Word: plutonium
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...greater impact than most highway fatalities. It brought to light a bizarre mystery that has touched off a series of investigations. It also resulted last week in a special Atomic Energy Commission report about Silkwood and her contamination by one of the most dangerous substances known to man-plutonium...
Karen Silkwood was a $4-an-hour technician at Kerr-McGee Corp.'s Cimarron River plutonium plant about 30 miles north of Oklahoma City. The facility makes plutonium pellet fuel rods for the breeder reactor, a second-generation nuclear power plant now being developed. Silkwood was one of the most active members of local 5-283 of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union. She was deeply concerned about how plutonium was handled. And with good reason. Inhalation or swallowing of a few specks of the radioactive element can result in cancer. Exposure to slightly greater quantities can cause...
Though Kerr-McGee installed safeguards to protect its employees from the hazards of plutonium, Silkwood was critical of the plant's health and safety procedures. Last September, in testimony before the AEC, she complained about unsafe working conditions. In early November, she became living proof of those dangers. On two consecutive days, as Silkwood was leaving work, sensitive plant monitors detected that she was slightly contaminated by radioactivity. She was promptly scrubbed clean. Later, she brought in urine and fecal samples; they proved to be radioactive. On a third day, the monitors clicked when she entered the plant...
...synthesis of element No. 106 was announced last week by a Berkeley team led by Physicist Albert Ghiorso and Chemist Glenn Seaborg, the former Atomic Energy Commission chairman who won a Nobel Prize for synthesizing element No. 94 (plutonium). The Berkeley scientists used a newly beefed-up particle accelerator called Super-HILAC (for heavy ion linear accelerator) to send nuclei of oxygen atoms barreling into another artificial element, californium. As occasional collisions occurred between the oxygen and californium nuclei, they fused and formed the heavier nucleus of element 106-but not for long. Like most artificial elements...
More Tinder. Plutonium (Pu-239) is not found in nature, but will become increasingly abundant. It is the artificial byproduct of the fission that takes place within nuclear power generators. After complicated processing, it can be converted into a warhead, and that is what worries experts. As the soaring price of fossil fuels encourages an increasing number of nations to buy nuclear plants to generate electricity, substantial amounts of Pu-239 will become available. "There will simply be more and more tinder lying around," observes Francois Duchene, the director of London's International Institute for Strategic Studies...