Americium: Future space missions can be powered for up to 400 years

By Fouad Sabry

What Is Americium

The chemical element americium, denoted by the symbol Am and having the atomic number 95, is produced in a laboratory and is radioactive. It is a transuranic element that is a part of the actinide class and can be found in the periodic table just below the lanthanide element europium. Because of this, it was named after the Americas by analogy.

How You Will Benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Americium

Chapter 2: Actinide

Chapter 3: Berkelium

Chapter 4: Curium

Chapter 5: Californium

Chapter 6: Einsteinium

Chapter 7: Neptunium

Chapter 8: MOX fuel

Chapter 9: PUREX

Chapter 10: Fertile material

Chapter 11: Isotopes of plutonium

Chapter 12: Isotopes of americium

Chapter 13: Minor actinide

Chapter 14: Curium(III) oxide

Chapter 15: Weapons-grade nuclear material

Chapter 16: Actinides in the environment

Chapter 17: Plutonium-241

Chapter 18: Plutonium-242

Chapter 19: Long-lived fission product

Chapter 20: Plutonium hexafluoride

Chapter 21: Americium-241

(II) Answering the public top questions about americium.

(III) Real world examples for the usage of americium in many fields.

(IV) 17 appendices to explain, briefly, 266 emerging technologies in each industry to have 360-degree full understanding of americium' technologies.

Who This Book Is For

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of americium.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: Oct 15, 2022

Book preview

Copyright

Americium Copyright © 2022 by Fouad Sabry. All Rights Reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

Cover designed by Fouad Sabry.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Bonus

You can send an email to [e-mail] with the subject line Americium: Future space missions can be powered for up to 400 years, and you will receive an email which contains the first few chapters of this book.

Fouad Sabry

Visit 1BK website at

www.1BKOfficial.org

Preface

Why did I write this book?

The story of writing this book started on 1989, when I was a student in the Secondary School of Advanced Students.

It is remarkably like the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Schools, which are now available in many advanced countries.

STEM is a curriculum based on the idea of educating students in four specific disciplines — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — in an interdisciplinary and applied approach. This term is typically used to address an education policy or a curriculum choice in schools. It has implications for workforce development, national security concerns and immigration policy.

There was a weekly class in the library, where each student is free to choose any book and read for 1 hour. The objective of the class is to encourage the students to read subjects other than the educational curriculum.

In the library, while I was looking at the books on the shelves, I noticed huge books, total of 5,000 pages in 5 parts. The books name is The Encyclopedia of Technology, which describes everything around us, from absolute zero to semiconductors, almost every technology, at that time, was explained with colorful illustrations and simple words. I started to read the encyclopedia, and of course, I was not able to finish it in the 1-hour weekly class.

So, I convinced my father to buy the encyclopedia. My father bought all the technology tools for me in the beginning of my life, the first computer and the first technology encyclopedia, and both have a great impact on myself and my career.

I have finished the entire encyclopedia in the same summer vacation of this year, and then I started to see how the universe works and to how to apply that knowledge to everyday problems.

My passion to the technology started mor than 30 years ago and still the journey goes on.

This book is part of The Encyclopedia of Emerging Technologies which is my attempt to give the readers the same amazing experience I had when I was in high school, but instead of 20th century technologies, I am more interested in the 21st century emerging technologies, applications, and industry solutions.

The Encyclopedia of Emerging Technologies will consist of 365 books, each book will be focused on one single emerging technology. You can read the list of emerging technologies and their categorization by industry in the part of Coming Soon, at the end of the book.

365 books to give the readers the chance to increase their knowledge on one single emerging technology every day within the course of one year period.

Introduction

How did I write this book?

In every book of The Encyclopedia of Emerging Technologies, I am trying to get instant, raw search insights, direct from the minds of the people, trying to answer their questions about the emerging technology.

There are 3 billion Google searches every day, and 20% of those have never been seen before. They are like a direct line to the people thoughts.

Sometimes that’s ‘How do I remove paper jam’. Other times, it is the wrenching fears and secret hankerings they would only ever dare share with Google.

