Jean McSorley, nuclear campaign coordinator for Greenpeace, said: "After 50 years of business we would have thought Sellafield could have improved their
plutonium assessment to the point where it's not such a hit and miss affair."
Concern over the danger of
plutonium is growing because of discoveries about the subtle effects of low-level radiation.
Once those fuel rods left the storage site, once reprocessing began, once
plutonium was manufactured, the strategic situation changed: Even if we could get the North Koreans back to the bargaining table, even if they would agree to drive the fuel rods back, we could never be certain that they'd totally disarmed; we could never know if they still had some undeclared
plutonium hidden in an underground chamber.
A new $22 million
plutonium pit production facility has been proposed so that stockpiled weapons can be "refreshed" in the name of homeland security.
"A major goal in filing the lawsuit was to prevent the Energy Department from hauling deadly
plutonium across the country in unsafe, substandard containers.
Although the German government supported the sale, contending that there is a global interest in making weapons-grade
plutonium less dangerous through better processing, the project has been put on hold.
David, 45, said residents learned of the
plutonium waste from Hunterston through a voluntary monitoring group.
One subject's daughter lamented that telling her father that he was injected with
plutonium "would be like telling him he was injected with ice cream." Names and addresses were hard to come by because identities were buried in anonymous aggregates or referred to by code.
She and other EPA officials adamantly deny that the site is poisoned by
plutonium or other nuclear wastes.
About 100 metric tons of weapons
plutonium has been declared surplus to military needs by the United States and Russia and will be converted to a proliferation-resistant form (ultimately to be followed by geologic disposal) if present policy commitments are realized.
nonproliferation project to obtain technical information on CANDU reactors in preparation for burning
plutonium from U.S.
JINR chemists bombarded a
plutonium metal strip with beams of calcium atoms.