear safety point of view. 

Technetium (Tc, [Kr]4 /65.vl), name and symbol after the Greek Tsxrmos (tech-nikos, artificial). Detected in Italy (1937) by Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segre in a sample of Mo which had been irradiated with deuterons at the E.O. Lawrence cyclotron in California. It was the first artificially produced element. 

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