plutonium

     

Plutonium (pronounce /pluːˈtoʊniəm/) is a rare radioactive, metallic and toxic chemical element. It has the symbol Pu and the atomic number 94. It is a fissile element used in most modern nuclear weapons. The most significant isotope of plutonium is 239Pu, with a half-life of 24,100 years. It can be made from natural uranium. The most stable isotope is 244Pu, with a half-life of about 80 million years, long enough to be found in extremely small quantities in nature, making 244Pu the nucleon-richest atom that naturally occurs in the Earth's crust, albeit in small traces.

Trivia about plutonium

  • Pu doesn't refer to the smell of a reactor but to this fuel in it
  • Glenn Seaborg, a discoverer of this deadly element, said it was given the symbol Pu "as a joke"
  • It's the chemical element named for the ninth planet from the sun
  • Using Pu-239, an isotope of this element, the atomic bomb was tested at Alamogordo in the summer of 1945
  • Some breeder reactors produce Neptunium, along with this radioactive metal whose atomic number is 94
  • Pu! But this element-238 doesn't stink--it powers pacemakers
  • This element, Pu, was first detected in a cyclotron at Berkely in 1940
  • The next element on the periodic table in the sequence uranium, neptunium....
  • As in planetary sequence, neptunium-239 emits a beta particle & becomes isotope 239 of this element
  • The symbol of this radioactive element is Pu & it sounds like it's named after Mickey Mouse's dog
  • Some worried about the safety of using this element to produce wattage for the Ulysses Space Probe
  • This, Pu-239, has a half-life of 24,100 years; yours would be a lot shorter if you touched it
  • Logically, it was the radioactive transuranium metal discovered right after neptunium

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