Same thing goes for things like plutonium. Plutonium is...

Plutonium. Wait a minute.

Even the plutonium inside the reactor is what's called reactor grade plutonium, which isn't suitable.

I'm not the biggest fan of plutonium because I'm not crazy about the plutonium fast breeder reactor, but there's nothing good or bad about plutonium.

This was the guy who discovered plutonium.

The overwhelming majority of transuranics are plutonium.

NASA is desperate for this stuff. Plutonium 238 is different than plutonium 239, the stuff we use in bombs.

But we launch plutonium batteries all the time.

like uranium, plutonium, and everything else when they decay.

Doc, look. All we need is a little plutonium.

Lived an old plutonium miner, and his daughter Clementine

Look at plutonium, is that deep low two right there.

You don't just walk into a store and buy plutonium.

Argon National Labs was fully going for the plutonium fast breeder.

Plutonium just is. It's what you decide to do with it.

The uranium and plutonium took on a gas form to escape.

Maybe keep a few little bombs of plutonium on the side.

Unfortunately, no. It requires something with a little more kick. Plutonium.

But there is a chemical difference between plutonium and uranium, so it was a lot easier to do a chemical separation of the plutonium you'd made.

That's what happens when the uranium absorbs the neutron and doesn't fission, and turns into plutonium, americium and curium and few other, most of it is plutonium.

That was there whole thing was to do the plutonium fast breeder.

What am I thinking of? I almost forgot to bring extra plutonium.

They built this during the Manhattan project to make plutonium for nuclear weapons.

The radioactivities are mixture of Uranium and Plutonium used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

They by and large said, We're going to go the plutonium route. One of the reasons why was they had developed a great deal of understanding about plutonium from the weapons program.

They had invested very heavily in an alternative technology, the plutonium fast breeder reactor based on solid fuels and turning abundant uranium 238 into plutonium 239 and then burning it in the reactor.

Now, plutonium is a different chemical element than uranium, so they can be chemically separated.

Experiments with plutonium based fast breeder reactors in France and Japan have been expensive failures.

I took the plutonium and gave them a bomb casing full of pinball machine parts.

The process yielded minute amounts of plutonium. By weight, the most expensive material on the planet.

We have to know that our civilization produced the nuclear power plants, it also produces plutonium.

So they were able to complete the creation of plutonium in order to make the first nuclear weapon.

Now, we've made a lot of plutonium in our reactors. What are we going to do with it?

The other thing it shows is that the blackness of that cloud, indicates that uranium and plutonium were volatilized

Waiting them out to decay is a very slow process. Plutonium 239, for instance, has a 24,000 year half life.

Out of about a thousand kilograms, about 15 kilograms of plutonium 238 will be left over. This is good stuff.

So, that accounts for the fact that uranium and plutonium were found as far away as a couple of miles offsite.

I'm sure that in 1985 plutonium is available in every corner drugstore but in 1955, it's a little hard to come by.

Look at plutonium, wow, big target, right? But one third of the time it's just going to eat the neutron in thermal fission.

The plutonium was so much better developed than the thorium. So, Wigner was not terribly successful in making converts in the nuclear community.

Plutonium has been found on site as a very fine powdery dust and another element called americium has been found in New England

These radioisotope thermoelectric generators are based on plutonium 238 and this is the only way that we've been able to explore the outer solar system.

The uranium bomb used on 6 August on the population of Hiroshima had previously never been tested by the U.S. military had previously never been tested by the U.S. military unlike the plutonium bomb used on 9 August on the population of Nagasaki. unlike the plutonium bomb used on 9 August on the population of Nagasaki.

This is really good! This was the genesis of the idea of the fast breeder reactor, a reactor that was based around having fast neutrons and plutonium fuel.

I'm thinking, You don't leave a bunch of plutonium in a pool of liquid sodium underground for an extended period of time that is a bad disposal option.