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Trace amounts of plutonium-238, plutonium-239, plutonium-240, and plutonium-244 can be found in nature. Small traces of plutonium-239, a few parts per trillion , and its decay products are naturally found in some concentrated ores of uranium, [ 54 ] such as the natural nuclear fission reactor in Oklo , Gabon . [ 55 ]
Plutonium-244 (244 Pu) is an isotope of plutonium that has a half-life of 81.3 million years. This is longer than any other isotope of plutonium and longer than any other known isotope of an element beyond bismuth, except for the three naturally abundant ones: uranium-235 (704 million years), uranium-238 (4.468 billion years), and thorium-232 (14.05 billion years).
This is a list of radioactive nuclides (sometimes also called isotopes), ordered by half-life from shortest to longest, in seconds, minutes, hours, days and years. Current methods make it difficult to measure half-lives between approximately 10 −19 and 10 −10 seconds.
The Plutonium-238 used in RTGs has a half-life of 88 years, as opposed to the plutonium-239 used in nuclear weapons and reactors, which has a half-life of 24,100 years. [full citation needed] In April 1964 a SNAP-9A failed to achieve orbit and disintegrated, dispersing roughly 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of plutonium-238 over all continents. Most ...
242 Pu's half-life is about 15 times as long as 239 Pu's half-life; therefore, it is 1/15 as radioactive and not one of the larger contributors to nuclear waste radioactivity. 242 Pu's gamma ray emissions are also weaker than those of the other isotopes. [15] 243 Pu has a half-life of only 5 hours, beta decaying to americium-243.
The department's Office of Environmental Management said Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the operator and manager of the Savannah River Site, recently completed its 100th plutonium downblend in ...
Letters to the editor on the history of plutonium, Project 2025, ageism on the Benton Commission, Trump, syphilis, drug laws and Hanford. | Opinion
Plutonium (Pu, atomic number 94), first synthesized in 1940, is another such element. It is the element with the largest number of protons (atomic number) to occur in nature, but it does so in such tiny quantities that it is far more practical to synthesize it. Plutonium is known mainly for its use in atomic bombs and nuclear reactors. [4]