Thorium nuclear reactor trial begins in Norway
> While the safety of nuclear power plants is hotly contested, no one is arguing the nastiness of plutonium.<p>Except everyone who knows anything about it. Plutonium is a hot topic because it's what you need to build a nuke, but the public perception that it is a significant as nuclear waste is simply completely misguided.<p>Because it's half-life is so long, it's only mildly radioactive. It's an alpha emitter, so plutonium not in your body is not a risk to you. It oxidizes easily, and it's oxides are heavy and non-soluble, so when it is released to the environment, it just tends to fall down and stay there. There is negligible biological uptake through eating, and while there is some uptake through breathing, plutonium does not tend to stay airborne.<p>Various people have denounced environmental plutonium as something capable of killing billions. The toxicity of plutonium in humans is not known, simply because not enough people have died of it. There is no-one in the world who has died of plutonium exposure who did not have it injected into his body (and that's a long and horrible story), and there were a lot of people who worked coated in plutonium dust for a long time. Of the people who were injected with plutonium, most died of other causes. Suffice to say, plutonium is sufficiently non-radioactive that it's <i>chemical toxicity</i> is considered significant in it's lethality. Or, in other words, it's fine to consider toxicity of environmental plutonium as you would consider lead or other heavy metals.<p>To put it short, plutonium being toxic is simply not a concern as far as nuclear waste is concerned. <i>If all the plutonium produced by civilian nuclear power was pulverized and spread in populated areas, it would not make nuclear reactors as dangerous to people as wind power.</i> (Somewhat ironically, because of the thorium that is released into the environment while separating the REE for the magnets.)  Taking all the plutonium produced in a plant and dumping it in one spot doesn't make that spot as dangerous as the ground near a typical fuel station that was in use for the period leaded gas was used.<p>Nuclear waste is really bad, but that's because of <i>short-lived</i> isotopes, which decay more often, and thus are more radioactive, and <i>light</i> radioactive materials, which are often soluble in water, have high biological uptake, and can stay in the atmosphere.<p>Plutonium needs to be tracked really closely, but that is not because it's toxic, it's because it can be used to make a bomb.<p>The more you know.