Old plutonium found in dump

[n2doc]

Weapons-grade material discovered at Hanford nuclear site.

Geoff Brumfiel


The glass bottle containing the plutonium (right) was found inside a rusty safe (left).
The clean-up of a decommissioned US nuclear weapons plant has unearthed one of the oldest known samples of man-made plutonium.

Workers found roughly half a gram of weapons-grade plutonium-239 (Pu-239) in an abandoned safe at the Hanford Site in rural Washington state. Researchers at the nearby Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have dated the plutonium to roughly 1946, just two years after the United States tested its first nuclear device in the desert of New Mexico.

The sample is the second-oldest known man-made plutonium, according to Jon Schwantes, a research scientist at the laboratory and author on the paper, which appears online in the journal Analytical Chemistry. The oldest sample, made in the early 1940s by Glen Seaborg of the University of California in Berkeley and his colleagues, is held by the Smithsonian in Washington.

more:

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090122/full/news.2009.53.html?s=news_rss

[havocmom]

1. Interesting solution to the storage problem

One might hope the power companies don't adopt the method.

:(

[n2doc]

3. "We're gonna need a bigger safe" n/t

[Iterate]

2. It's the Rocky Flats solution:spread the wealth.