Where is plutonium

Natural abundance Where the element is most commonly found in nature, and how it is sourced commercially. Uses and properties. Image explanation. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita.

Plutonium was used in several of the first atomic bombs, and is still used in nuclear weapons. The complete detonation of a kilogram of plutonium produces an explosion equivalent to over 10, tonnes of chemical explosive.

Plutonium is also a key material in the development of nuclear power. It has been used as a source of energy on space missions, such as the Mars Curiosity Rover and the New Horizons spacecraft on its way to Pluto. Biological role. Plutonium has no known biological role. It is extremely toxic due to its radioactivity. Natural abundance. The greatest source of plutonium is the irradiation of uranium in nuclear reactors.

This produces the isotope plutonium, which has a half-life of 24, years. Help text not available for this section currently. Elements and Periodic Table History. They produced it by bombarding uranium with deuterium nuclei alpha particles. This first produced neptunium with a half-life of two days, and this decayed by beta emission to form element 94 plutonium. Within a couple of months element 94 had been conclusively identified and its basic chemistry shown to be like that of uranium.

To begin with, the amounts of plutonium produced were invisible to the eye, but by August there was enough to see and weigh, albeit only 3 millionths of a gram. However, by the Americans had several kilograms, and enough plutonium to make three atomic bombs, one of which exploded over Nagasaki in August Atomic data.

Glossary Common oxidation states The oxidation state of an atom is a measure of the degree of oxidation of an atom. Oxidation states and isotopes. Glossary Data for this section been provided by the British Geological Survey. Relative supply risk An integrated supply risk index from 1 very low risk to 10 very high risk. Recycling rate The percentage of a commodity which is recycled. Substitutability The availability of suitable substitutes for a given commodity. Reserve distribution The percentage of the world reserves located in the country with the largest reserves.

Political stability of top producer A percentile rank for the political stability of the top producing country, derived from World Bank governance indicators. Political stability of top reserve holder A percentile rank for the political stability of the country with the largest reserves, derived from World Bank governance indicators.

Young's modulus A measure of the stiffness of a substance. Shear modulus A measure of how difficult it is to deform a material. Bulk modulus A measure of how difficult it is to compress a substance. Vapour pressure A measure of the propensity of a substance to evaporate. Pressure and temperature data — advanced. Listen to Plutonium Podcast Transcript :. You're listening to Chemistry in its element brought to you by Chemistry World , the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Hello, this week on Chemistry in its element a substance that most people think is man made but in fact often turns up in the centres of stars. It also packs a huge nuclear punch when it's in the right sort of warhead and also has the power to be a super conductor. The only problem is its radio active and that means that when it decays it tends to fall apart. Plutonium's often billed as the 'most toxic substance known to man'.

Just the word plutonium instils a dread in people's minds - And it's the early history of plutonium that established its dark side - and it's a reputation that's been hard to shake-off since.

Glenn Seaborg discovered plutonium at Berkeley in , and in the following spring, when it was found that it could sustain a nuclear chain reaction, he secretly wrote to President Roosevelt, to inform him of that this substance had the potential to be a powerful source of nuclear energy. And from that moment the race was on to produce significant amounts to supply a secret project codenamed the Manhattan Engineering District, the goal of which was to produce a nuclear bomb.

Anyone familiar with the iconic image of the mushroom cloud understands the tremendous explosive power of a correctly controlled detonation of plutonium. The energy density is mind-boggling: a sphere of metal 10 cm in diameter and weighing just 8 Kg is enough to produce an explosion at least as big as the one that devastated Nagasaki in But apart from military uses like this, plutonium also has one of the richest chemistries of any element.

There are six different forms of plutonium, known as allotropes, that all exist at different temperatures and behave differently. At room temperature, for instance, the plutonium is very brittle, but heated to around Celsius is transforms to a much more malleable metal. Scientists have found that they can mimic this effect by adding a small amount of gallium, which gives the room temperature metal similar properties to its higher-temperature counterpart, and this makes it much easier to work with.

Mixing plutonium with other metals can also produce substances with other interesting properties. For instance, adding some cobalt and gallium can produce a material that behaves as a super-conductor at low temperatures.

Its electrons link up into a close-knit arrangement called Cooper pairs, which allow electricity to flow freely with no resistance. But unfortunately this arrangement doesn't last very long. Because plutonium self destructs, undergoing radioactive decay by spitting out a highly energetic alpha-particle to produce Uranium But as the alpha-particle leaves it causes the uranium nucleus to recoil like a gun that's just been fired, and this damages the structure of the material, disrupting the paired electrons and slowly destroying the superconductivity.

So in this sense plutonium is its own worst enemy. Its radioactivity means that it's very difficult to exploit the richness of its chemistry in many compounds, and as its reputation precedes it, plutonium would also have trouble gaining acceptance as a technological material.

Nowadays it's been replaced by better batteries, but it's still popular with space scientists who use it to power probes sent to explore distant planets far from the Sun, like Cassini, that was sent to Saturn, and New Horizons, which is on its way to Pluto.

Plutonium's in a part of the periodic table called the actinide series alongside its neighbours thorium and protoactinium. Seaborg christened the actinides, rearranging the periodic table in the process, on the basis of the unusual arrangements of their electrons, which give these substances unusual magnetic properties, as well as the ability to have multiple oxidation states.

Plutonium, for instance, has five, giving it the ability to form an unusually wide range of compounds that scientists are only just beginning to get to grips with. Some say that plutonium's an evil element created by man, but it's actually a natural element produced by a process known as nucleosynthesis, which takes place in supernova explosions, when dying stars blow themselves to pieces.

There isn't much of it on the earth naturally, because the majority of its isotopes have such short half-lives. And in the 4. What there is mostly comes from reactors and nuclear tests.

