Goodbye California - Alistair [11]
‘It’s the inevitable by-product of the fissioning of uranium in a nuclear reactor. The plutonium, you understand, is still inside the uranium fuel rods. The rods are removed from the reactor and chopped up–.’
‘Who does the chopping? Not a job I’d fancy myself.’
‘I don’t know whether you would or not. First chop and you’d be dead. Done by remote-controlled guillotines in a place we call the “canyon”. Nice little place with five-foot walls and five-foot-thick windows. You wouldn’t want to go inside. The cuttings are dissolved in nitric acid then washed with various reactive chemicals to separate the plutonium from the uranium and other unwanted radioactive fission products.’
‘How’s this plutonium stored?’
‘Plutonium nitrate, actually. About ten litres of it goes into a stainless steel flask, about fifty inches high by five in diameter. That works out about two and a half kilograms of pure plutonium. Those flasks are even more easily handled than the uranium drums and quite safe if you’re careful.’
‘How much of this stuff do you require to make a bomb?’
‘No one knows for sure. It is believed that it is theoretically possible although at the moment practically impossible to make a nuclear device no bigger than a cigarette. The AEC puts the trigger quantity at two kilograms. It’s probably an over-estimate. But you could for sure carry enough plutonium to make a nuclear bomb in a lady’s purse.’
‘I’ll never look at a lady’s purse with the same eyes again. So that’s a bomb flask?’
‘Easily.’
‘Is there much of this plutonium around?’
‘Too much. Private companies have stock-piled more plutonium than there is in all the nuclear bombs in the world.’
Ryder lit a Gauloise while he assimilated this. ‘You did say what I thought you did say?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are they going to do with this stuff?’
‘That’s what the private companies would like to know. The half-life of this plutonium is about twenty-six thousand years. Radioactively, it’ll still be lethal in a hundred thousand years. Quite a legacy we’re leaving to the unborn. If mankind is still around in a hundred thousand years, which no scientist, economist, environmentalist or philosopher seriously believes, can’t you just see them cursing their ancestors some three thousand generations removed?’
‘They’ll have to handle that problem without me. It’s this generation I’m concerned with. Is this the first time nuclear fuel has been stolen from a plant?’
‘God, no. The first forced entry I know of, but others may have been hushed up. We’re touchy about those things, much more touchy than the Europeans who admit to several terrorist attacks on their reactor stations.’
‘Tell the man straight out.’ Ferguson sounded weary. ‘Theft of plutonium goes on all the time. I know it, Dr Jablonsky knows it. The Office of Nuclear Safeguards–that’s the watchdog of the AEC–knows about it best of all, but comes over all coy when questioned, even although their director did admit to a Congressional House energy sub-committee that perhaps one half of one per cent of fuel was unaccounted for. He didn’t seem very worried about it. After all, what’s one half of one per cent, especially when you say it quickly? Just enough to make enough bombs to wipe out the United States, that’s all. The great trusting American public know nothing about it–what they don’t know can’t frighten them. Do I sound