| Discovery date | 1937 |
| Discovered by | Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè |
| Origin of the name | The name is derived from the Greek 'tekhnetos' meaning artificial. |
| Allotropes |
|
Tc
Technetium
43
[98]
| Group | 7 | Melting point | 2157°C, 3915°F, 2430 K |
| Period | 5 | Boiling point | 4262°C, 7704°F, 4535 K |
| Block | d | Density (g cm−3) | 11 |
| Atomic number | 43 | Relative atomic mass | [98] |
| State at 20°C | Solid | Key isotopes | Unknown |
| Electron configuration | [Kr] 4d55s2 | CAS number | 7440-26-8 |
| ChemSpider ID | 22396 | ChemSpider is a free chemical structure database | |
Image explanation
The symbol of a human hand reflects the fact that the element is created artificially, and its name means ‘artificial’.
Appearance
A radioactive, silvery metal that does not occur naturally.
Uses
The gamma-ray emitting technetium-99m (metastable) is widely used for medical diagnostic studies. Several chemical forms are used to image different parts of the body.
Technetium is a remarkable corrosion inhibitor for steel, and adding very small amounts can provide excellent protection. This use is limited to closed systems as technetium is radioactive.
Biological role
Technetium has no known biological role. It is toxic due to its radioactivity.
Natural abundance
The metal is produced in tonne quantities from the fission products of uranium nuclear fuel. It is obtained as a grey powder.
Early chemists puzzled over why they could not discover element number 43, but now we know why – its isotopes are relatively short-lived compared to the age of the Earth, so any technetium present when the Earth formed has long since decayed.
Technetium long tantalised chemists because it could not be found. We now know that all its isotopes are radioactive and any mineral deposits of the element had long disappeared from the Earth’s crust. (The longest lived isotope has a half life of 4 million years.) Even so, some technetium atoms are produced as uranium undergoes nuclear fission and there is about 1 milligram of technetium in a tonne of uranium. Claims in the 1920s to have found this element, or at least to have observed its spectrum, cannot be entirely discounted.
Technetium was discovered by Emilio Segrè in 1937 in Italy. He investigated molybdenum from California which had been exposed to high energy radiation and he found technetium to be present and separated it. Today, this element is extracted from spent nuclear fuel rods in tonne quantities.
| Atomic radius, non-bonded (Å) | 2.16 | Covalent radius (Å) | 1.38 |
| Electron affinity (kJ mol−1) | 53.07 |
Electronegativity (Pauling scale) |
2.10 |
|
Ionisation energies (kJ mol−1) |
1st
702.41
2nd
1472.37
3rd
2850.18
4th
-
5th
-
6th
-
7th
-
8th
-
|
||
| Common oxidation states | 7 | ||||
| Isotopes | Isotope | Atomic mass | Natural abundance (%) | Half life | Mode of decay |
| 97Tc | 96.906 | - | 4.2 x 106 y | EC | |
| 98Tc | 97.907 | - | 6.6 x 106 y | β- | |
| - | EC | ||||
| 99Tc | 98.906 | - | 2.13 x 105 y | β- | |
|
Specific heat capacity (J kg−1 K−1) |
Unknown | Young's modulus (GPa) | Unknown | |||||||||||
| Shear modulus (GPa) | Unknown | Bulk modulus (GPa) | Unknown | |||||||||||
| Vapour pressure | ||||||||||||||
| Temperature (K) |
|
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| Pressure (Pa) |
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| Listen to Technetium Podcast |
|
Transcript :
Chemistry in its element: technetium(Promo) You're listening to Chemistry in its element brought to you by Chemistry World, the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry. (End promo) Chris Smith Hello! For Chemistry in its element this week, we are meeting the man who made the periodic table and also hearing the story of the element that he predicted would exist, but never lived to see it discovered. That man was Mendeleev and with the tale of technetium, the element he foresaw, here's Mark Peplow. Mark Peplow "Once there lived and existed a great learned man, with a beard almost as long as God's", so wrote Daniel Posin in his biography of Dmitri Mendeleev, the 19th Century Russian scientist credited with creating the periodic table of elements. There's a sculpture outside the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, which portrays Mendeleev in all his hirsute glory right at the centre of a sunburst of elements. The sculpture makes it clear that Mendeleev is no mere bookkeeper of elements; instead he was the creative spark behind their existence. For a while other scientists had tried to create ways of ordering the known elements. Mendeleev created a system that could predict the existence of elements, not yet discovered. That's what made the idea so revolutionary. When he presented the table to the world in 1869, it contained four prominent gaps, one of these was just below manganese and Mendeleev predicted an element with atomic weight 43 and properties similar to its neighbours would be found to fill that gap. He named the missing element ekamanganese. After the other absentees were found and subsequently named Scandium, Gallium and Germanium, the search for ekamanganese intensified. There were unconfirmed reports of its discovery from Russia, Japan and most convincingly in Germany, but it was not until 1937 that a group of Italian scientists led by Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè at the University of Palermo in Sicily finally found the missing element. The previous year, Segrè had visited Ernest Lawrence's cyclotron in Berkley in America, a particle accelerator that was being used to smash atoms