plutonium

Plutonium er det 94. grundstof i det periodiske system, og har det kemiske symbol Pu, som dannes af uran i atom-reaktorer. Et halvt kilo af stoffet ville teoretisk kunne give hvert eneste menneske på jorden lungekræft. Er et nødvendigt led i produktion af kernevåben. Plutonium fremstilledes første gang i 1940, og først derefter har man fundet det i naturen, dog kun i ganske ringe mængde.
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).
Miljøforurening
/ Contamination, environmental pollution
Barium ; beryllium ; cerium ; cæsium ; jod ; krypton ; lanthanum ; molybdæn ; neptunium ; niobium ; polonium ; radioaktivitet ; ruthenium ; strontium-90 ; tellur ; tritium ; uran ; xenon ; zirkonium.
Se også: Apollo Plant ; demon core ; guld ; Hanford Reservation 25 ; IAEA ; irreversibilitet / irreversibily ; Karen Silkwood ; MOX ; Rocky Flats ; Savannah River Site ; tritium ; Sellafield ; the US Waste Management Database.

Litteratur

Annotated Bibliography of Literature relating to wind transport of plutonium-contaminated soils at the Nevada Test Site / N. Lancaster, R.Bamford. Quatemary Sciences Center Desert Research Institute, University and Community College System of Nevada prepared for Nevada Operations Office U.S. Department of Energy Las Vegas, Nevada, December 1993. - 49 s.
Alvarez, Robert Plutonium Wastes from the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex.
- Washington DC : - Institute for Policy Studies, 2010. - 16 s.
Carlsen, Otto: Læger mod Kernevåben's undersøgelser. - Aalborg : Dove Art, 1995. - 63 s.
Disposing of plutonium in Russia : hearing before the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, One Hundred Third Congress, first session, March 9, 1993 (1993).
- http://www.archive.org/details/disposingofpluto00unit
CRS: U.S. Nuclear Weapon “Pit” Production : Options for Congress. / : Jonathan E. Medalia, 2014.
DOE: Report of the Plutonium Disposition Working Group: Analysis of Surplus Weapon-Grade Plutonium Disposition Options April 2014
GAO: SECURING U.S. NUCLEAR MATERIALS: DOE Needs to Take Action to Safely Consolidate Plutonium.
July 2005. - http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-05-665.
Global Stocks of Nuclear Explosive Materials
- http://www.isis-online.org/global_stocks/end2003/tableofcontents.html
INSTITUTE FOR SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
- http://www.isis-online.org/
India's Stocks of Civil and Military Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium, End 2014. / : David Albright and Serena Kelleher-Vergantini, 2015.
- http://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/India_Fissile_Material_Stock_November2_2015- Final.pdf
National Academy Of Sciences: Management And Disposition Of Excess Weapons Plutonium (1994).
NNSS Soils Monitoring: Plutonium Valley (CAU 366). / : prepared by Julianne J. Miller, Steve A. Mizell, George Nikolich, and Scott Campbell. Desert Research Institute- Publication No. 45241 submitted to Nevada Site Office. National Nuclear Security Administration U.S. Department of Energy. Las Vegas, Nevada. February 2012.
- http://dx.doi.org/10.2172/1046465
Ritzaus Bureau: Stadig plutonium i Thule. I: Politiken, 06/01/2006.
Stemming the plutonium tide : limiting the accumulation of excess weapon-usable nuclear materials : hearing before the Subcommittee on International Security, International Organizations, and Human Rights of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, One Hundred Third Congress, second session, March 23, 1994 (1994).
- http://www.archive.org/details/stemmingplutoniu00unit
The United States Plutonium Balance, 1944 - 2009. / : DOE: National Nuclear Security Administration, 2012.
Weapons Plutonium in Los Alamos Soil and Waste: Environmental, Health, and Security Implications.
Brice Smith, Ph.D. ; Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D. November 29, 2005
Welsome, Eileen: The Plutonium Files : America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War. 1999.


Send kommentar, email eller søg i Fredsakademiet.dk
Locations of visitors to this page