(Written by Glenn T. Seaborg, Nobel Laureate and pre-emine...)
Written by Glenn T. Seaborg, Nobel Laureate and pre-eminent figure in the field, with the assistance of Walter D. Loveland, it covers all aspects of transuranium elements, including their discovery, chemical properties, nuclear properties, nuclear synthesis reactions, experimental techniques, natural occurrence, superheavy elements, and predictions for the future.
The Atomic Energy Commission under Nixon: Adjusting to Troubled Times
(In this revealing book Nobel Laureate Glenn T. Seaborg te...)
In this revealing book Nobel Laureate Glenn T. Seaborg tells what it was like to be chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission during the Nixon presidency.
The Plutonium Story: The Journals of Professor Glenn T. Seaborg 1939-1946
(This book chronicles on a day-to-day basis the astounding...)
This book chronicles on a day-to-day basis the astounding story of the discovery of plutonium and the feverish activities to unlock its secrets and enhance its productivity to the levels necessary for the building of an atomic bomb in World War II by its discoverer, Professor Glenn T. Seaborg.
Adventures in the Atomic Age: From Watts to Washington
(Here is Glenn Seaborg's autobiography -- the extraordinar...)
Here is Glenn Seaborg's autobiography -- the extraordinary story of a modest Swedish American who never strayed from his strong basic commitments throughout a career that gave him national and international fame.
Glenn Theodore Seaborg was an American chemist. He was also a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and co-winner with Edwin M. McMillan of the Nobel Prize in chemistry for 1951 for their discovery of plutonium and other transuranium elements.
Background
Ethnicity:
On his mother's side Seaborg was descended from the Pemer family, a Swedish family of German origin.
Glenn Theodore Seaborg was born on April 19, 1912, in the iron-mining town of Ishpeming, Michigan, to Swedish immigrants Herman Theodore Seaborg, a machinist, and Selma O. (Erickson).
At his mother's urging, the family moved to the Los Angeles, California, area when he was ten, in an effort to locate better educational opportunities for the children.
Education
Seaborg graduated from the ‘David Starr Jordan High School’ in Los Angeles in 1929, and then, the same year, he entered the University of California at Los Angeles, where he majored in chemistry. After graduation from the University of California, he transferred to Berkeley, where he received a Ph. D. in 1937 and joined the faculty.
Seaborg received numerous honorary Doctor of Science degrees from such educational establishments as the University of Denver (1951), Gustavus Adolphus College (1954), North Western University (1954), University of Notre Dame (1961), Ohio State University, Florida State University, University of Maryland (1961), Temple University, Georgetown University, University of the State of New York (1962), and Trinity College (1963).
Seaborg was given the degrees of a Doctor of Humane Letters by the Northern Michigan College, a Doctor of Public Service by the George Washington University and a Doctor of Public Administration by the University of Puget Sound in 1962.
Seaborg received a Doctor of Laws from the University of Michigan in 1962 and from the University of Massachusetts in 1963.
Without a job after graduation in 1937, Seaborg was surprised and delighted when Gilbert N. Lewis asked him to be his personal assistant. Seaborg was able to continue working in his own specialty area: the discovery and chemical characterization of the radioactive isotopes of various elements, including iodine-131, iron-59, and cobalt-60.
Berkeley physicists Edwin McMillan began the search for element 94 but turned the task over to Seaborg when he was called away on war research. Seaborg, by now an instructor in the Chemistry Department (1939 - 1941), produced and chemically identified plutonium in February 1941 by bombarding neptunium with deuterons, the nuclei of the hydrogen isotope deuterium. A month later he and Emilio Segre showed that the isotope plutonium-239 fissioned with slow neutrons, opening the possibility of using it as fuel for a nuclear reactor or the explosive heart of a nuclear weapon. Seaborg was made an assistant professor in 1941. Early the next year John Gofman, a student working with him, created and chemically identified a new isotope of uranium, U-233, which would be of great commercial importance if thorium, readily abundant, ever became a common reactor fuel.
With America's entry into the war and the organization of scientific activity for military purposes, Seaborg took leave from the University of California and joined the nuclear research group, The Manhattan Project, at the University of Chicago. There he was in charge of the investigation of transuranium elements, especially the task of learning plutonium's chemical properties so the element could be extracted from uranium. Visible amounts of plutonium were extracted by the summer of 1942. The microgram quantities produced were used to devise chemical separation techniques tested in a pilot plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and scaled up to industrial size for the plutonium-producing reactors built at Hanford, Washington. The plutonium separated there was transported to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where it was fashioned into components for the bomb tested at Alamogordo in July 1945 and for the weapon dropped on Nagasaki in August.
