Verdens lagre af plutonium er voksende.
Mellem 1944 og 1994, skønner Energiministeriet, at De Forenede Stater producerede og erhvervede i alt 111,4 tons plutonium, skriver forskeren Robert Alvarez.
Tæt ved Tokio er der plutoniumartikler i havet som 'matcher amerikanske kernevåbensprængninger mellem 1946 og 1958 ved Bikini-atollen i Stillehavet, skriver Berlingske Tidende, 08/06/2004.
Under den kolde krig udsatte den amerikanske regering tusindvis af menneskelige forsøgskaniner med radioaktive gifte, herunder 18 amerikanere som fik sprøjtet plutonium direkte ind i deres blodårer. I en skole i Massachusetts blev 73 handikappede børn madet med havregryn bestrålet med radioaktive isotoper.
In an upstate New York hospital, an eighteen-year-old woman believing she was being treated for a pituitary disorder, was injected with plutonium. At a Tennessee clinic, 829 pregnant women were served "vitamin cocktails" containing radioactive iron, as part of their regular treatment. No these are not acts of terrorism by common criminals. These are just some of the secret human radiation experiments that the U.S. government conducted on unsuspecting Americans for decades as part of its atom bomb program.
In a gruesome plot that spanned 30 years, doctors and scientists working with the US atomic weapons program, exposed thousands of unwilling and unknowing Americans to radiation poisoning to study its effects. For years, the experiments by the U.S. government and the identities of their human guinea pigs were covered up. Then after a six-year investigation, investigative reporter Eileen Welsome uncovered the names of 18 people who were injected with plutonium in the 1940s without their knowledge by federal government scientists.
Plutonium is very hazardous to human health and the environment and requires extensive security because of its potential use in a nuclear weapon. The Department of Energy (DOE) stores about 50 metric tons of plutonium that is no longer needed by the United States for nuclear weapons. DOE cannot yet consolidate its excess plutonium at SRS for several reasons. First, DOE has not completed a plan to process the plutonium into a form for permanent disposition, as required by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2002. Without such a plan, DOE cannot ship additional plutonium to SRS. Second, SRS cannot receive all of the plutonium from DOE’s Hanford Site because it is not in a form SRS planned to store. Specifically, about one-fifth of Hanford’s plutonium is in the form of 12-footlong nuclear fuel rods, which Hanford had planned to ship intact to SRS as part of its efforts to accelerate the cleanup and demolition of its closed nuclear facilities. However, SRS’s storage plan called for storing DOE’s standard storage containers and not intact fuel rods. Recent changes in DOE’s security requirements have complicated SRS’s storage plans by eliminating one facility that DOE planned to use to store plutonium. Until DOE develops a permanent disposition plan, additional plutonium cannot be shipped to SRS and DOE will not achieve the cost savings and security improvements that consolidation could offer. Continued storage at Hanford will cost an additional approximately $85 million annually and will threaten that site’s achievement of the milestones in its accelerated cleanup plan. In addition, DOE lacks the capability to fully monitor the condition of the plutonium necessary to ensure continued safe storage. The facility at SRS that DOE plans to use to store plutonium lacks adequate safety systems to conduct monitoring of storage containers. Without a monitoring capability, DOE faces increased risks of an accidental plutonium release that could harm workers, the public, and/or the environment.
En pit er plutonium kernen i et nukleart våben som antændes af et tændrør.
U.S. Nuclear Weapon “Pit” Production: Options for Congress. / :Jonathan E. Medalia, 2014.
- http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/R43406.pdf
A “pit” is the plutonium core of a nuclear weapon. Until 1989, the Rocky Flats Plant (CO) massproduced pits. Since then, the United States has made at most 11 pits per year (ppy). U.S. policy is to maintain existing nuclear weapons. To do this, the Department of Defense states that it needs the Department of Energy (DOE), which maintains U.S. nuclear weapons, to produce 50-80 ppy by 2030. While some argue that few if any new pits are needed, at least for decades, this report focuses on options to reach 80 ppy.
Pit production involves precisely forming plutonium—a hazardous, radioactive, physically quirky metal. Production requires supporting tasks, such as analytical chemistry (AC), which monitors the chemical composition of plutonium in each pit.
With Rocky Flats closed, DOE established a small-scale pit manufacturing capability at PF-4, a building at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).