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Plutonium is a chemical element; it has symbol Pu and atomic number 94. ... a safe was discovered during excavations of a burial trench at the Hanford nuclear site ...
Plutonium recovered from LWR spent fuel, while not weapons grade, can be used to produce nuclear weapons at all levels of sophistication, [25] though in simple designs it may produce only a fizzle yield. [26] Weapons made with reactor-grade plutonium would require special cooling to keep them in storage and ready for use. [27]
One of four example estimates of the plutonium (Pu-239) plume from the 1957 fire at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. The Rocky Flats Plant, a former United States nuclear weapons production facility located about 15 miles (24 km) northwest of Denver, caused radioactive (primarily plutonium, americium, and uranium) contamination within and outside its boundaries. [1]
Nuclear materials scientist Dr Lewis Blackburn from the University of Sheffield said the plutonium would be "converted into a ceramic material" which, while still radioactive, is solid and stable ...
Watchdogs are raising new concerns about legacy contamination in Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb and home to a renewed effort to manufacture key components for nuclear weapons. A ...
"Plutonium is a weird material," said Mike Furlanetto, a lab scientist and the project's director. "We understand it well enough to be confident our [nuclear] stockpile works, but there are a lot ...
The pits of the first nuclear weapons were solid, with an urchin neutron initiator in their center. The Gadget and Fat Man used pits made of 6.2 kg of solid hot pressed plutonium-gallium alloy (at 400 °C and 200 MPa in steel dies – 750 °F and 29,000 psi) half-spheres of 9.2 cm (3.6 in) diameter, with a 2.5 cm (1 in) internal cavity for the initiator.
A comparison of the activity associated to U-233 for three different SNF types can be seen in the figure on the top right. The burnt fuels are Thorium with Reactor-Grade Plutonium (RGPu), Thorium with Weapons-Grade Plutonium (WGPu) and Mixed Oxide fuel (MOX, no thorium). For RGPu and WGPu, the initial amount of U-233 and its decay around a ...