Seaborg returned to Berkeley in the spring of 1945 as a full professor. While still in Chicago, he and his colleagues synthesized and separated elements 95 and 96, americium and curium, respectively, and Seaborg fashioned the concept of the actinide group to place the heavy elements in the periodic table. This idea enabled him to predict the chemical properties of still-higher numbered transuranium elements.
At Berkeley between 1946 and 1958 he and his group (sometimes collaborating with other laboratories) discovered six more elements: berkelium (97), californium (98), einsteinium (99), fermium (100), mendelevium (101), and nobelium (102). Element 106 was found some years later. With scientific distinction came additional responsibilities. Seaborg was director of Berkeley's Nuclear Chemistry Division (1946-1958 and 1972 - 1975) and an associate director of the campus' Radiation Laboratory (1954 - 1961 and after 1972), founded by Ernest Lawrence.
He also served on the national scene. President Truman appointed him a member of the Atomic Energy Commission's first General Advisory Committee (1947 - 1950), which was chaired by Robert Oppenheimer. These positions did not pull Seaborg away from laboratory work, but a request from a most unexpected direction began that process. Berkeley's chancellor, Clark Kerr, asked Seaborg, a sports fan, to be the faculty representative to the Pacific Coast Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. He accepted and served (1953 - 1958) during a time of scandals that forced the conference's dissolution and the creation of a successor organization. Indeed, he was a leading figure who displayed administrative skills in navigating through that troubled period.
When Kerr was elevated to the presidency of the multi-campus University of California in 1958, he asked Seaborg to be the next chancellor at Berkeley. Seaborg served in this position during a period of great activity: various departments, colleges, and institutes were created, while others were restructured. Increased federal funding offered greater opportunities for graduate education, numerous buildings were constructed or planned, programs to improve the quality of teaching were initiated, and teams in several sports were remarkably successful. Seaborg responded to invitations at the national level as well and was appointed by President Eisenhower to the President's Science Advisory Committee (1959 - 1961) and to the National Science Foundation's National Science Board (1960 - 1961).
In early, 1961 newly inaugurated President Kennedy appointed Seaborg chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). He had held this post for ten years - longer than any other chairman - under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. As it was a full-time job requiring residence in Washington D. C., Seaborg took an extended leave of absence from the University of California. The AEC's mission was two-fold: to design and build nuclear weapons and to encourage peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The commission's history during this period has not yet received enough attention, so Seaborg's leadership cannot be fully evaluated. New weapons - such as the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile - were deployed, while other weapons - such as missiles with multiple warheads - were developed. The nation's stockpile of arms reached a point where the production of fissionable material was reduced. Seaborg also was involved in the government's successful effort to negotiate the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963) and the Non-Proliferation Treaty (1970).
As the discoverer of plutonium Seaborg preferred to encourage its use for peaceful purposes rather than as the prime ingredient in atomic bombs or the trigger in hydrogen bombs. His years at the AEC were ones in which the peaceful atom seemed likely to succeed. Radioactive materials were used in medical diagnosis and treatment, industrial product testing, the dating of archeological artifacts, power packs for instruments that must be left unattended, and other applications that are noncontroversial. But the major uses, once so promising, were dead or moribund by 1985. The AEC's Plowshare program, in which nuclear explosives would carve out harbors and canals and pulverize rock for easier mineral extraction, proved to be neither economically nor politically viable. The same is true of the nuclear-powered spacecraft (which never got off the drawing board) and nuclear-powered merchant ships (which were built).
During the early 1960s electrical utilities could not sign up fast enough for the construction of nuclear reactors. By the end of the decade and through the 1970's they canceled contracts faster than they sought new ones. Unanticipated time delays, enormous cost overruns, smaller demand for electricity, construction quality problems, safety uncertainties, public opposition, and other factors turned nuclear power into an industry with a great future behind it. But if this has been a failed generation of reactors, a number of them nevertheless were built and more will come on line in the future. Support for the next generation-breeder reactors - which would produce more fissionable material than they consume and which would utilize the presently "wasted" uranium-238 or thorium-232 (the latter yields U-233, discovered by Gofman and Seaborg) had been withdrawn by the federal government.
Seaborg returned to Berkeley in 1971 as a University Professor of Chemistry. During his years in Washington D. C. and after he served on numerous other governmental committees and played an active role in professional societies. In the 1980s, he published two books, the first being Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban (1981). In 1987 Stemming the Tide: Arms Control in the Johnson Years was published.
