About the Book
This book consists of articles from Wikia or other free sources online. Pages: 78. Chapters: Actinium, Alkaline earth metal, Americium, Antimony, Argon, Arsenic, Beryllium, Boron, Calcium, Carbon, Carbon group, Chemical elements data references, Chemical symbol, Chlorine, Chromium, Cobalt, Dubnium, Fluorine, Germanium, Gold, Halogen, Helium, Hydrogen, Hydrogen-1, Hydrogen-2, Iodine, Iodine-131, Iron, Isotope, Isotopes of Oxygen, Krypton, Lead, List of elements by atomic mass, List of elements by melting point, List of elements by symbol, Lithium, Magnesium, Manganese, Mercury, Nitrogen, Noble gas, Oxygen, Phosphorus, Plutonium, Potassium, Radon, Rutherfordium, Scandium, Silicon, Silver, Sulfur, Synthetic element, Thorium, Tin, Titanium, Ununoctium, Uranium, Vanadium, Xenon, Zinc. Excerpt: Actinium (IPA: ) is a chemical element in the periodic table that has the symbol Ac and atomic number 89. Actinium is a silvery, radioactive, metallic element. Due to its intense radioactivity, Actinium glows in the dark with a pale blue light. It is found only in traces in uranium ores as Ac, an α and β emitter with a half-life of 21.773 years. One ton of uranium ore contains about a tenth of a gram of actinium. It is about 150 times as radioactive as radium, making it valuable as a neutron source. Otherwise it has no significant industrial applications. Ac is used in medicine to produce bismuth in a reusable generator or can be used alone as an agent for radio-immunotherapy. Actinium was discovered in 1899 by Andre-Louis Debierne, a French chemist, who separated it from pitchblende. Friedrich Oskar Giesel independently discovered actinium in 1902. The chemical behavior of actinium is similar to that of the rare earth lanthanum. The word actinium comes from the Greek aktis, aktinos, meaning beam or ray. Actinium is found in trace amounts in uranium ore, but more commonly is made in milligram amounts by the neutron irradiation of radium in a nuclear reactor. Actinium metal...
