In a major and welcomed development, Russia announced that it will close its last weapons-grade plutonium production reactor.
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This came close to exploding and blowing the plutonium-fuelled reactor to smithereens.
Russia also said it would shut down its last plutonium-producing reactor.
And the fast-breeder type of nuclear reactor in which plutonium was used as fuel is no longer economic.
He worked out, among other things, how to separate plutonium from uranium in a reactor after it had been synthesised.
In nineteen eighty-one, Iraq was on the point of acquiring nuclear power. 10.17.01 Narrator The Osirak reactor was an experimental plutonium plant.
Yes I have seen the advocacy for Liquid Fluoride Thorium reactors and there are some apparent tantalizing advantages over current Uranium reactor designs like ability to burn plutonium as a starter fuel, less production of transuranics, higher fuel burn efficiencies, etc.
With plutonium no longer needed for use in the world's abandoned fast breeder reactor programmes and nuclear powers getting rid of their atomic weapons, large stockpiles of the highly toxic plutonium metal are starting to build up.
Which allows them to extract plutonium from the fuel rods used in the light water reactor, the second one that was finished in 1998.
That reactor type is not ideal for producing weapons-grade plutonium, but all reactors produce plutonium that could be used in a nuclear explosion.
It also ups the ante for reactor accident danger, as in the case of Fukushima, because MOX fuel has plutonium in it.
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David Sanderson, a physicist at the Scottish universities' research and reactor centre, says that while this would need heavy investment (and a lot of workers), plutonium can be mixed with waste and vitrified into storable glass blocks, so making it unusable in bombs if any terrorists managed to steal some.
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