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Radioactive wasps at SRS

Good grief, so much wrong with this article. WTF??

First they say: "It became an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site in 1989, with cleanup and environmental remediation going on ever since."

Then the article ends with this little gem: "In recent years, the National Nuclear Security Administration has begun work on a facility at SRS to produce new plutonium cores for American nuclear weapons.

The agency plans to build at least 50 new plutonium cores per year in the new facility."

Spend trillions to clean the damn place up only to create a new disaster waiting to happen? Our tax dollars at work. Got it.
 
If I read the literature correctly, the purpose of the new plant is not to build plutonium cores for weapons, it's to meet a need for power cores in the next generation of space vehicles.

Now, having a Pu plant in your backyard - no matter what isotope of Pu you're talking about - isn't great, but it's really just the last step of transforming Np-237 into something useful.

Pu238 is a powerful alpha emitter, but it's utterly lousy for weaponization.

Just don't eat it.

Edit - oops - I meant Np-237
 
If I read the literature correctly, the purpose of the new plant is not to build plutonium cores for weapons, it's to meet a need for power cores in the next generation of space vehicles.

Now, having a Pu plant in your backyard - no matter what isotope of Pu you're talking about - isn't great, but it's really just the last step of transforming Np238 into something useful.

Pu238 is a powerful alpha emitter, but it's utterly lousy for weaponization.

Just don't eat it.
Don’t eat plutonium?

That should be today’s official “ODT Tip of the Day”
 
go-there-get-out-of-here.gif
 
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