In my pursuit to discover an untapped goldmine of content ideas about Americium, I use many tools to listen into autocomplete data from search engines like Google, then quickly cranks out every useful phrase and question, the people are asking around the keyword Americium.

It is a goldmine of people insight, I can use to create fresh, ultra-useful content, products, and services. The kind people, like you, really want.

People searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche. Therefore, this book is a live product, and constantly updated by more and more answers for new questions about Americium, asked by people, just like you and me, wondering about this new emerging technology and would like to know more about it.

The approach for writing this book is to get a deeper level of understanding of how people search around Americium, revealing questions and queries which I would not necessarily think off the top of my head, and answering these questions in super easy and digestible words, and to navigate the book around in a straightforward way.

So, when it comes to writing this book, I have ensured that it is as optimized and targeted as possible. This book purpose is helping the people to further understand and grow their knowledge about Americium. I am trying to answer people’s questions as closely as possible and showing a lot more.

It is a fantastic, and beautiful way to explore questions and problems that the people have and answer them directly, and add insight, validation, and creativity to the content of the book – even pitches and proposals. The book uncovers rich, less crowded, and sometimes surprising areas of research demand I would not otherwise reach. There is no doubt that, it is expected to increase the knowledge of the potential readers’ minds, after reading the book using this approach.

I have applied a unique approach to make the content of this book always fresh. This approach depends on listening to the people minds, by using the search listening tools. This approach helped me to:

Meet the readers exactly where they are, so I can create relevant content that strikes a chord and drives more understanding to the topic.

Keep my finger firmly on the pulse, so I can get updates when people talk about this emerging technology in new ways, and monitor trends over time.

Uncover hidden treasures of questions need answers about the emerging technology to discover unexpected insights and hidden niches that boost the relevancy of the content and give it a winning edge.

The building block for writing this book include the following:

(1) I have stopped wasting the time on gutfeel and guesswork about the content wanted by the readers, filled the book content with what the people need and said goodbye to the endless content ideas based on speculations.

(2) I have made solid decisions, and taken fewer risks, to get front row seats to what people want to read and want to know — in real time — and use search data to make bold decisions, about which topics to include and which topics to exclude.

(3) I have streamlined my content production to identify content ideas without manually having to sift through individual opinions to save days and even weeks of time.

It is wonderful to help the people to increase their knowledge in a straightforward way by just answering their questions.

I think the approach of writing of this book is unique as it collates, and tracks the important questions being asked by the readers on search engines.

Acknowledgments

Writing a book is harder than I thought and more rewarding than I could have ever imagined. None of this would have been possible without the work completed by prestigious researchers, and I would like to acknowledge their efforts to increase the knowledge of the public about this emerging technology.

Dedication

To the enlightened, the ones who see things differently, and want the world to be better -- they are not fond of the status quo or the existing state. You can disagree with them too much, and you can argue with them even more, but you cannot ignore them, and you cannot underestimate them, because they always change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones or amateur, others see genius and innovators, because the ones who are enlightened enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do, and lead the people to the enlightenment.

Epigraph

The chemical element americium, denoted by the symbol Am and having the atomic number 95, is produced in a laboratory and is radioactive. It is a transuranic element that is a part of the actinide class and can be found in the periodic table just below the lanthanide element europium. Because of this, it was named after the Americas by analogy.

Table of Contents

Copyright

Bonus

Preface

Introduction

Acknowledgments

Dedication

Epigraph

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Americium

Chapter 2: Actinide

Chapter 3: Berkelium

Chapter 4: Curium

Chapter 5: Californium

Chapter 6: Einsteinium

Chapter 7: Neptunium

Chapter 8: MOX fuel

Chapter 9: Fertile material

Chapter 10: Isotopes of plutonium

Chapter 11: Isotopes of americium

Chapter 12: Minor actinide

Chapter 13: Curium(III) oxide

Chapter 14: Thorium fuel cycle

Chapter 15: Weapons-grade nuclear material

Chapter 16: Actinides in the environment

Chapter 17: Plutonium-241

Chapter 18: Plutonium-242

Chapter 19: Long-lived fission product

Chapter 20: Plutonium hexafluoride

Chapter 21: Americium-241

Epilogue

About the Author

Coming Soon

Appendices: Emerging Technologies in Each Industry

Chapter 1: Americium

The chemical element americium, denoted by the symbol Am and having the atomic number 95, is produced in a laboratory and is radioactive. It is a transuranic element that is a part of the actinide class and can be found in the periodic table just below the lanthanide element europium. Because of its location, it was given the name america by analogy.

