Twenty year old, billion dollar reactor runs for one hour in total before decomissioning decision.

that's very quick for a reactor.

This is the reactor the local residents want restarted isn't it?

More evidence of the stupidity of Greens and other bureaucrats

Of course it can

Not a very bg pile really.

hey know exactly how to deal with it.

Harry. Did you know that the worlds oceans contain over 4 billion tonnes of radioactive uranium already?

You are such a total idiot, its a shame to have to mention it.

Considering when this was built i found it rather odd they were allowed to build it. Why? Well after the last war they were not supposed to make arms or have an army. Only recently did this change. If this plant makes Plutonium then what use was it? Making big bangs one supposes?

Funny old worrld.

I am sure that making stuff radioactive will not stop anyone using this form of power geeneration in the same way that burning fossil fuels makes pollution and warms the planet up. Humans are a short term fix race and always have been. Brian

That is one use. The other is as reactor fuel. Its a very very good safe radioactive element that makes very very nice reactor fuel.

"At Harwell in the 1950s the newly-crowned Queen Elizabeth was handed a lump of plutonium in a plastic bag and invited to feel how warm it was. Morrison had been protected from alpha rays from his hemispheres by nickel plating. The Aldermaston scientists used gold foil."

Hasn't died of cancer yet, has she harry?

She won't have received any radiation from the plutonium. A sheet of paper is enough to stop it, as any skoolboy kno.

Any skoolboy except Harry, that is, and actually probably several million others who are completely ignorant about radioactivity and radiation, and who s*it in their pants and dive under the bedclothes at the very mention of the words. Is it their fault? I don't know, but I blame the education system for not giving them a balanced view of such things. Every skoolboy _should_ kno but doesn't, sadly.

En el artículo , Chris Hogg escribió:

H'm. I'm more inclined to blame the meeja, myself. Nothing like a nice meaty noocular scare story to get the juices flowing.

Happy Crimble, one and all. May Santa's bulging sack bring you much happiness :)

Smuggle it to Brussels and fly-tip it.

Like f*ck it is. It's extremely poisonous.

That's enough to stop alpha particles, yes. Or is it gammas? Anyway, protects against only *part* of the radiation.

Would you care to quote an LD50 for it? Cohen reckoned it was no more poisonous than caffeine (LD50 192 mg/kg rat) and offered to 'eat as much plutonium as any prominent nuclear critic will eat or drink caffeine'*

Cohen was professor of physics and radiation health at the University of Pittsburgh, and spent much of his career evaluating the toxicity of plutonium.

Virtually all alphas (helium nuclei) and betas (electrons). The gamma ray emission is minor.

Depends which isotope, probably (I've not looked them up). Pu-238 is very active and slugs of the oxide are used in radio-thermal generators as energy sources for use on spacecraft that visit the edges of the solar system (E.g. New Horizons). The slugs are permanently red hot.

If someone gave Brenda a lump of plutonium metal wrapped in plastic, and is was not red hot from self-generated heat, then it wasn't Pu-238, but another isotope.

The metal is probably OK provided you don't machine it and breathe in the dust. Equally, don't imbibe plutonium salts - most of those large-nucleus elements at that end of the periodic table are chemically poisonous.

I meant chemically. The isotope is irrelevant.

Yes, alpha particles.

You're assuming that gammas are produced.

Not half as poisonous as cyanide.

Actually, in the case of plutonium, the rest doesn't amount to much at all.

Pu 239 is what is made in breedrers mostly.

But not that poisonous.

Lead or mercury far worse.

Its not very poisonous.

That's more green CND hysterical mythspin.

Some, but at pretty low energy. Probably as damagings as watching a TV of the day.