Australia’s strongest particle accelerator helped conjure new elements into being. But many students trained at the facility are being hired offshore.
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The stunt would also attract a horde of angry scientists who would beat me up with sticks, says David Hinde, an emeritus professor with a long history at this facility at the Australian National University in Canberra.Scientists can fire a soil sample through this accelerator and pluck out individual plutonium atoms left over from nuclear tests in the 1950s. The beam also blasts satellite prototypes with radioactivity to test if they can withstand cosmic gamma rays.
The method of smashing calcium-48 with a heavy element has reached its practical limit because, to create element 119, you’d need einsteinium; an element discovered in the debris of a hydrogen bomb test that’s quick to decay and can only be manufactured in tiny quantities .“We’ve discovered a whole new region of fission and nuclei that behave in an unexpected way,” Hinde says.
“And really, that’s the same story that’s always led us to applications – let’s think of the hardest thing we can think of to do and have a crack at it.” We’ll need nuclear engineers and physicists to safely house and run the AUKUS submarines slated to arrive in the late 2030s; at least 200 nuclear experts and 4300 people trained in nuclear engineering,But there aren’t enough tenured nuclear physicists to provide the high-level training needed to fully embrace domestic nuclear opportunities in defence, space, medicine and agriculture. There are so few in Australia I’ve just met half of them in the facility’s lobby.
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