Glenn Seaborg

Glenn Seaborg was an American nuclear chemist whose work was central to establishing plutonium as a usable nuclear fuel. In February 1941 he and his colleagues first identified plutonium-239, produced by bombarding uranium, and went on to show that it was fissile, a finding that directly shaped the direction of Manhattan Project research. During the project Seaborg developed the chemical extraction process used to isolate plutonium for the first atomic weapons. He went on to co-discover nine further transuranium elements, and received the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared with Edwin McMillan, for this body of work.