The conference in a nutshell

"Plutonium Futures-the Science Conference" closed with a tour-de-force summary of the entire fiveday program by Gerd Rosenblatt, one of the founders of the conference. Rosenblatt, of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said he listened to all forty-five talks and looked at all 125 posters. "The scientific quality of the papers (presentations and posters) has just gone up and up and up," Rosenblatt said. On the other hand, he commented, the average age of those attending the conference has gone down notably-perhaps as much as 10 years-a fact that gives Rosenblatt "a lot of hope" for the future of plutonium science. Such diverse participatio're making exciting progress," Rosenblatt concluded, but he reminded his audience of the call by Dr. Helen Caldicott, founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, for an end to all nuclear weapons. "We have to think about what we do and why, and our responsibilities to our fellow human beings," he said.

Gerd Rosenblatt provided two postscripts for his audience: The next plutonium conference will be the "Actinides 2005 International Conference," July 3Ð8, 2005, in Manchester, England. To keep up with developments, those interested in the conference should visit the Web site (www.actinides2005.com). And the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics are likely to rule in August that GSI in Darmstadt, Germany, (a heavy ion research center funded by the Federal Government of Germany and the state of Hesse) has proved the existence of another element-number 110. GSI wants to call it "darmstadtinium," and the name is likely to win approval, Rosenblatt said. An announcement is likely soon afterward, he said, declaring that GSI has also discovered element 111. But, he said, no other suggested elements yet seem sufficiently reliable to be approved.

NMT | LANL | DOE
Phone Book | Search | Help/Info

L O S  A L A M O S  N A T I O N A L   L A B O R A T O R Y
Operated by the University of California for the US Department of Energy