[iwwr]

Fascinating article, with just one quip I'd have:

Plutonium-238, the material in nuclear batteries is very different from Plutonium-239, a material for nuclear weapons. There is great stigma against Plutonium, but mainly because of Pu-239. If you remember some of the news around the launch of the Cassini probe, there was opposition because of the Pu-238 pellet powering the RTG.

Compared to Pu-239, Pu-238 is non-fissile and also produces a lot of heat (which is the point, really). Pu-238 poses almost no proliferation risk. Even the radioactivity is in the form of alpha radiation, which needs very little shielding (hardly even penetrating the skin). The only problem with Pu-238 right now is that it's very expensive to produce and also very scarce. If Pu-238 were abundant, it could find many applications and pose very little security risk; building a dirty bomb out of it won't really work (as a matter a fact, neither making one out of Pu-239).

In general, our civilization has an irrational fear of nuclear energy. Even more egregious since there is a variant of nuclear technology that's almost completely proliferation-free, namely the thorium cycle.

[daniel-cussen]

Chile is already moving toward building the first thorium nuclear reactors: http://diario.elmercurio.cl/detalle/index.asp?id={183364cc-d...

[wazoox]

> building a dirty bomb out of it won't really work (as a matter a fact, neither making one out of Pu-239).

Plutonium is chemically extremely toxic. Even throwing some powdered plutonium in air somewhere would cause serious harm.

Edit : In fact it's not :)

[Symmetry]

Thats actually an urban legend (though one thats often repeated in the media). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Toxicity http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/pl...

The radiological toxicity of plutonium is _way_ higher than the chemical toxicity.

[wazoox]

I stand corrected. In fact, I just checked and it seems like even Uranium isn't actually extremely toxic.

[Symmetry]

I remember my 8th grade science teacher telling us all about Plutonium's toxicity and I believed it for many years, so I don't blame you. Apparently some researchers had a "Hot Particle" theory that said that because of the way plutonium was taken in by the body it was much more dangerous than just looking at its radioactivity would lead you to believe - concentrating in certain areas of the lungs. Its not surprising that media figures like Nader confused this with chemical toxicity, or didn't notice when experiments contradicted this theory.

EDIT: Edited for horrible grammar caused by rewriting something without proofreading after.

[dspeyer]

This is Plutonium Oxide. IIRC, metallic plutonium is a lot more dangerous. Also almost impossible to come by in an oxygen atmosphere. Kind of like Aluminum.