Daily Quiz | On the element Plutonium
Glenn Seaborg, an American scientist who led the team that first isolated plutonium and shared the chemistry Nobel Prize in 1951.
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1 / 5 |
Plutonium has many distinctions. For example, it’s the element with the highest ______ ______ to occur naturally. All the elements beyond this point, such as americium, curium, and berkelium, have only been synthesised in the lab. Fill in the blanks.
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Plutonium hit international headlines in August 1945 when the U.S. dropped two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These bombs had two designs, called X and Y. Of these, Y was developed for a bomb using plutonium; in the X design, the plutonium core may have detonated too early. What are the colloquial names of X and Y?
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The difficulty with using X (in Q2) arose because the plutonium delivered to the Manhattan Project contained a significant quantity of an isotope that would undergo fission even if a single stray neutron got into it. Which isotope is this?
4 / 5 |
Plutonium is hard to mould into different shapes because it has six __________ even at room pressure (a seventh forms at higher temperature). They have different crystal structures and densities, which means small changes in physical conditions can lead to large changes in a plutonium object’s physical properties. Fill in the blank.
5 / 5 |
These two robotic machines contain, among other things, 4.8 kg of plutonium-238 dioxide. As the isotope decays, it emits heat. Some of this heat is diverted to thermocouples that supply 110 W of electric power for each machine’s instruments. The rest provides 2 kW of thermal power that warms each machine, especially when the surrounding temperature drops below –100º C. Name the two machines.
Answer : Curiosity and Perseverance rovers
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