OUR car rolls up to a forbidding pair of metal gates set into a high wall. “We have to have a lot of security here because we have a reactor,” says my guide, nuclear physicist .
We are entering the (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, a 3-hour rickety train ride from Moscow. Dubna, once a “closed” scientific town dedicated to nuclear research, is now open to visitors. Its claim to fame is as the birthplace of the heaviest, most ephemeral atoms known.
Since 2006, Oganessian has made a clutch of these fragile, superheavy elements…
