The WordPress blog website comes with a feature on the dashboard that lets you know what key words people are using to find your site. I just got two hits from people looking for “Plutonium Mining”. Some folks out there are really confused.
My dear fellow: one does not mine plutonium. One mines uranium and breeds it into plutonium. Plutonium may be had from two successive neutron absorption and beta decay events starting with U-238. Plutonium has two more protons than uranium, so two beta decay events have to occur to increase the proton count by two in the nucleus. And making certain actinide nuclei even more rich in neutrons is one way to encourage beta decay.
The age of the solar system is just too great for the heavy actinides to be left over from regional supernovae atomic weight building events. But imagine if plutonium was found in abundance in ore bodies. No doubt museum shelves would be full of artifacts fashioned from plutoniferous minerals. Glazed pots and fertility fetishes made from the pretty rock. Perhaps the Egyptians might have had glow-in-the-dark burial artifacts and a hieroglyph for radiation burn or sudden hair loss.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Can one mine linoleum?
Surely you’ve heard of the linoleum mines of West Virginia? And the mine disaster of 1898 where 26 linoleum miners were found laminated under tons of raw linoleum ore? Spinsters still sing about it in the Appalachian hollers.
That sounds like a made-for-TV movie. Too bad there aren’t any linoleum mines in CO, I’d love to see one.
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/pasta.htm
Were I a country in need of 8 kg of Pu-239 with higher isotopes decayed (heat emission Pu-241 plus spontaneous fission stray neutrons Pu-240 – bad things), I’d mine it. I’d form a third party radioactive spill remediation company and reclaim the Hanford,WA WWIi plutonium processing site as a compassionate act.
The USSR made serious money as the only supplier of 700+ tons of quality titanium to a company that compounded Beta Ti 13V 11CR 3Al alloy as a quietly owned Lockheed subdivision. Curiously, net profits were on the other side,
Receiving dock
Loading dock
As every MBA casebook begins, “taking is better than making.”
“My dear fellow: one does not mine plutonium.” You sound just like Kirby!
Guilty as charged!
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