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Plutonium–gallium–cobalt alloy (PuCoGa 5) is an unconventional superconductor, showing superconductivity below 18.5 K, an order of magnitude higher than the highest between heavy fermion systems, and has large critical current. [46] [50] Plutonium–zirconium alloy can be used as nuclear fuel. [51]
The majority of plutonium isotopes are not short-lived on a geological timescale, [3] though it has been argued that traces of the long-lived 244 Pu isotope still exist in nature. [4] This isotope has been found in lunar soil , [ 5 ] meteorites , [ 6 ] and in the Oklo natural reactor. [ 7 ]
Plutonium-240 has a high rate of spontaneous fission, raising the background neutron radiation of plutonium. Plutonium is graded by proportion of 240 Pu: weapons grade (<7%), fuel grade (7–19%) and reactor grade (>19%). Lower grades are less suited for bombs and thermal reactors but can fuel fast reactors.
Watchdogs are raising new concerns about legacy contamination in Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb and home to a renewed effort to manufacture key components for nuclear weapons. A ...
Plutonium-244 (244 Pu) is an isotope of plutonium that has a half-life of 80 million years. This is longer than any of the other isotopes of plutonium and longer than any other actinide isotope except for the three naturally abundant ones: uranium-235 (704 million years), uranium-238 (4.468 billion years), and thorium-232 (14.05 billion years).
Letters to the editor on the history of plutonium, Project 2025, ageism on the Benton Commission, Trump, syphilis, drug laws and Hanford. | Opinion
For two years of my time as a student at the University of Chicago, my dorm building, my cafeteria, and the library where I worked all stood on the same block as the site of the world's first-ever ...
The odd numbered fissile plutonium isotopes present in spent nuclear fuel, such as Pu-239, decrease significantly as a percentage of the total composition of all plutonium isotopes (which was 1.11% in the first example above) as higher and higher burnups take place, while the even numbered non-fissile plutonium isotopes (e.g. Pu-238, Pu-240 and ...