The plutonium in the Northern Rio Grande is entirely artificial. Small amounts of plutonium may have formed in exceptionally rich uranium deposits in south-central Africa, but for practical purposes, until its manufacture in 1939, the element did not occur in the earth’s environment. Although the detailed story of the origins of plutonium are beyond the scope of this book, a summary of that history does clarify the issues regarding plutonium in the Northern Rio Grande in the late twentieth century. The purposes of this chapter are to review the origins of plutonium and to examine briefly the nature of that element. Modern nuclear physics, which ultimately led to the production of plutonium, began with the publication of the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in 1896. His work showed that the physical world was much more complicated than previously thought and that energy could be emitted from substances. In the same year, Henri Becquerel of Paris showed that uranium emitted radiation, and soon thereafter Marie and Pierre Curie coined the term radioactivity to describe the emissions they recorded from two newly discovered elements, radium (named after its radiative properties) and polonium (named after Marie Curie’s home country of Poland). Between 1898 and 1902, Ernest Rutherford of Cambridge University and, later, McGill University explored processes of radioactive decay that generated free electrons (beta radiation) and bursts of energy (gamma radiation) and discovered that some elements changed their basic properties during the emission. Rutherford termed these changes transmutation and laid the philosophical foundations for understanding atomic structure. The transmutation of elements was a significant addition to the rapidly expanding knowledge about the number and types of elements in the natural world. Between 1894 and 1900, William Ramsey enlarged the periodic table with an entire family of inert gases, and by 1903 more than a dozen radioactive elements were known. By 1903, it was obvious that the decay process explained many observed elemental changes: Americans Bertram B. Boltwood and Herbert N. McCoy showed that radium descended from uranium, and Otto Hahn connected several types of thorium.
Applying al-zughair transform on nuclear physics
