If we have trouble keeping tabs just on this thing, which isn't even waste, then what hope is there of keeping adequate records over the generations of humnakind for an entire industry?:
In 2004, clean-up work uncovered a battered, rusted, and broken old safe containing a glass jug inside which was 400 millilitres of plutonium.
Recent tests by Jon Schwantes' team at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, has shown this plutonium was the first ever processed at the site, and the first made on a usable scale anywhere in the world.
Schwantes and colleagues used the fact that plutonium naturally decays to uranium to date the sample to 1946, give or take 4.5 years, by comparing the amounts of the two metals present inside the jug. Its age allowed the team to establish that the plutonium must have come from one of four reactors - out of 11 in the US at the time - from which fuel was reprocessed into plutonium.
Three of those reactors were on the Hanford site, with the fourth at Oak Ridge in Tennessee. Comparing the minor plutonium isotopes in the sample to signatures for each of the four reactors showed that the sample came from the X-10 reactor at Oak Ridge.
But only trawling through records at Hanford helped Schwantes and his team realise the historical significance of their find. The Hanford site's reprocessing plant, the first in the world, was completed before the reactors nearby were ready, in late 1944. So the inaugural run of the reprocessor on 9 December 1944 used fuel shipped from Oak Ridge.
"The very next run [and all subsequent runs] used Hanford plutonium," says Schwantes. "We have the oldest known sample of plutonium-239 - weapons plutonium."
His team read that a safe matching the description of the one unearthed in 2004 was sealed in 1945 because of radioactive contamination. It was disposed of in 1951, and remained lost for the next 50 years.
"The contamination was not from the plutonium jug," Schwantes says. "The jug was intact when found."
Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,110 years and emits alpha particles that are too bulky to penetrate even skin or paper. It is most dangerous when inhaled as a dry powder, where its decay in the lungs can cause cancer, he adds.
John Simpson, an expert on nuclear history at Southampton University in the UK, thinks the new find is important.
"From the historical records, it looks as if they've got it right," he says. "But the puzzling thing is, why didn't this plutonium make it into the bomb?" In 1944, the Americans were working flat out to develop a nuclear capability - it's strange that any first large batch of plutonium-239 should be stored and not used, he says.
Schwantes thinks that is because of the radioactive contamination to the safe it was being stored in. The first batch would eventually have been folded back into the stockpile if not for that contamination.
But despite its historic significance, Schwantes doesn't plan to put the sample in a museum. He is working with New Brunswick Labs to create a standard reference sample for plutonium-239 from the material, partly because of its primacy as the oldest sample. "The other factor is its extreme purity - 99.96% plutonium-239 is as pure a sample of 239 I have seen produced from any reactor," says Schwantes.
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