Georgy Flerov
- The Random Leftist
- Jul 14, 2019
- 4 min read
Born on the 2nd of march in the year 1913 in the port city of Rostov-on-Don. Details are rather scarce about his early life. What is known is that Flerov finished school in 1929 and took up a multitude of jobs like being an electrician, technician and machine operator. Two years after graduating Flerov would move to Leningrad (modern day St. Petersburg) to work at Krasny Putilovets plant, one of the USSR’s most prized machine producing and metallurgical plants. In 1933 Flerov would continue his academic pursuits and studied for five years in Leningrad Polytechnic Institute which was headed by Abram Ioffe. After graduating Flerov would be employed by the laboratory of Igor Kurchatov in Leningrad Physics and Technology Institute. There he’d conduct a plethora of experiments and studies on Uranium.
In the year 1939 Flernov and his colleague Rusinov would attempt to cause a nuclear chain reaction of uranium fission. Though this experiment failed the data collected form it would prove very valuable to future advancements. A year later Flerov along with Yui Khariton, and Mikhail Rusinov would submit a research plan titled “On the utilization of the energy of uranium fission in a chain reaction.” In that same year Flerov and fellow Konstantin Petrzhat would discover a new type of radioactive transformation which was the spontaneous nuclear fission of uranium. They did this by observing the flow of neutrons within uranium and using an ionization chamber to remove those neutrons.
When Germany launched it’s invasion into the USSR, Flerov would stop is research and join a volunteer corps and he’d be sent to the Leningrad Air force academy to train to be an engineer in order to help build bombers for the war effort. Flerov would be given special permission to hold a seminar in Kazan where to discussed with many of his colleagues the importance of nuclear research.
When he went to a library in the small town of Voronezh he’d read many of the scientific magazines in the library and realize that none of them included any information on nuclear physics.This lead Flerov to conclude that all of his research was classified and in response to this flerov would write a letter to Soviet union leader Josef Stalin that argued that more focus should go into nuclear research. In the letter Flerov would stress the importance of nuclear research by claiming that if more attention wasn’t give towards it the west would develop an atomic bomb before the USSR.
In the year 1943 Flerov would be pulled from the war effort and become part of a group of scientists, who were tasked with the purpose of creating nuclear weaponry. Flerov would be take part in a mission to look into the German atomic bomb program. Some soviet scientists were worried that German scientist would be brought into work on the USSR’s atomic bomb program Flerov would be part of a project The group of scientists would identify the interactions in cross sections of slow neutrons and also weigh the critical mass of Uranium-235 and plutonium.
On August 29, 1949 all on Flerov’s work would culminate when the USSR’s first atomic bomb test, which he would be present to observe. The same year Flerov would be granted full membership into the academy of science and would be given the Hero of Socialist Labor award which was one of the most esteemed awards in the USSR. A few years later in 1951 Flerov would design equipment and developed a technique for neutron and gamma-ray logging of oil wells.
Flerov would work Dubna where he’d head a nuclear research lab and be part of the joint institute of nuclear research. Starting in 1953 Flerov would work on developing techniques to synthesize and accelerate of heavy multiply charged ions. Along with techniques for physical and chemical detection and for isolation of unknown products in nuclear reactions. In 1954 the institute would experiment on nitrogen Ions with the use of a 150-centimeter cyclotron. The next year Flerov would commence on the creation of multi-charged ions. That same year the institute of atomic energy managed to host a source of mono-energetic ionic beams of oxygen, carbon and nitrogen for the first time in history. During this time Flerov would conclude that a new research facility needed to be built in order for Ion’s to be further researched, though he was unsure on what the principle of the facility should be.
From years 1955 to 1959 Flerov would devote himself to work on studying peculiarities of compound nuclei. In 1956 Flerov conducted experiments to research the then unknown element with the atomic number of 102. The Year after Flerov with the aid of I.V. Kurchatov would expand research into Ion and create the laboratory of Nuclear Reactions (or LNR) with Flerov as the head. For the rest of his life Flerov would continue making new discoveries throughout the 60’s and 70’s.
He’d die on November 19th, 1990. However his prestige for in the year 2012 the element Flerovium would be named after him.
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