The image is based on a scene from an Ancient Greek vase. It depicts the god Atlas witnessing Zeus’ punishment of Prometheus. Prometheus was chained to a rock on a mountain top. Every day an eagle tore at his body and ate his liver, and every night the liver grew back. Because Prometheus was immortal, he could not die, but he suffered endlessly.

Fact Box

Uses

Most promethium is used only in research. A little promethium is used in specialised atomic batteries. These are roughly the size of a drawing pin and are used for pacemakers, guided missiles and radios. The radioactive decay of promethium is used to make a phosphor give off light and this light is converted into electricity by a solar cell.

History

In 1902, Bohuslav Branner speculated that there should be an element in the periodic table between neodymium and samarium. He was not to know that all its isotopes were radioactive and had long disappeared. Attempts were made to discover it and several claims were made, but clearly all were false. However, minute amounts of promethium do occur in uranium ores as a result of nuclear fission, but in amounts of less than a microgram per million tonnes of ore.

In 1939, the 60-inch cyclotron at the University of California was used to make promethium, but it was not proven. Finally element 61 was produced in 1945 by Jacob .A. Marinsky, Lawrence E. Glendenin, and Charles D. Coryell at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. They used ion-exchange chromatography to separate it from the fission products of uranium fuel taken from a nuclear reactor.