When the US Department of Energy halted Plutonium 238 production as far back as 1988, things looked grim for the future of space exploration. On Monday, March 18th, NASA's planetary science division head Jim Green announced that production has been restarted, and is currently in the test phases leading up to a restart at full scale.
posted by cthuljew on Mar 25, 2013 - 37 comments

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have been able to confirm the production of the superheavy element 114, ten years after a group in Russia, at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, first claimed to have made it. The search for 114 has long been a key part of the quest for nuclear science’s hoped-for Island of Stability.

[more inside]
posted by darkstar on Sep 28, 2009 - 16 comments

Nanda Devi - India's second-highest peak, at 25,645 feet (7816m), sits in a "sanctuary," surrounded by 21,000-foot+ lesser mountains. This has made it even more of a challenge to climb. Among those who took up the challenge were a 1965 CIA team trying to set up a plutonium-powered device to spy on China's nuclear testing program. That expedition retreated in the face of bad weather, leaving the device on the mountain. When they returned the next spring, it was gone. The Nanda Devi Sanctuary supplies water to the Ganges River, and there were fears that the four pounds of plutonium in the device could escape into the watershed. Those fears have been confirmed.
posted by Kirth Gerson on Aug 28, 2007 - 42 comments

The site of the world's first nuclear reactor? Gabon. About 1.7 billion years ago several deposits of uranium in Oklo, Gabon spontaneously began to undergo nuclear chain reactions fed by small drips of water. These natural breeder reactors ran for almost a million years, producing both intense heat and plutonium byproducts. Aside from the strangeness of naturally occurring reactors, Oklo provides the only existing case of how highly radioactive waste behaves over a period of tens of millions of years -- exactly the problem faced by the DOE's Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site.
posted by blahblahblah on Feb 16, 2005 - 19 comments

People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die. If you've been hanging around the net for a while, chances are you've seen this in someone's sig. In fact, it's so frequently quoted that it makes finding Jim Davidson's original post in alt.folklore.urban just a bit difficult to find -- but it's worth looking for! It sits in the middle of an interesting debate about how poisonous plutonium is, spurred on by the rumor(?) that it's one of the "most toxic poison[s] known to man." Deadly poison, Los Alamos Scientists, levitating hemispheres of metal... all it really needs to round it out is true love.
posted by namespan on Mar 30, 2003 - 10 comments

Here are two thoughtful pieces on the North Korean Crisis.

From Foreign Affairs comes How to Deal With North Korea.

From the New York Times comes
Q&A: Should U.S. Launch Direct Talks with North Korea?

Here, by the way, is the fourth footnote from How to Deal With North Korea :

Had the Agreed Framework not been signed in 1994, the North's plutonium-based program would by today have produced enough plutonium for up to 30 nuclear weapons. Critics of the accord should not ignore this fact.
posted by y2karl on Mar 19, 2003 - 17 comments

Scientists Offer Cash, Possible Immortality The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is conducting a contest for the best "Plutonium Memorial" design. Are you ready to think out of the box? Make sure to incorporate classic design elements, as the contents will have a half-life of 24,000 years. It would be a shame to have our distant descendants mock our architecture. P.S. I encourage residents of the Denver metropolitan area to enter the contest.
posted by JDC8 on Jul 6, 2001 - 5 comments