Cold War Vintage Plutonium Discarded At Dump

Dr. Strangelove lives.The A-Bomb enthusiast would be happy to know the nuclear bomb thing has caught on so widely that discarded weapons grade plutonium litter the landscape. We're not there yet but the incident sure raises some ricklish questions.

Talk about your message in a bottle. The issue of nuclear waste disposal came screaming out of a bottle discarded at a waste site in the US . This bottle contains the oldest sample of bomb-grade plutonium ever made in a nuclear reactor, scientists say. The sample dates to 1944 and is a relic from the infancy of the US nuclear weapons programme. As reported in the journal Analytical Chemistry. a team from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory used nuclear forensic techniques to date the sample and track down its origins. The bottle and its evil genie was discovered in a burial trench at the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state. The Manhattan Project was the US' bid to build the world's first nuclear weapon during World War II. The project's roots lay in fears that Nazi Germany was investigating similar technology. Established as part of the Manhattan Project in 1943, Hanford was home to the world's first full-scale plutonium production facility. Further investigation reveals more care should have bee taken with the bottle, as apart from the obvious danger, the things has serious historical importance. The sample produced at the Hanford site was used in Trinity - the world's first nuclear weapon test - on 16 July 1945 and in the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on 10 August 1945. The Hanford site is now the focus of a massive environmental cleanup effort due to high levels of radioactive waste that remain at the site. While excavating a burial trench in December 2004, clean-up personnel discovered a safe which contained a jug filled with whitish liquid slurry. Further tests revealed the bottle contained a type of plutonium made by re-processing spent fuel in a manner consistent with early operations at Hanford. Their results strongly suggested the plutonium was manufactured at the prototype X-10 reactor at Oak Ridge in Tennessee, which began operating in 1943, a year after the Manhattan Project was authorised. This is yet another Oops for the US nuclear security agencies, whose job is tracking the whereabouts of every single drop of radioactive matetial. In theory, since radioactive material regulraly trades on the international black market. This was most discreetly addressed by the researchers, who noted that the frequency of smuggling events involving radioactive materials is supply driven and is on the rise worldwide. Looking the genie squarely in the eye, the finding added that in light of the current nuclear renaissance and greater access to these materials by the public, smuggling events involving fissionable materials may rise in the near future.