On August 24, 1998, while in Boston to attend a meeting by the American Chemical Society, Seaborg suffered a stroke, which led to his death six months later on February 25, 1999, at his home in Lafayette.
As an adviser to 10 U. S. presidents, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George H. W. Bush, Seaborg visited more than 60 countries to promote international scientific cooperation and nuclear arms control treaties. Although he was actively involved in the development of the atomic bomb, he was one of the six signatories of the Franck Report (1945), which urged that the bomb be demonstrated to the Japanese instead of being used against a civilian population. He considered control of nuclear weapons the most crucial problem facing humanity, and he laid the groundwork for the 1968 Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which he considered “perhaps the most important step in arms limitation since the advent of the nuclear age.”
Views
Quotations:
“All my life I've been surrounded by people who are smarter than I am, but I found I could always keep up by working hard. ”
“People must understand that science is inherently neither a potential for good nor for evil. It is a potential to be harnessed by man to do his bidding. ”
Membership
Glenn Seaborg was an honorary member of many foreign scientific societies, such as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1972 and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) of London in 1985.
Seaborg became president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972 and of the American Chemical Society in 1976. He was one of the founders of, and in 1981, the president of the International Organization for Chemical Sciences in Development (IOCD), an organization that tried to solve Third World problems through scientific collaboration.
Personality
Outside the political and scientific arenas, Seaborg was a devoted family man and outdoor enthusiast. He was an avid hiker. Upon becoming Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1961, he commenced taking daily hikes through a trail that he blazed at the headquarters site in Germantown, Maryland.
Quotes from others about the person
"To say that Seaborg had a high-profile career is an understatement. He is in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the longest entry in "Who's Who in America." … In 1944, Seaborg formulated the 'actinide concept' of heavy element electronic structure which predicted that the actinides – including the first eleven transuranium elements – would form a transition series analogous to the rare earth series of lanthanide elements. Called one of the most significant changes in the periodic table since Mendeleev's 19th-century design, the actinide concept showed how the transuranium elements fit into the periodic table."
"The body of information assembled in Dr. Seaborg's laboratory has made it possible to predict the radioactive characteristics of many isotopes of elements still to be found. Under Dr. Seaborg's leadership, also, whole new bodies of methodology and instrumentation have been developed and have become a cornerstone of modern nuclear chemistry."
"Glenn Seaborg had a tremendous influence on me — both before and after I met him. Of course, as a nuclear chemist, I knew of his leadership in the legendary discovery of plutonium in 1941, the development of the actinide concept, his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1951, and the discovery of 8 more transplutonium elements by 1958. It was not until his tenure as chairman of the AEC (1961-71) that I actually began to learn first hand about the "real" person behind these awesome accomplishments. … The breadth of his interests, his skill in communicating with both scientists and the general public and press, and his energy in doing all this even while he was AEC chairman still boggles my mind! … I learned so many things from him just by observing how he ran the weekly brown bag lunches with his graduate students and later mine — listening with great interest as they described their research progress. He asked insightfully and penetrating questions, but not in a threatening manner, made suggestions, and frequently went to visit the labs late in the day to see what was going on. He also hosted many undergraduate research students. He was devoted to education and student training and would prepare as carefully for lectures to freshman chemistry classes as for presentations to prestigious assemblages of scientists."
Glenn was very concerned with history and had kept a diary or journal since he was eight years old. After his return to Berkeley from Washington in 1971, he continued the tremendous undertaking of putting them into book form, which occupied him and several helpers for many years. His journals also formed the basis for books on his years as chancellor at Berkeley, as chairman of the AEC, and many other topics. On the rare occasions that he did not remember something that one of us might ask about he would look it up in his journals. He had a fabulous memory and was able to synthesize and apply and keep track of what he knew so it could be applied to the situation at hand. One might almost say in the parlance of our time that he was a "parallel processor"! … In spite of his legendary accomplishments, Glenn Seaborg always had time for family members, colleagues, students, and even non-scientists who wanted to visit with him. We have lost a treasured advisor, colleague, mentor, resource, and friend. But he will live on through his prolific writings and in the cherished memories of the hosts of students, scientists, colleagues, and lay people that he influenced." - Darleane C. Hoffman
Interests
Sport & Clubs
Glen T. Seaborg was fond of athletics and helped found the ‘Athletic Association of Western Universities’ in 1958.
Connections
Seaborg married Helen L. Griggs in 1942. They had seven children.