Quotes About Plutonium

For 50 years, nuclear power stations have produced three products which only a lunatic could want: bomb-explosive plutonium, lethal radioactive waste and electricity so dear it has to be heavily subsidised. They leave to future generations the task, and most of the cost, of making safe sites that have been polluted half-way to eternity.

Society regards its waste as an unfortunate, but necessary, consequence of its activities-what is left when we have made essential societal goods available. But waste is not the result of what we have made. It is what we have made. Waste plutonium is not an indirect consequence of the nuclear industry; it is a product of that industry.

Fermi thought plutonium production needed an area a mile wide and two miles long for safety. Compton proposed building piles of increasing power to work up to full-scale production and was considering alternative sites in the Lake Michigan Dunes area and in the Tennessee Valley.

The pile as it waited in the dark cold of Chicago winter to be released to the breeding of neutrons and plutonium contained 771,000 pounds of graphite, 80,590 pounds of uranium oxide and 12,400 pounds of uranium metal. It cost about $1 million to produce and build. Its only visible moving parts were its various control rods.

This time," he told Weil, "take the control rod out twelve inches." Weil withdrew the cadmium rod. Fermi nodded and ZIP was winched out as well. "This is going to do it," Fermi told Compton. The director of the plutonium project had found a place for himself at Fermi's side. "Now it will become self-sustaining. The trace [on the recorder] will climb and continue to climb; it will not level off.

Seaborg's team developed two separation processes to take advantage of the different chemistries of plutonium's several different valence states.

I believe we should be investing in the potential of nuclear technology based on thorium, to end the use of plutonium and lead to much safer nuclear power plants, less toxic nuclear waste, and less opportunities for nuclear weapons proliferation.

My family never talks about feelings, and we certainly never talk about plutonium. It's hard to take something seriously if you can't see it, smell it, touch it, or feel it. Plutonium is a cosmic trick. The invisible enemy, the merry prankster. Can it hurt you or not? None of us know.

Plutonium is the darling and the demon of the nuclear age.

From 1952 to 1989, Rocky Flats manufactures more than seventy thousand plutonium triggers, at a cost of nearly $4 million apiece. Each one contains enough breathable particles of plutonium to kill every person on earth.

The doctors made plans to collect biological samples--tissues, urine, feces--all of which would be tested for the presence of plutonium, to see how it would travel, how much of it would remain in the body, and what effect it might have on HP-12 [Ebb Cade]. The day after the injection [April, 1945], Dr. Friedell sent news to Los Alamos. "I think we will have access to considerable clinical material here and we hope to do a number of subjects," he wrote.

You know what all the plutonium can buy me?" "Yeah it'll buy you one hell of a funeral!" Angel says angrily to man who was behind everything!

What's all this fuss about plutonium? How can something named after a Disney character be dangerous?

I knew we were going to pass one of the Soviet Union's most secret atomic sites, the subterranean labyrinth code-named Krasnoyarsk-26, once one of the world's most prodigious producers of plutonium. Built to make the fissile material for nuclear warheads, the entire complex had been constructed inside the mountain. It never appeared on Soviet maps.

My job was to produce plutonium that was used for atomic bomb.

It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.

Once we open the door to the plutonium economy, we expose ourselves to absolutely terrible, horrifying risks from these people.

Unlike uranium, plutonium was created in an American lab in 1940, but scientists soon realized that it could produce even wilder chain reactions and even bigger explosions. In fact, fearing another country would create it, too, the American government went to great lengths to keep even the existence of plutonium a secret.

The sunlike energy released by the fusion of atoms of the lightest element, hydrogen, is detonated by the fission of one of the heaviest, plutonium, named after the god of the underworld.

There are many different kinds of radioactive waste and each has its own half-life so, just to be on the safe side and to simplify matters, I base my calculations on the worst one and that's plutonium.

Researches at Yale found a connection between brain cancer and work environment. The No. 1 most dangerous job for developing brain cancer? Plutonium hat model.

For 50 years, nuclear power stations have produced three products which only a lunatic could want: bomb-explosive plutonium, lethal radioactive waste and electricity so dear it has to be heavily subsidised. They leave to future generations the task, and most of the cost, of making safe sites that have been polluted half-way to eternity.

In eight years alone—2010–2018—the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs. The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, it's because of these people.

It's easy to have no observable health effects when you never look," the medical director of the Lawrence Livermore lab said, back in the 1980s, after seeing how the private contractors who ran Hanford studied the matter. In her jaw-dropping 2013 book Plutopia, University of Maryland historian Kate Brown compares and contrasts American plutonium production at Hanford and its Soviet twin, Ozersk.