0 a chemical element that is a soft, silver-white metal, and is radioactive:
He realized that berkelium could be extracted at the same time.
The element was manufactured in a particle accelerator by smashing together isotopes of calcium and a radioactive element called berkelium.
The production resulted in 22 milligrams of berkelium, enough to perform the experiment.
The isotope which is the easiest to synthesize is berkelium-249.
The production of the second-important isotope berkelium-247 involves the irradiation of the rare isotope curium-244 with high-energy alpha particles.
In a thermal reactor, much of it will therefore be converted to berkelium-250 which quickly decays to californium-250.
The coordination of the berkelium atom in its trivalent fluoride and chloride is tricapped trigonal prismatic, with a coordination number of 9.
He was part of the team that discovered elements 97 and 98 (berkelium and californium) in 1949 and 1950.