There are severe hazards associated with plutonium, but as with most dangerous materials, these can be mitigated by careful handling and rigorous safeguards. But whatever you think about plutonium, its history, however chequered, has revealed some fascinating chemistry. Although the mushroom cloud remains its best-known image. Ian Farnan, unpacking Plutonium. Next time on Chemistry in its Element the toxic chemical that saves thousands of lives every year.

These would be irradiated at Darlington then returned to Chalk River for processing. Production target is reportedly 5 kg Pu per year by about , but the project is yet to receive regulatory approval. Early heart pacemakers used Pu as the power source, and after 30 years some were still running well. It takes about 10 kilograms of nearly pure Pu to make a bomb though the Nagasaki bomb in used less.

Producing this requires 30 megawatt-years of reactor operation, with frequent fuel changes and reprocessing of the 'hot' fuel. Allowing the fuel to stay longer in the reactor increases the concentration of the higher isotopes of plutonium, in particular the Pu isotope, as can be seen in the Table above. For weapons use, Pu is considered a serious contaminant, due to higher neutron emission and higher heat production. It is not feasible to separate Pu from Pu The operational requirements of power reactors and plutonium production reactors are quite different, and so therefore is their design.

An explosive device could be made from plutonium extracted from low burn-up reactor fuel i. Typical 'reactor-grade' plutonium recovered from reprocessing used power reactor fuel has about one-third non-fissile isotopes mainly Pu d.

In the UK, the Magnox reactors were designed for the dual use of generating commercial electricity as well as being able to produce plutonium for the country's defence programme. A report released by the UK's Ministry of Defence MoD says that both the Calder Hall and the Chapelcross power stations, which started up in and respectively, were operated on this basis 3.

The government confirmed in April that production of plutonium for defence purposes had ceased in the s at these two stations, which are both now permanently shutdown. The other UK Magnox reactors were civil stations subject to full international safeguards. International safeguards arrangements applied to traded uranium extend to the plutonium arising from it, ensuring constant audits even of reactor-grade material. This addresses uncertainty as to the weapons proliferation potential of reactor-grade plutonium.

The 'direct use' definition applies also to plutonium which has been incorporated into commercial MOX fuel, which as such certainly could not be made to explode. As can be discerned from the attributes of each, it is the first which produces weapons-usable material. Total world generation of reactor-grade plutonium in spent fuel is some 70 tonnes per year. About one-third of the separated Pu has been used in mixed oxide MOX fuel. The UK's plutonium stockpile is tonnes of separated civil plutonium from historic and current operations and foreign swaps.

At the end of France had about 75 tonnes of separated civil plutonium stored domestically. Some Japan at the end of had about 9 tonnes of separated civil plutonium stored domestically, plus The USA had no reactor-grade plutonium separated, but had at the end of about 45 tonnes of weapons-grade material destined for MOX.

China at the end of had about 41 tonnes of separated civil plutonium. Worldwide stocks of civil plutonium are estimated as around tonnes. In June , the USA and Russia agreed to dispose of 34 tonnes each of weapons-grade plutonium by Generation IV reactor designs are under development through an international project.

Four of the six designs are fast neutron reactors and will thus utilize plutonium in some way. Despite being toxic both chemically and because of its ionising radiation, plutonium is far from being "the most toxic substance on Earth" or so hazardous that "a speck can kill". On both counts there are substances in daily use that, per unit of mass, have equal or greater chemical toxicity arsenic, cyanide, caffeine and radiotoxicity smoke detectors.

There are three principal routes by which plutonium can get into human beings who might be exposed to it:. Ingestion is not a significant hazard, because plutonium passing through the gastro-intestinal tract is poorly absorbed and is expelled from the body before it can do harm.

Contamination of wounds has rarely occurred although thousands of people have worked with plutonium. Their health has been protected by the use of remote handling, protective clothing and extensive health monitoring procedures. The main threat to humans comes from inhalation. While it is very difficult to create airborne dispersion of a heavy metal like plutonium, certain forms, including the insoluble plutonium oxide, at a particle size less than 10 microns 0.

If inhaled, much of the material is immediately exhaled or is expelled by mucous flow from the bronchial system into the gastro-intestinal tract, as with any particulate matter. Some however will be trapped and readily transferred, first to the blood or lymph system and later to other parts of the body, notably the liver and bones. It is here that the deposited plutonium's alpha radiation may eventually cause cancer.

However, the hazard from Pu is similar to that from any other alpha-emitting radionuclides which might be inhaled. It is less hazardous than those which are short-lived and hence more radioactive, such as radon daughters, the decay products of radon gas, which albeit in low concentrations are naturally common and widespread in the environment. In the s some 26 workers at US nuclear weapons facilities became contaminated with plutonium.

Intensive health checks of these people have revealed no serious consequence and no fatalities that could be attributed to the exposure. The science and engineering are both well-known and well-established, and its production certainly breaks no new scientific or technical ground.

As I mentioned last week, the American Pu production line shut down over two decades ago. So this option is not going to work for much longer, regardless of the future of US-Russian international relations.

But if there is a Pu stockpile at LANL it would certainly be nice to tap it for space exploration — not to mention the savings in disposal costs. Yet another way to make Pu is in a liquid fluoride thorium reactor LFTR — a reactor that uses naturally occurring thorium Th to breed U, which fissions quite nicely. Additional neutron captures can turn U into Pu, which can be chemically separated from the fuel.

There may be scraps of the material — possibly even stockpiles — at various DOE facilities, but dismantling nuclear weapons is probably not going to do the job. That would seem to leave us with only three options — re-start our Pu production line, find another way to make or obtain the material, or confine ourselves to the inner Solar System.