Page 68 - Where the Dream Ends ebook

Marc Erdrich

to make it. Go figure. While it’s not that hard to make (any
nuclear reactor will do), it’s easier and cheaper to purchase it
from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory at a cost of $45,360
an ounce (to qualified users in the US and UK only), plus
shipping and handling. And they say drugs are expensive!
Wouldn’t you say at that price, it’s pretty cheap of the Oak
Ridge boys to charge extra for shipping. Any post office will
be happy to mail it first class for 49 cents.
Americium is radioactive, which has not prevented anyone
from using it in smoke detectors, about the only consumer
application for it. But don’t worry, according to doctors amer-
icium passes right through the digestive tract without any side
effects. It also tarnishes easily, so don’t plan on keeping it on a
shelf for friends to look at.

Unlike ruthenium, which everyone seems to have an opin-
ion about, no one seems to know how much americium there
is in anything, no less the universe. Which is probably because
it doesn’t exist in the first place. Or does it? I suppose the
only one who can answer that is Glenn Seaborg, the Nobel
laureate who first made or discovered americium (I’m not sure
of protocol here) in 1944, four years after discovering pluto-
nium. He named it after, you guessed it, America. Seaborg
discovered a whole bunch of things that don’t exist, including
curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, men-
delevium, and nobelium. He named so many elements that
chemists decided to name one of his discoveries, seaborgium,
after him. So much for patriotism.

Seaborgium was discovered in 1974. It has a half life (that’s
the time it takes for half the nuclei in a given quantity of the
substance to decay) of less than one second. I guess that means

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