Japan to send weapons grade plutonium back to U.S. this weekend, Greenpeace says

[bananas]

Source: Reuters

Japan will load weapons-grade plutonium onto a ship as early as this weekend to send to the United States, in what will be largest such shipment of the highly dangerous material since 1992, Greenpeace said on Friday.

The shipment of 331 kilograms of plutonium, enough to make about 50 nuclear weapons, will be loaded in Tokai Mura northeast of Tokyo onto the Pacific Egret, an armed British ship, and transported to the U.S. Department of Energy's Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the environmental group said.

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The shipment is a tiny portion of the nearly 50 tonnes of plutonium Japan holds. Most of Japan's plutonium comes reprocessing spent nuclear fuel burned in the country's reactors. All but two of Japan's reactors have been shut down since the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011.

The plutonium being shipped this weekend was supplied by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France for the Japan Atomic Energy Agency's Fast Critical Assembly project in Tokai Mura, according to the International Panel on Fissile Materials.

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Read more: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/japan-send-weapons-grade-plutonium-back-u-weekend-085303714.html

[Skwmom]

1. Exactly what are we going to do with it? We have problems storing our own.

[LiberalArkie]

2. It is just 330 kilograms of it.

[Igel]

3. We have a number of uses for it.

Some probes and such not in close Earth orbit use Pu to power their electronics. Voyager's powered by a Pu reactor, for instance. It's been going for decades and has a few years' left in her.

No, it's not dangerous after liftoff.

There are other reactors around that still use the stuff. Otherwise it's not a huge amount.

330 kg? Should be something like a 5" x 5" x 5" block, if you were foolish enough to pack it that way. (And if I didn't do something stupid with conversions.)

[AtheistCrusader]

5. Bigger than that, total mass.

The 'pit' core of Fat Man was 6.1kg, a 92 mm sphere.

[AtheistCrusader]

4. This isn't waste. This is high-end byproduct, and a small amount of it.

The equivalent of 54 'pits' or cores from a fat-man type atomic weapon from WWII.

Deadly, but a trivial amount, compared to our entire nuclear deterrent and the materials stockpiled to resupply/recondition existing weapons.

They are giving it to us to satisfy non-proliferation treaties.

[Dont call me Shirley]

6. Thanks Obama, for the trillion dollar bonanza says the nuclear weapons manufacturers!