Nuclear weapons are carefully designed to have an extremely low probability of exploding accidentally with an appreciable yield—even if they are involved in a high-speed crash, struck by a bullet or consumed in a fire. The principal concern when nuclear warheads are involved in such accidents is the possible dispersal of plutonium into the environment. In particular, an explosion could disperse...

Contaminants in Fish From the icy waters of Boston Harbor to the warm waves of San Diego Bay, bottomdwelling fish suffer liver damage caused by chemical contaminants, according to researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But seafood lovers need not panic, because damaged specimens were captured primarily in urban waters where commercial fishing is prohibited, said Lyn...

The complexity of phase stability and transformations in plutonium alloys is reflected in the plutoniumgallium (Pu-Ga) phase diagram, which is perhaps the most complex of all binary systems. Although many investigations have explored phase equilibria, transformation systematics, and structure/property relations in the Pu-Ga system, many outstanding problems remain and new issues regularly appea...

We present phonon properties of plutonium metal obtained from a combination of density-functional-theory (DFT) electronic structure and the recently developed compressive sensing lattice dynamics (CSLD). The CSLD model is here trained on DFT total energies of several hundreds of quasi-random atomic configurations for best possible accuracy of the phonon properties. The calculated phonon dispers...

Radiation effects on mortality from solid cancers other than lung, liver, and bone cancer in the Mayak worker cohort: 1948-2008. The cohort of Mayak Production Association (PA) workers in Russia offers a unique opportunity to study the effects of prolonged low dose rate external gamma exposures and exposure to plutonium in a working age population. We examined radiation effects on the risk of m...