Workers cleaning up the Hanford Site, a huge decommissioned nuclear research facility in southeastern Washington state, came across an old safe buried in a pit.
Cracking it open, they found a glass bottle — which turned out to contain plutonium made for the Manhattan Project in 1945.
Plutonium is extremely radioactive, and even a tiny amount could cause lung cancer in a human who breathed it in. But this wasn’t just any plutonium — this was an extremely pure sample of the fissile isotope plutonium-239, used to make atomic bombs such as the one dropped on Nagasaki.
In fact, it now turns out that except for a tiny sample stored at the Smithsonian, the 400 milliliters from the bottle is the oldest batch of plutonium-239 in existence. It’s not enough to make a nuclear weapon, but it’d be plenty for terrorist to manufacture a “dirty bomb” with.
All the other sizable samples of plutonium-239 from 1945 went into the Nagasaki bomb or the Trinity nuclear-test bomb that preceded it. It’s not clear why this batch was left out — or how it came to end up in a sealed safe abandoned in a landfill.
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