What is Plotinium?

Question

What is Plotinium? And what connection it has with atomic reactor?

Answer 1

Plutonium is a radioactive, metallic, chemical element. It has the symbol Pu and the atomic number 94. It is the element used in most modern nuclear weapons. The most important isotope of plutonium is 239Pu, with a half-life of 24,110 years. It can be made from natural uranium and is fissile. The most stable isotope is 244Pu, with a half-life of about 80 million years, long enough to be found in extremely small quantities in nature. Nuclear materials workers sometimes call it "plute".

Answer 2

Plutonium is a radioactive, metallic, chemical element. It has the symbol Pu and the atomic number 94. It is the element used in most modern nuclear weapons. The most important isotope of plutonium is 239Pu, with a half-life of 24,110 years. It can be made from natural uranium and is fissile. The most stable isotope is 244Pu, with a half-life of about 80 million years, long enough to be found in extremely small quantities in nature. Nuclear materials workers sometimes call it "plute".
nitially predicted by Walter Russell, the production of plutonium and neptunium by bombarding uranium-238 with neutrons was predicted in 1940 by two teams working independently: Edwin M. McMillan and Philip Abelson at Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and by Norman Feather & Egon Bretscher at the Cavendish Laboratory at University of Cambridge. Coincidentally both teams proposed the same names to follow on from uranium, like the sequence of the outer planets.

Plutonium was first produced and isolated on February 23, 1941 by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg, Edwin M. McMillan, J. W. Kennedy, and A. C. Wahl by deuteron bombardment of uranium in the 60-inch cyclotron at Berkeley. The discovery was kept secret due to the war. It was named after the planet Pluto, having been discovered directly after neptunium (which itself was one higher on the periodic table than uranium), by analogy with the ordering of the planets in the solar system. Seaborg chose the letters "Pu" as a joke, which passed without notice into the periodic table. During the Manhattan Project, the first production reactor was built in Oak Ridge. Later, large reactors were set up in Hanford, Washington for the production of plutonium, which was used in the first atomic bomb, tested at the Trinity site in White Sands, New Mexico. It was also used in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima utilized Uranium-235, not plutonium.

Large stockpiles of plutonium were built up by both the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War—it was estimated that 300,000 kg of plutonium had been accumulated by 1982. Since the end of the Cold War, these stockpiles have become a focus of nuclear proliferation concerns. In 2002, the United States Department of Energy took possession of 34 metric tons of excess weapons-grade plutonium stockpiles from the United States Department of Defense, and as of early 2003 was considering converting several nuclear power plants in the US from enriched uranium fuel to MOX fuel as a means of disposing of plutonium stocks.

During the initial years after the discovery of plutonium, when its biological and physical properties were very poorly understood, a series of human radiation experiments were performed by the U.S. government and by private organizations acting on its behalf. During and after the end of World War II, scientists working on the Manhattan Project and other nuclear weapons research projects conducted studies of the effects of plutonium on laboratory animals and human subjects. In the case of human subjects, this involved injecting solutions containing (typically) five micrograms of plutonium into hospital patients thought to be either terminally ill, or to have a life expectancy of less than ten years either due to age or chronic disease condition. The injections were made without the informed consent of those patients. [4]

The episode is now considered to be a serious breach of medical ethics and of the Hippocratic Oath, and has been sharply criticised as failing "both the test of our national values and the test of humanity."