MetaFilter posts tagged with plutonium

Tom Lehrer has some work to do...

darkstar — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:07:20 -0800

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.

(Experience is especially long at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley – not least because Glenn Seaborg discovered plutonium here early in 1941.)

The Periodic Table will continue to refer to the element by its IUPAC systematic element name, ununquadium, until agreement is made on a final "trivial" name for the element. Previously on MeFi: Element 112. Tom Lehrer's classic song, "The Elements".

Nanda Devi and the Nuclear Genie

Kirth Gerson — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 11:24:09 -0800

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.

Beating Fermi by 1.7 billion years

blahblahblah — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 14:45:27 -0800

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.

A sig that spread like wildfire

namespan — Sun, 30 Mar 2003 21:17:40 -0800

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.

How to Deal With North Korea & Q&A: Should U.S. Launch Direct Talks with N. Korea?

y2karl — Wed, 19 Mar 2003 01:26:53 -0800

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.

JDC8 — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 19:06:01 -0800

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.