fermium

chemical properties similar to those of erbium; man-made radioactive element; discovered in 1952 in debris from thermonuclear explosion by Ghiorso and colleagues; t1/2 of 257Fm is 100 days [KIR78] [HAW93] [MER06]

The name of Fm derives from the Italian born physicist “Enrico Fermi”, who built the first man made nuclear reactor. The nuclide . . . Fm was found in the debris from the first thermonuclear weapon’s explosion, nicknamed “Mike,” on November 1, 1952, at Enewetak atoll, Marshall Islands, by a collaboration of American scientists G.R. Choppin, S.G.Thompson, A. Ghiorso and B.G. Harvey from the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, Illinois, the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico and the University of California lab at Berkeley, CA. The longest half-life associated with this unstable element is 100 day ²⁵⁷Fm.