The announcement of the discovery of element 95 was made in 1946 by Seaborg and his associates (1). Like neptunium (element 93), plutonium (element 94), and curium (element 96) this new element, americium, is radioactive and has not been observed in nature in appreciable amounts. During the war an extensive study was made of the metabolic properties of plutonium (2) and several other heavy elem...

Among the Plutonium isotopes the alpha emitting ones are the most dangerous when they are incorporated. Plutonium may exist in refractory and soluble form. In the soluble form Plutonium may be in many valence states but tetravalent Plutonium tends to form complexes very easily and its deposition and toxicology are greatly influenced by the chemical and physical form of incorporation. Plutonium ...

INTRODUCTION Anthropogenic plutonium has been introduced into the environment over the past 50 years as the result of the detonation of nuclear weapons and operational releases from the nuclear industry. In the Arctic environment, the main source of plutonium is from atmospheric weapons testing, which have resulted in a relatively uniform, underlying global distribution of plutonium. Other rele...

239 PUQFUA i.san IBM-i’& FORTRAN program, written primarily for I% , which calculates from urinalyses the plutonium body burden in microcuries and the per cent of the maximum permissible body burden. It is based on a set of power function elimination equations developed by Wright H. Langham for the excretion of plutonium over a five year period. Results with PUQFUA compare favorably with those ...

Discriminators are described that quantify enhancements added to plutonium destruction and/or nuclear waste transmutation systems through use of an accelerator/fluid fuel combination. This combination produces a robust and flexible nuclear system capable of the destruction of all major long-lived actinides (including plutonium) and fission products. The discriminators discussed in this report a...

The results of electronic structure modeling of plutonium and americium higher oxide molecules (actinide oxidation states VI through VIII) by two-component relativistic density functional theory are presented. Ground-state equilibrium molecular structures, main features of charge distributions, and energetics of AnO3, AnO4, An2On (An=Pu, Am), and PuAmOn, n = 6-8, are determined. In all cases, m...

Plutonium and uranium in human tissues obtained from residents of the Tokyo area were determined by a-spectrometry and the fission track method, respectively. The distribution pattern of each element was estimated on the basis of mean concentration obtained. Plutonium is concentrated in some special organs, while uranium is distributed rather generally throughout the whole body. This difference...

This study investigates actinide burning in a standard lattice PWR. It assumes that after the first loading of depleted uranium, plutonium and minor actinides, only the fission products are removed and only depleted uranium and the plutonium/minor actinide mixture are added. The relative concentrations of plutonium and minor actinide feed are always maintained the same as PWR discharge fuel aft...

Historically, plutonium still may be considered a material of very recent vintage, having been discovered only 24 years ago by Seaborg, McMillan, Kennedy, and Wahl [1]. Within a few months 239 after discovery, the fissionable properties of the Pu isotope were established by the same group using an amount of material (0.5 Bg) equal to what is now considered to be approximately one maximum permis...

Radioactive particles from three locations were investigated for elemental composition, oxidation states of matrix elements, and origin. Instrumental techniques applied to the task were scanning electron microscopy, X-ray and gamma-ray spectrometry, secondary ion mass spectrometry, and synchrotron radiation based microanalytical techniques comprising X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, X-ray fluor...