Wednesday, November 02, 2005

United colors of plutonium

Plutonium, like a lot of the other transition metals, has a number of oxidation states and all of them are colorful. The valence ranges from +3 to +7, with +4 being the most common state.


This image was provided through Los Alamos or Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories; Wikipedia claims it's from LLNL but LANL uses it on a page at their site. The four colors on the right are the +4 valence forming different complexes with different anions.


I edited the image and concatenated the colors together for a palette. It looks like some sort of bad hotel color scheme.


P.S. There is some discussion of the first separation of plutonium here: http://chemcases.com/2003version/nuclear/nc-04.htm

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