HELP Neptunium-237 undergoes alpha, alpha, beta, gamma, alpha, beta, alpha, gamma, and alpha decay.

are radioactive; the stablest is neptunium-237, with a half-life of 2,144,000 years, and among the most unstable is neptunium-225, with a half-life of more than 2 microseconds. Neptunium-237 can be separated from used reactor fuel to study the physical and chemical properties of the element.

Explanation:

Since only two of the transuranium elements have been found in nature (neptunium and plutonium) and those only in trace amounts, the synthesis of these elements through nuclear reactions has been an important source of knowledge about them. That knowledge has expanded scientific understanding of the fundamental structure of matter and makes it possible to predict the existence and basic properties of elements much heavier than any currently known. Present theory suggests that the maximum atomic number could be found to lie somewhere between 170 and 210, if nuclear instability would not preclude the existence of such elements. All these still-unknown elements are included in the transuranium group.

Discovery Of The First Transuranium Elements

The first attempt to prepare a transuranium element was made in 1934 in Rome, where a team of Italian physicists headed by Enrico Fermi and Emilio Segrè bombarded uranium nuclei with free neutrons. Although transuranium species may have been produced, the experiment resulted in the discovery of nuclear fission rather than new elements. (The German scientists Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassman, and Lise Meitner showed that the products Fermi found were lighter, known elements formed by the splitting, or fission, of uranium.) Not until 1940 was a transuranium element first positively produced and identified, when two American physicists, Edwin Mattison McMillan and Philip Hauge Abelson, working at the University of California at Berkeley, exposed uranium oxide to neutrons from a cyclotron target. One of the resulting products was an element found to have an atomic number of 93. It was named neptunium.

Transformations in atomic nuclei are represented by equations that balance all the particles of matter and the energy involved before and after the reaction. The above transformation of uranium into neptunium may be written as follows: