A Los Alamos metallurgist will discuss the uniqueness and properties of plutonium and its alloys in a pair of inaugural talks for a series of lectures from the Laboratory’s Glenn T. Seaborg Institute for Transactinium Science.
David Olivas of Process Science and Technology (NMT-10) will provide a high-level “Introduction to Plutonium Metallurgy” at 3 p.m., Tuesday, in the auditorium of Building 535 at Technical Area 46. Olivas will follow up with a second lecture, “The Plutonium-Gallium System,” at 3 p.m., Thursday, in the same auditorium.
“The new lecture series will focus on the chemistry, metallurgy and materials properties of plutonium, with the goal of developing ideas for a possible graduate-level course that could be offered through the University of New Mexico,” said Gordon Jarvinen, an associate director of the Seaborg Institute.
The unclassified lectures will take place at 3 p.m., Tuesdays and Thursdays at the TA-46, Building 535 auditorium and a tailored to a general laboratory audience, such as students, postdoctoral fellows, technicians, staff members and visiting scientists.
The initial lectures focus on practical metallurgical theory, especially how plutonium metal can be manipulated to produce alloys that exhibit desirable properties.
In Tuesday’s talk, Olivas will discuss the properties of the different isotopes and of the six allotropes, or phases, of plutonium. He will cover the addition of alloying elements to stabilize the delta phase of plutonium and explain how select impurities affect the properties.
On Thursday, Olivas will focus on alloying plutonium with gallium to produce delta-phase plutonium alloys. He will describe the U.S. and Russian versions of the plutonium-gallium equilibrium binary phase diagram. Most of his discussion will be on understanding solidification of Pu-Ga alloys, the coring (gallium segregation) phenomena in phase transformations, cooling of the cored structure to produce a two-phase microstructure at ambient temperature, and finally heat treating of the two-phase alpha-delta microstructure to produce a 100 percent delta-phase structure.
The Seaborg Institute and its lectures and seminars form an important component of the Laboratory's educational goals. The institute this summer is sponsoring 12 undergraduate and graduate students in several Laboratory divisions, including Nuclear Materials Technology (NMT), Chemistry (C), Materials Science and Technology (MST) and Theoretical (T) divisions.
