A radiochemist who helped build the Soviet atomic project
Kurchatov’s urgent call in 1943 brought her back from evacuation to the front line of the atomic project.
Zinaida Yershova was a Soviet radiochemist who connected the industrial production of radioactive elements with nuclear chemistry. Recalled from evacuation in Kazakhstan at Igor Kurchatov’s request in 1943, she led work at Giredmet that produced uranium carbide and metallic uranium for research on the F-1 reactor. She later advanced plutonium, polonium, and tritium technologies, contributing to both the nuclear-weapons program and isotope power sources for space exploration.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1923–1929Student at Moscow State University; research in radiochemistry
- 1930–1937Moscow Plant of Rare Elements, radium section; head of the physics laboratory
- 1936–1937Research training at the Paris Radium Institute under Irène Joliot-Curie
- 1938–1945Head of Giredmet’s radium laboratory; led production of uranium carbide and metallic uranium
- 1946–1948Head of the First Radiochemical Laboratory at the Institute of Special Materials, NII-9
- 1947–1954Research on plutonium, polonium, and tritium production technologies; received Stalin Prizes
- 1960년대–1989Research at VNIINM on polonium chemistry and isotope power sources
Related historical events
Plutonium and polonium research for nuclear weapons
In 1946 Yershova moved to NII-9 as head of its first radiochemical laboratory and led the development of methods and processes for separating plutonium compounds from irradiated uranium. From early 1947, uranium pieces irradiated in the F-1 reactor were processed in the laboratory’s pilot-scale installation. On 18 December, its researchers obtained 73 micrograms of plutonium, the first such quantity produced in the Soviet Union. The laboratory’s installation and methods also contributed to developing plutonium production at the Mayak plant.
In 1948 Yershova took up polonium research and established a new laboratory. With Dmitry Ziva, she developed a wet process and a pilot-scale installation to extract polonium from reactor-irradiated bismuth, producing polonium-beryllium neutron sources. Polonium made with this installation was used in the first Soviet atomic bomb, tested in August 1949. This work joined radiochemical separation and process development to the urgent demands of weapons production.