Zinaida Yershova was a Russian chemist, physicist and engineer. She spent her entire career working with radioactive elements and headed laboratories producing radioactive materials used mostly in the Soviet atomic bomb project and the Soviet space programmed. She was born in Moscow. After leaving school in 1923, she enrolled at Moscow State University in the faculty of Physics and Mathematics. She joined a radiochemical laboratory. In 1924, Ershova was under the supervision of and cooperated with Khlopin. Noticing her potential, he advised her to work at the Moscow Plant of Rare Elements, where radium was first produced in the Soviet Union industrially. She graduated from university in 1929.[In 1930, she began work as a specialist processing radium from the Tyuya-Muyun deposits and quickly became head of the physical laboratory. The first batches of radium produced by the young team were released in the winter of 1931. In 1936, she was sent for an internship to the Marie Curie laboratory in Paris. Estimation of the ratio she was sent to work at Giredmet (State Institute of Rare Metals) and was appointed head of the radium laboratory. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, she was evacuated to Kazakhstan with her family. In 1943, she was called back to Moscow urgently. She was asked to produce uraniumcarbide and uranium metal; this was done at Giredmet and used for nuclear physics research and for the construction of the first European experimental nuclear reactor. That year, she defended her thesis at the M.V. Lomonosov Institute of Fine Chemical Technonogy, using research from the Radium Institute. In 1945, she headed works at a pilot factory in the city to manufacture uranium ingots. Seeing the need for a research institute with a wider technical and scientific scope - there were only two institutions (Giredmet and RIAN working with radioisotopes) . In 1944, the State Defense Committee instigated the Institute of Special Materials and arranged the technical design projects. She was invited with other scientists to see Lavrentiy Beria, the feared Soviet state security chief. He questioned her as she spoke of the uranium production and showed him a sample in a velvet-lined box. Beria said she would be rewarded and she was, promptly and financially. Ershova was head of the first radiochemical laboratory at NII-9 from the beginning of 1946, and for the next three years this was a critical period, developing technology to process uranium and its nuclear product after irradiation - plutonium and bismuth and its nuclear product after irradiation - polonium bomb primer with A pilot factory for producing plutonium was built. From the start of 1947, ingots of uranium irradiated at the reactor had begun to arrive at the Institute to extract the plutonium. In December 1947, the young female workforce produced the first Soviet plutonium. She witched to polonium production in a new laboratory in 1948. 'Wet' technology was developed by Ershova to produce large quantities of polonium-beryllium neutron sources in another new factory. The first Soviet nuclear charge, was tested in August 1949, using these products. For her contribution, she was awarded the first of her national prizes, the Stalin Prize, the same year. After 1949, she was instructed to produce tritium from the irradiation of lithium to use in the development of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. In 1952, Ershova gained her Ph.D. from the Institute. In the 1960s, the main area of work for Ershova was tritium production for research on the tritium fuel cycle for reactors and 'installations'. Polonium was used less by nuclear weapons designers but continued to be used for small-scale atomic energy sources. With B.V. Petrov she developed a 'dry' process, vacuum distillation of polonium from irradiated melted bismuth, which was safer and more efficient. She studied the reactions of polonium with many different elements. Her laboratories produced polonium products for electric current generators in communications satellites. She was awarded the USSR Academy of Sciences Prize in 1968 for her work on the chemistry of polonium. She retired from NII-9 after a 40-year career. She died in 1995 and is buried at the Vagankovskoye cemetery in Moscow.

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