You learn something new every day. For example, for more than the last thirty years I’ve understood plutonium to be the first truly synthetic element… it didn’t appear in nature until Man brought it into being. Ooops. Behold “muromontite.”
http://periodictable.com/Elements/094/index.html
The sample I have representing plutonium is the naturally occurring mineral muromontite, which is a mixture of uranium and beryllium. Putting beryllium near uranium is generally considered a bad idea because the alpha particles from the decay of uranium are captured by the beryllium atoms, which in turn release neutrons. Neutrons are very unhealthy to be around.
In the case of this sample, however, the neutrons are in turn re-captured by the uranium, which then undergoes further decay and is transformed into plutonium. The result is that this mineral contains the highest known naturally occurring concentration of plutonium.
Well, how about that. In retrospect it’s sorta obvious that plutonium would exist in the natural world. But I keep hearing that plutonium doesn’t.
4 Responses to “Muromontite”
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That’s a new one on me too.
So you’ve got a mineral that’s a natural breeder reactor.
Deposits of this mineral are found in both Sweden and Germany; I wonder if the Germans ever considered trying to extract the plutonium from it in WW II?
I think the idea of plutonium not existing in the natural world came from the thought that all of it would have decayed long ago.
But its stable isotope form, Plutonium 244. has a half-life of 80 million years, and can be detected in trace amounts in nature.
The description sounds like it came from a John W. Campbell jr. space opera.
The name sounds like it came from an H. G. Wells novel.
reading up on Radon,remember it was a big deal for awhile?
The ones that really sounded like something out of Campbell were two of the other names proposed for plutonium – “extremium” and “ultimium”.