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So actinium: it’s often said about radioactivity that you might be glowing
in the dark if you work with radioactive elements. By-and-large it’s not
true. However, actinium is one of them which might do that because the
element itself glows blue in the dark.
And actinium is actually more dangerous than plutonium, and plutonium
was once described as the most deadly and toxic substance known to
Man. So it’s pretty dangerous.
I’ll avoid it! Have you had anything to do with it at all?
No, because it’s so dangerous.
When I was an undergraduate I saw this book here, which was written
by Seaborg, and I really liked the cover because I think it looked really
nice and I was also quite interested about the transuranium elements
because I didn’t really know much about them. And he, probably more
than anybody else, discovered more of these elements than any other
scientist, probably more elements than most if not all scientists. And he
wrote in this book about the chemistry of the different elements and,
although we consider that these are pretty radioactive and so on, they at
least managed to isolate enough material so you could see it in the
bottom of a small glass tube. It may not have been bigger than the tip of
a pin or something like that, but it’s a huge amount compared to the one
or two atoms that were formed of some of these elements very near the
end of the periodic table.