Element 117 Synthesized - Island of Stability

Element 117 has been synthesized:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/scien ... ement.html

If the Island of Stability exists, and significant quantities of a stable element 126 could be synthesized, then what would be the practical applications of such a material?

Could it be used for some kind of superior nuclear shielding, because of a larger nuclear cross-sectional area? Or could it instead be used as a high-energy density material?

What are the likely useful properties of an hypothesized element 126?

Creating significant quantities will require incredible amounts of energy for just 1 gram of material. It will be a very dense material, therefore very massive, which will limit its useful applications to stationary devices. For the first few decades after it is produced, I would imagine that it will only be available for materials research purposes.

johno

Well, do we know what it's electronic structure would be?

I dunno, but they say these g-orbital elements would represent a totally new area of the periodic table. Apparently, element 126 would have a large nuclear cross-sectional area for high-energy EM absorption, but it would be unstable wrt neutron absorption. It's been said that if stable ultra-heavy elements could be manufactured, then you could have an atom-bomb the size of a pencil eraser. To me, that would suggest a material with such a low critical mass for chain reaction purposes, that you could carry it in powdered form and feed grains of it to a spallation source, to release lots and lots of energy on demand. Think of a toned down version of Orion and its' mini-A-bombs. These would be smaller explosions, because it would be tiny grains of this exotic material, able to chain react in small amounts due to low critical mass.

I was unable to find any info on the half-life of this material. Anybody got any sources? Also: If it's long enough, we SHOULD be able to find some! Wonder what the spectrographic signature is? Maybe somebody should look thru the M3 data to see if we can spot any on the moon!

Hmmm. If the island of stability does exist, I suppose some of the elemtns must be synthesized in supernova. A lot rarer than Uranium, though...