Word: plutonium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...time Baker arrived in Beijing on Friday, his meetings in other Asian capitals had turned North Korea's nuclear weapons program into the most prominent topic on his agenda. Experts say Pyongyang is probably producing plutonium and might have enough for a bomb within two to five years. American officials said they hoped to enlist China, Japan and the Soviet Union in a joint effort to push North Korea out of the nuclear field...
...world peace with his nuclear- weapons-reduction speech last month, but he has also handed a heavy burden to the atomic-arms industry. By the latest calculation, there are over 3,000 warheads headed for early retirement, containing about 25 tons of enriched uranium and 10 tons of plutonium -- both radioactive and both difficult to dispose of. Moreover, the Department of Energy's Pantex bomb-assembly facility near Amarillo, Texas, which was expecting to build some 3,500 warheads over the next few years, suddenly has to reverse gears and begin dismantling weapons. Says Thomas Cochran, a nuclear-arms expert...
...customized packing crates and, if overseas, flown back to the U.S. Under heavy guard, they are then shipped to Pantex by truck or train, along routes that are constantly changed and always kept secret. The most sensitive part of disassembly comes not in handling the uranium and highly toxic plutonium, which are shielded in metal, but in dealing with the conventional explosives needed to trigger a nuclear chain reaction. Disassembly therefore takes place in underground bunkers known as "Gravel Gerties," whose roofs are mounded with gravel to contain any accidental blasts...
...public's dread centers on the radioactive elements that remain in spent fuel rods after atomic reactions. While such highly toxic fission products as strontium 90 and cesium 137 have half-lives of only about 30 years, other intensely radioactive substances like plutonium will endure for tens and even hundreds of millenniums, and are piling up fast. High-level waste -- that which is most radioactive -- from U.S. power plants is not voluminous. More than 30 years' worth totals 17,000 tons, a thimbleful compared with the slag that would result from generating equivalent power by burning coal. Yet this waste...
...operation." What worries the watchers is that the reactor was built in secret and that its capacity -- estimated at between 15 and 40 megawatts -- is too small for generating electricity but too large for research. The likely conclusion, they say, is that its purpose is to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons...