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Plutonium (specifically, plutonium-238) was first produced, isolated and then chemically identified between December 1940 and February 1941 by Glenn T. Seaborg, Edwin McMillan, Emilio Segrè, Joseph W. Kennedy, and Arthur Wahl by deuteron bombardment of uranium in the 60-inch (150 cm) cyclotron at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the ...
Over the forty years of operation the site produced about 67.4 metric tons of plutonium, of which 54.5 metric tons was weapons-grade plutonium, supplying the majority of the 60,000 weapons in the U.S. arsenal.
As is typically found in civilian European thermal reactors, a 5.3% plutonium MOX fuel-bundle, produced by conventional wet-chemical/PUREX reprocessing of an initial fuel assembly that generated 33 GWd/t before becoming spent nuclear fuel, creates, when it itself is burnt in the thermal reactor, a spent nuclear fuel with a plutonium isotopic ...
This makes plutonium unsuitable for use in gun-type nuclear weapons. To reduce the concentration of Pu-240 in the plutonium produced, weapons program plutonium production reactors (e.g. B Reactor) irradiate the uranium for a far shorter time than is normal for a nuclear power reactor.
Since plutonium-239 is constantly being created in the reactor core during operation, the use of plutonium-239 as nuclear fuel in power plants can occur without reprocessing of spent fuel; the plutonium-239 is fissioned in the same fuel rods in which it is produced. Fissioning of plutonium-239 provides more than one-third of the total energy ...
Apr. 14—It's been almost 80 years since the first atomic bomb was detonated, and scientists say there's still much to learn about how nuclear devices function as they reach the point of ...
Plutonium-244 is the most stable isotope of plutonium, with a half-life of about 80 million years. It is not significantly produced in nuclear reactors because 243 Pu has a short half-life, but some is produced in nuclear explosions. 244 Pu has been found in interstellar space [13] and has the second longest half-life of any non-primordial ...
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