SCIENCE JOURNAL 2018

Economic and Environmental Factors of Synthesising New Elements If new elements were discontinued to be synthesized, there would be many consequences in terms of economic and environmental factors. A particle accelerator costs a substantial amount of money. For example, the Large Hadron Collider which shares the border between France and Switzerland costs nearly 5 billion dollars (The Economist, 2013) and the employees that work at the Large Hadron Collider accumulate to approximately 10,000 people (Wacker, 2011). Therefore, a constraint of this process is that this industry costs an extensive amount of money that is collected from tax payer’s which could be argued to be spent in a field that has more reliable and immediate results. Furthermore, there are serious environmental effects that are associated with synthesizing new elements. When a particle accelerator is in use, it produces radiation and radioactive waste (Jha, 2013). This radiation includes x-rays which can be harmful towards anyone working near the accelerator and biota that inhabit nearby. Furthermore, as particle colliders are so large and are embedded underground, they affect the growth and vegetation of the biosphere which can cause large repercussions in food webs and populations of wildlife (Jha, 2013). Lastly, the discarding of radioactive waste that is produced from accelerators often affect the area in which is it disposed of (Jha, 2013). Therefore, these environmental worries are a possible constraint as people argue towards the health of the environment. Despite all these risks and consequences, it is crucial that new elements are continued to be synthesized. Superheavy Elements Should Continue to be Synthesized Due to the instability of super heavy elements, many people believe there is no point in trying to synthesize any new elements. This is because

‘even if a collision creates a new element, it will often be so unstable that it immediately breaks apart’ (Kramer, 2016). However, the process of creating new elements is not only functional but very important in scientific discovery. This is because, it allows scientists to learn more about how atoms are held together (N/A, 2016). Additionally, as seen in graph 2, scientists believe that these developments of superheavy elements aid in leading the discovery of the ‘Rumoured Island of Stability’ (Moskowitz, 2014) (Oganessian, 2015). This island of stability is fabled to be superheavy elements that have a perfect number of protons and neutrons that they are stable (Moskowitz, 2014). The discovery of the Island of Stability would be important because it pushes the boundaries of humanity’s knowledge and allows scientists to discover elements that they can classify and study which could potentially lead to life-changing advancements in medicine and technology (Moreno, 2015). For example, it has been shown that 44% of particle accelerators are used for radiotherapy and an additional 49% are utilised in medical and industrial methods such as medical diagnosis (Sutton, 2012). Moreover, it can be seen on Graph 2, that the new synthesized elements are decreasing the distance between themselves and the island of stability, thus signifying that this synthesisation is allowing scientists to progress closer to this potential scientific breakthrough (Oganessian, 2015). Additionally, the new synthesized elements all eventually alpha decay into Dubnium which can be used for nuclear bombs and weapons and therefore aid in this area of humanity’s safety and protection. (Stewart, 2018; Gagnon, 2018). Therefore, this disproves the claim because as new elements are synthesized, humanity is progressing closer to scientific innovation and discovery.

SC J SI

35

Somerset College Journal of Scientific Issues

Year 10