Word: plutonium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Washington next month, two House Foreign Affairs subcommittees will hold joint hearings on the global spread of plutonium, the highly toxic atomic explosive. An estimated 55 tons of separated plutonium exists in the West, a stockpile that is growing by five to six tons a year. Among the issues likely to be discussed by legislators at the hearings is the potential that plutonium traffic offers to nuclear terrorism...
Proliferation invokes atavistic fears and uncertainties because it involves arcane and highly sophisticated technologies: breeder reactors, plutonium reprocessing plants, uranium-enrichment facilities.* Says Leonard Weiss, an expert on the U.S. Senate staff: "Proliferation is a set of symptoms with a number of causes. It is both a political and technical problem. Therefore no single cure, or set of cures, will work...
...least mastered the capacity to build them. All told, about 345 commercial nuclear power reactors are in operation in 26 countries, and some 52 nations have nuclear research facilities. At least eleven nations possess facilities for the reprocessing of nuclear fuels, all yielding varying amounts of plutonium. Large enrichment facilities to turn uranium into nuclear fuel, or bomb-grade material, exist in the U.S., the Soviet Union, the Netherlands, France and China. Commercial reprocessing plants to extract plutonium from used reactor fuel are located or planned in France, Britain, West Germany, Japan, India and the Soviet Union. Programs involving breeder...
...phantoms are widely assumed to have atom bombs already or to be close to that goal. The major example of that ambiguous status known as having "a bomb in the basement" is Israel. The Israelis probably developed an atomic weapon as early as 1968, in all likelihood using reprocessed plutonium from their top-secret, French-built research reactor at Dimona, in the Negev desert. By 1973, Israel was believed to possess at least 13 nuclear weapons...
...program developed rapidly along several fronts, some evidently peaceful in intent, others less so. By 1973 the country possessed a Canadian-built commercial nuclear reactor fueled by natural uranium. At about the same time, Bhutto entered negotiations with France for a commercial-scale plutonium- reprocessing plant. It would be capable of extracting from spent fuel more than 300 lbs. of plutonium annually, enough for as many as 30 atom bombs and far more than necessary for Pakistan's peaceful nuclear program...