mrcchapman

Before he became The Colonel, Harland Sanders was the assistant cafeteria manager at Oak Ridge. This was one of the secret bases built by the US to work on the Manhattan Project, and was home to the world's first permanent nuclear reactor. They did work on uranium there, and also did the proof of concept for making plutonium (which is what the nuclear reactor was for). The history of KFC is thus tied in to the making of the atom bomb.

Oddly enough, the guy who discovered plutonium got food poisoning so badly when he visited Oak Ridge that on later trips he always insisted on bringing in sandwiches. Apparently a lot of people got the squits there...

ISLAND OF STABILITY.

I think we're going to get 119 and 120. There's very little doubt in the community that'll happen. But the biggest breakthrough would be hitting the island. It's essentially a region of nuclides where isotopes of elements that currently last for minutes/seconds will last for years, possibly millions of years. We're close to it (you can tell as the half-lives increase) but we haven't been able to create a superheavy element with enough neutrons yet to hit the region.

That would change everything. Suddenly you'd have an element (most likely 114 or 120) that would be so stable you could hold it in your hand. Rather than just have a few atoms, we'd be able to build much larger quantities. That opens up the opportunities for chemistry, for industrial applications, for understanding how our universe fits together.

If you ask any superheavy expert, discovering an element is lovely, but the Island of Stability is THE goal.

Convince some very nice men (and one woman) with AK47s that it was totally legit for me to have video cameras while walking through their checkpoint into their nuclear facility.

That or trying to match vodka shots with Russian scientists. Damn.

Yeah, there is. There's a lot of work currently going on to try and find the island around neutron number 184, so that's work with flerovium (although the problem is we can't get the neutron count up). The other possible islands beyond that, say the 120 region, are theoretical at the moment, so we need to get the next few elements before we know.

Probably 60% old friends seeing each other, 40% discussing who's doing what/interesting ideas/how work is going. It depends how long ago it was that they caught up with each other.

As the community is relatively small, there's a lot of business chat and deal making. In the cold war, the US/Russian teams were competing and not working together; today it's just not possible to do the research any other way.

That said, if it's a conference or something everyone's looking to unwind a little. Nuclear physicists discussing going to an escape room is great. Also scientists LOVE to talk about food.