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Found in the Trash: A Jug of Plutonium; (Vintage '44)
Topic Started: Mar 4 2009, 01:46 PM (99 Views)
She-ra
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Princess of Power

Found in the Trash: A Jug of Plutonium (Vintage ’44, Sleuths Say)

By HENRY FOUNTAIN
Published: March 2, 2009

An old safe buried in a waste trench at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State has yielded an artifact from the birth of the atomic age: a batch of plutonium that is among the first ever made.

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BURIED Plutonium found in 2004 was among the first ever made.

The plutonium, found in a one-gallon glass jug after a cleanup crew tore open the safe with an excavator, was processed at Hanford in late 1944 from spent uranium fuel from a reactor at Oak Ridge, Tenn. It was the product of test runs of a plant built for separating plutonium for use in the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb.

Apart from the historical significance of the discovery — the only earlier sample of man-made plutonium known to exist was produced in 1941 in an accelerator and is stored at the Smithsonian Institution — the techniques employed to determine its origins provide a glimpse of the kind of detective work that might be used against atomic terrorism.

“This is a completely unclassified example of the type of science you could apply in nuclear forensics,” said Jon M. Schwantes, who led a team that analyzed the plutonium at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash. Their findings were published in Analytical Chemistry.

Through isotopic analysis, reactor simulations and other techniques, Dr. Schwantes and his team determined when the plutonium was separated and which reactor provided the fuel. Since every reactor produces spent fuel with a unique “fingerprint” of small variations in isotopic concentrations, similar analyses could help investigators determine the source of material for a terrorist bomb.

The researchers also demonstrated how another isotopic signature could be used to calculate when an amount of plutonium had been split from a larger batch, and how big the original batch was. That could aid in determining whether a seized amount of plutonium represented only part of a larger cache.

The glass jug, which contained less than half a gram of plutonium-239, a tiny part of the amount needed for a bomb, was found with “wastes for recovery” scrawled on it when it was removed from the concrete-lined safe in 2004.

Once it was determined that the plutonium had its origins in Tennessee, the researchers found old shipping manifests documenting the transfer of 96 slugs of spent reactor fuel from Oak Ridge to Hanford in September 1944.

At Hanford, huge plants to separate plutonium from reactor fuel, and the reactors to provide the fuel, were being built simultaneously. One separation facility, the T Plant, was the first to be finished, in late 1944, and with no local fuel ready to test the efficiency of the process, the Oak Ridge fuel was used.

Later, fuel from Hanford was used to produce plutonium for the first test bomb, detonated in New Mexico in July 1945, and for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, a month later.

Robert S. Norris, the author of “Racing for the Bomb,” a biography of Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the military leader of the Manhattan Project, said that some plutonium was produced even earlier at Oak Ridge, using a pilot separation plant. Those small samples were analyzed by scientists in the project, and their findings led to an abrupt change in plans for the design of the plutonium bomb. But where that plutonium ended up is anybody’s guess, Mr. Norris said.

As for the Hanford sample, don’t expect it to be on display at the Smithsonian anytime soon. One reason to look at the Manhattan Project for forensic purposes, Dr. Schwantes said, “is to identify and procure samples of interest that we can use as cross-reference material” in new investigations. The Hanford plutonium is just such a sample, he said, and will remain in government hands.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/science/03plut.html?_r=1&ref=science
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Shall I let you come over to Myspace and let you
Twitter my Yahoo until I Google all over your Facebook?
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StrmySummer
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Storm Goddess

hope they all had their suits on or they'll be glowin.....haha :swoon:
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"Beginning now, let's play more, kiss more, love more, let's be so close that when one of us cries, the other tastes salt."
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LarryOldtimer
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The Man!!!
[ *  *  *  *  *  *  * ]
Plutonium has been much maligned. Its "radiation" is almost entirely alpha particles, which can't even penetrate a piece of paper. Or even the dead cells of human skin, for that matter.

Now if it is ground up real fne, or machining is done, and the fne particles get into a person's lungs, quick and fatal lung cancer will occur.

But it isn't really all that dangerous. More scare and panic tactics from the anti-nuclear power nitwits.
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