In 1939, the last naturally occurring element on Earth,

Francium, was discovered.

However, the periodic table of the elements still wasn't full.

The next year, a non-natural element was discovered, plutonium. This new element had fascinating properties which

made it incredibly useful and incredibly dangerous. Learn more about plutonium,

how it's made and what it can do on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. To start a discussion of plutonium, we might as well start with what it is and where it comes from.

Plutonium has the atomic number 94, which means it has 94 protons.

Its discovery is credited to Nobel Laureate Glenn Seaborg,

who discovered 10 different elements on the periodic table.

If you remember back to my episode on the element Uranium, which is element 92,

it was given its name from the then newly discovered planet Uranus.

Excuse me, Uranus.

Just months before the discovery of plutonium in 1940,

Element 93 was discovered by bombarding uranium with a cyclotron,

and it was called Neptuneum, the next planet after Uranus.

Then later that year,

a seabor again at the University of California Berkeley

bombarded uranium with Duturium, a hydrogen isotope, which created element 94, and it was

named after the planet after Neptune, or at least it was at that time, Pluto.

Only a few atoms of it were actually ever initially created.

The abbreviation for plutonium is PU, even though it really should be PL,

and there are no other elements with PL as an abbreviation.

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