Our society is at an important crossroads: should plutonium be used on a large scale as fuel in atomic reactors, thus leading us to a plutonium economy on a global scale ?; or should plutonium be treated as hazardous waste with a high degree of risk to world security, and therefore it should be eliminated by halting all production of plutonium and by isolating and closely monitoring what has been already created?
When the fuel rods (or bundles) are put in place in an atomic reactor, they become very radioactive due to the accumulation of plutonium and other radioactive substances. From the start of the nuclear era, supporters of the nuclear path considered plutonium as the fuel of the future, dreaming of recycling the plutonium from the waste of irradiated fuel rods [also called spent fuel, ie the fuel which leaves a reactor when one has drawn the maximum of energy from it]. So-called breeder reactors have been built in France, Japan and the United States, with the aim of producing large quantities of plutonium, but serious accidents have forced all these countries to restrict their breeder programs.
The extraction of plutonium from the waste of irradiated fuel rods is a dangerous and excessively polluting activity. In the XNUMXs, reprocessing of spent fuel rods was carried out at two different AECL facilities at Chalk River. Both had to be closed due to accidents involving large spills of radioactive material into the environment. These facilities and the contaminants that result from them have never been cleaned. AECL therefore built another reprocessing plant to separate plutonium from used fuel waste and then export it to the United States for the production of atomic weapons. Reservoirs filled with highly radioactive liquid waste are still there, posing a significant decontamination challenge.
Eighty percent of the plutonium existing today is immobilized in the used fuel routinely produced in nuclear reactors.
France, Russia and Great Britain are reprocessing used fuel in order to chemically separate plutonium from the other highly radioactive substances found there. This process is used for military reasons, namely obtaining the raw material for atomic bombs. It is also used for non-military purposes: the plutonium thus separated may one day be used as fuel in nuclear power plants. About twenty percent of the plutonium on the globe is in this separate form. Once separated from other substances forming used fuel, plutonium can be more easily handled, stolen, transported or stored.
Public health and environmental hazards
The alpha radiation emitted by plutonium has only a very short range. This is the reason why, in certain cases, it can be handled and stored without having to resort to too bulky radiological protection screens. Take, for example, a small amount of plutonium in the vicinity of a human being: most of the energy emitted by the plutonium would collide on the outer, non-living surface of the skin (assuming that '' there are no open wounds and no plutonium particles are aspirated).
If, on the other hand, if one or more particles of plutonium were sucked up, they could go to lodge in the sensitive tissues of the lungs, causing a lot of biological damage. When drawn into the lungs, a few milligrams of plutonium is enough to cause death in the months that follow. A much smaller amount can also lead to fatal lung cancer many years later. For this reason, plutonium is considered to be one of the most carcinogenic known substances ever produced by humans.
source:
http://www.cnp.ca/sn/questions/plutonium-bkfr.html
jamy knows everything!
