Plutonium. Wait a minute.

What am I thinking of? I almost forgot to bring extra plutonium.

Everybody was really excited about Curiosity, and that had this big plutonium battery on board that has plutonium 238, which actually has a higher specific activity than the low enriched uranium fuel of these molten salt reactors, which means that the effects would be negligible, because you launch it cold, and when it gets into space is where you actually activate this reactor.

Same thing goes for things like plutonium. Plutonium is...

Doc, look. All we need is a little plutonium.

In a crater, on a ast'roid excavating for a mine,

Unfortunately, no. It requires something with a little more kick. Plutonium.

You don't just walk into a store and buy plutonium.

That's what happens when the uranium absorbs the neutron and doesn't fission, and turns into plutonium, americium and curium and few other, most of it is plutonium.

Technically, I need the plutonium inside.

Technically, I need the plutonium inside.

It's very difficult to convince yourself that things are safe because you can't see what's going on.

And all they are missing is the plutonium.

Out of about a thousand kilograms, about 15 kilograms of plutonium 238 will be left over. This is good stuff.

This was the Hanford reactor in Washington.

I'm not the biggest fan of plutonium because I'm not crazy about the plutonium fast breeder reactor, but there's nothing good or bad about plutonium.

Argon National Labs was fully going for the plutonium fast breeder.

This was a temperature of colossal magnitude.

I call it the decay because it's a natural fundamental decay

Now, plutonium is a different chemical element than uranium, so they can be chemically separated.

Wigner was not successful in convincing the bulk of the nuclear community to take the thorium approach.

Almost all of it will ultimately end up fissioning.

Let me tell you how this stuff was discovered. There was a guy named Glenn Seaborg who worked at Berkeley Labs in California in 1942.

As you may know, the Cylons are... susceptible to certain kinds of radiation... and by taking the plutonium... and embedding it in a carbon nanotube matrix... and it really is that simple...

And the other thing is, if you look at the photos there's an awful lot of rubble coming back down Now, that's fuel racks, fuel rods and pieces of uranium and plutonium

I mean, we're really lucky he did this, or we would not have been able to finish the Manhattan Project.

You can run these off they're really hungry, they really like down blended weapons pits, so that's highly enriched uranium and weapons grade plutonium that's been down blended.

We're giving all the reactor work to Argon National Labs in Chicago and you guys aren't part of the deal anymore.

Big targets, a lot easier, everybody who is pushing thorium said, We like thermal.

Well, lots of blue, because when you hit these dudes with neutron, you want them fission.

At the end of their life their concept is to just bury the thing in the ground and leave it there.

In fact it's worthless for bombs.

In other news, officials at the Pacific Nuclear research facility have denied the rumor that a case of missing plutonium was in fact stolen from their vault two weeks ago.

Plutonium just is. It's what you decide to do with it.

This was the guy who discovered plutonium.

It would be like starting over.

lived transuranics through fission.

So, that accounts for the fact that uranium and plutonium were found as far away as a couple of miles offsite.

Which leads us to the fact that the fuel that's been found off site had to come from Unit 3

But there is a chemical difference between plutonium and uranium, so it was a lot easier to do a chemical separation of the plutonium you'd made.

And people say, Oh, well, you've launched this thing, and it's radioactive, into space, and what about accidents?

After a short cooling off period, the now highly irradiated fuel rods were transported to T plant in Hanford's 200 area.

The Atomic Energy Commission unfortunately did not share their zeal.

It was there long before humans and it will be forever after our age.

His son, Ivan, who is also a physicist, was convicted of selling Sovietera weaponsgrade plutonium to Pakistan and served 15 years in Kopeisk prison.