apart. And in early 1937, Lawrence sent Segrè a piece of deflector foil from the cyclotron, made from molybdenum, element number 42, just one proton shy of ekamanganese. Now Segrè was a particle physicist. He actually went on to share the Nobel Prize in physics for discovering the antiproton. So he didn't have much experience of chemistry, but the mineralogist, Carlo Perrier did and together they eventually managed to isolate two radioactive isotopes of the new element, which they named technetium. The name is from the Greek word for artificial, since technetium was the very first man-made element, yet despite the name, technetium is found naturally albeit in tiny traces. It's a product of spontaneous uranium fission and although there are no stable isotopes of technetium, you can usually find about a nanogram of technetium in every 5 kilos of the uranium ore, pitchblende. That's not to say that the stuff is scarce, it's actually a common waste product from nuclear power stations and it's estimated that several tons of technetium have been released into the environment as low level waste over the past half century. But technetium is also used in about 20 million medical imaging procedures every year. This relies on a form of technetium, which has a half life of about 6 hours. It decays by emitting a gamma ray, which can be detected by what is effectively a special form of camera. The short half life allows doctors to inject the technetium into a patient in order to light up particular organs in the body and assess how well they work. Hooking the technetium atoms up with certain organic molecules or pharmaceuticals can even allow you to target specific types of tissue. Because technetium doesn't occur naturally, it doesn't interfere with any of the body's biochemistry, so it's safely excreted after the procedure and since you need so little of the isotope, it keeps the radiation dose really low. Mendeleev could surely have had no idea that 140 years after he predicted the existence of ekamanganese, about 50,000 people in North America alone would be injected with the stuff every single day. Chris Smith Mark Peplow telling the tale of technetium. Next time on Chemistry in its element we're sinking to new depths. Philip Ball Even the spark of glamour the metal gets from its association with the world's greatest rock band stems from the eeyorish prediction that they would sink like a lead balloon or zeppelin. Chris Smith And you can hear science writer Phil Ball swinging the lead in next week's edition of Chemistry in its element. I'm Chris Smith, thank you for listening. See you next time. (Promo) Chemistry in its element is brought to you by the Royal Society of Chemistry and produced by thenakedscientists.com. There's more information and other episodes of Chemistry in its element on our website at chemistryworld.org/elements. (End promo)
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Visual Elements images and videos
© Murray Robertson 1998-2017.
W. M. Haynes, ed., CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis, Boca Raton, FL, 95th Edition, Internet Version 2015, accessed December 2014.
Tables of Physical & Chemical Constants, Kaye & Laby Online, 16th edition, 1995. Version 1.0 (2005), accessed December 2014.
J. S. Coursey, D. J. Schwab, J. J. Tsai, and R. A. Dragoset, Atomic Weights and Isotopic Compositions (version 4.1), 2015, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, accessed November 2016.
T. L. Cottrell, The Strengths of Chemical Bonds, Butterworth, London, 1954.
John Emsley, Nature’s Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, Oxford University Press, New York, 2nd Edition, 2011.
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility - Office of Science Education, It’s Elemental - The Periodic Table of Elements, accessed December 2014.
Periodic Table of Videos, accessed December 2014.
Derived in part from material provided by the British Geological Survey © NERC.
Elements 1-112, 114, 116 and 117 © John Emsley 2012. Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 © Royal Society of Chemistry 2017.
Produced by The Naked Scientists.
Created by video journalist Brady Haran working with chemists at The University of Nottingham.
© Murray Robertson 1998-2017.
Data
W. M. Haynes, ed., CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis, Boca Raton, FL, 95th Edition, Internet Version 2015, accessed December 2014.
Tables of Physical & Chemical Constants, Kaye & Laby Online, 16th edition, 1995. Version 1.0 (2005), accessed December 2014.
J. S. Coursey, D. J. Schwab, J. J. Tsai, and R. A. Dragoset, Atomic Weights and Isotopic Compositions (version 4.1), 2015, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, accessed November 2016.
T. L. Cottrell, The Strengths of Chemical Bonds, Butterworth, London, 1954.
Uses and properties
John Emsley, Nature’s Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, Oxford University Press, New York, 2nd Edition, 2011.
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility - Office of Science Education, It’s Elemental - The Periodic Table of Elements, accessed December 2014.
Periodic Table of Videos, accessed December 2014.
Supply risk data
Derived in part from material provided by the British Geological Survey © NERC.
History text
Elements 1-112, 114, 116 and 117 © John Emsley 2012. Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 © Royal Society of Chemistry 2017.
Podcasts
Produced by The Naked Scientists.
Periodic Table of Videos
Created by video journalist Brady Haran working with chemists at The University of Nottingham.
