Earliest weapons-grade plutonium found in US dump

Earliest weapons-grade plutonium found in US dump

www.newscientist.com

An old glass jar inside a beaten up old safe at the bottom of a waste pit may seem an unlikely place to find a pivotal piece of 20th century history. But that's just where the first batch of weapons-grade plutonium ever made has been found - abandoned at the world's oldest nuclear processing site. ...

The potentially dangerous find was made at Hanford, Washington State, the site of a nuclear reservation, established in 1943 to support the US's pioneering nuclear weapons program.

(visit the link for the full news article)

This is just unbelievably negligent!

I recently commented on tezzajw's thread about Britain's misleading of Australia about the effects of it's nuclear tests, and just a day later I'm yet again reminded how incredibly negligent the people that should protect us apparently have no regard for safety or public health.

It's with situations like these that I get reminded how amazing it is we haven't blown ourselves up.

Some more excerpts from the article:

The potentially dangerous find was made at Hanford, Washington State, the site of a nuclear reservation, established in 1943 to support the US's pioneering nuclear weapons program.

Hanford made the plutonium-239 for Trinity, the first ever nuclear weapon test, on 16 July 1945. Just three-and-a-half weeks later, more Hanford plutonium was used in the nuclear strike on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.

But sloppy work by the contractors running the site saw all kinds of chemical and radioactive waste indiscriminately buried in pits underground over the 40 years Hanford was operational, earning it the accolade of the dirtiest place on Earth.

www.newscientist.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Images of the find, that explicitly illustrate the dimension of the negligence:

The large, stained, glass bottle to the right was found inside this rusty safe, and contains a sample of the first weapons-grade plutonium ever purified.


The old safe was first uncovered in 2004 by excavations that formed part of that clean-up operation.