Fermium
. Fermium, symbol Fm, artificially created radioactive element with an atomic number of 100. Fermium is one of the transuranium elements in the actinide series of the periodic table . The element was isolated in 1952 from the debris of a hydrogen bomb explosion by the American chemist Albert Ghiorso and coworkers. Subsequently fermium was prepared synthetically in a nuclear reactor by bombarding plutonium with neutrons and in a cyclotron by bombarding uranium -238 with nitrogen ions. Isotopes with mass numbers from 242 to 259 have been produced; fermium-257, the longest-lived of these isotopes, has a half-life of 80 days. The element was named fermium in 1955 in honor of the Italian American nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi . Fermium does not have any industrial applications. See also Radioactivity .