Denatured Plutonium

"Uranium 235 and plutonium can be denatured; such denatured materials do not readily lend themselves to the making of atomic explosives, but. . . can be used for the peaceful applications of atomic energy."

This cryptic statement was the heart & soul of the State Department's Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy (see INTERNATIONAL). Upon the "denaturing" depended the effectiveness of the Plan, which proposed to distribute the "harmless" materials freely.

How was the denaturing accomplished? Only a handful of insiders knew. But scientists all over the world could conjecture.

The case of uranium 235 was easy. When extracted from its ores, 11-235 is already denatured with a much larger amount of the nonexplosive uranium isotope U-238.* Unless the U-235 is purified, it will not explode, and its purification is enormously difficult.

The big problem was how to denature plutonium, produced by elaborate equipment from the mixture of U-235 and U-238. Competent physicists guessed that the only substance which could denature plutonium effectively would be a nonexplosive isotope of plutonium itself. A different chemical element would not do, for it could be separated by a comparatively simple chemical process.

Until last week, the world had heard no hint of nonexplosive plutonium. But behind the Manhattan Project's secrecy curtain, it might have been created as early as 1943. Some physicists mentioned plutonium 240, which they thought might be made from the explosive plutonium (Pu-239), or from natural uranium. If it proved inert, like U-238, it could be mixed with Pu-239 to make it non-detonating. There is reason to think that both varieties of plutonium may be produced simultaneously, and ready-mixed.

The denatured mixture would be harmless militarily. It would not explode, but it would be active enough to yield floods of atomic power, and to produce the valuable radioactive substances for which the world's scientists have been so eagerly seeking.

* All the isotopes of an element have the same chemical properties. They differ only in the number of neutrons their nuclei contain.

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