In 1944, a group led by Glenn T. Seaborg was the first to manufacture americium.

Seaborg from Berkeley, California, At Chicago, at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory, within the scope of the Manhattan Project.

Despite being the third element in the transuranic series, it has no known uses, It was the fourth thing to be found, after the more substantial curium.

The finding was a closely guarded secret until it was made public in the month of November in 1945.

The vast majority of amerium is created in nuclear reactors when uranium or plutonium is subjected to a barrage of neutrons. Approximately one hundred grams of amerium may be found in one tonne of spent nuclear fuel.

It finds widespread use in ionization chamber smoke detectors sold in commercial settings, in addition to being used in neutron sources and many industrial gauges.

Several unconventional uses, include things like nuclear batteries and fuel for spaceships that use nuclear propulsion, have been proposed for the isotope ²⁴²mAm, However, they are still unable to advance due to the limited supply and expensive cost of this nuclear isomer.

Americium is a radioactive metal having a silvery appearance and a rather soft structure.

Its most common isotopes are ²⁴¹Am and ²⁴³Am.

When it comes to chemical substances, In its natural condition, americium is in the +3 oxidation state, particularly in terms of solutions.

There are known to be a number of additional oxidation states, ranging from +2 all the way up to +7, and are distinguishable based on the optical absorption spectra that are typical to each.

Solid americium and the compounds of the element possess tiny radiogenic flaws that are inherent to the crystal structure, because of the metamictization that was brought about by the self-irradiation with alpha particles, which builds up over the course of time; Because of this, some of the material's qualities may change over the course of time, a trend that is more obvious in older samples.

Glenn T. Seaborg, Leon O. Morgan, Ralph A. James, and Albert Ghiorso were the first people to intentionally synthesize, isolate, and identify americium in late autumn 1944 at the University of California, Berkeley. It is possible that americium was produced in earlier nuclear experiments; however, it was first intentionally synthesized there. At the University of California, Berkeley, they made use of a cyclotron that measured 60 inches.

{\displaystyle {\ce {^{239}_{94}Pu ->[{\ce {(n,\gamma)}}] ^{240}_{94}Pu ->[{\ce {(n,\gamma)}}] ^{241}_{94}Pu ->[\beta^-][14.35\ {\ce {yr}}] ^{241}_{95}Am}}\ \left({\ce {->[\alpha][432.2\ {\ce {yr}}] ^{237}_{93}Np}}\right)}

These are the periods of our life.

The second isotope ²⁴²Am was produced upon neutron bombardment of the already-created ²⁴¹Am.

Upon rapid β-decay, ²⁴²Am converts into the isotope of curium ²⁴²Cm (which had been discovered previously).

At first, it was estimated that this degradation would take 17 hours to complete one cycle, This was not too far off from the already agreed upon figure of 16.02 hours.

{\displaystyle {\ce {^{241}_{95}Am ->[{\ce {(n,\gamma)}}] ^{242}_{95}Am}}\ \left({\ce {->[\beta^-][16.02\ {\ce {h}}] ^{242}_{96}Cm}}\right)}

The Manhattan Project was strongly tied to the discovery of americium and curium in 1944; the discoveries were kept secret and weren't made public until 1945. In response to a question from a listener about whether any new transuranium elements besides plutonium and neptunium had been discovered during the war, Seaborg revealed the synthesis of elements 95 and 96 on a children's radio show in the United States called Quiz Kids five days before the official presentation at an American Chemical Society meeting on 11 November 1945.

The isotopes of americium with the longest half-lives and highest frequencies, ²⁴¹Am and ²⁴³Am, have half-lives that are 432.2 years