Plutonium Quotes

I'm sure that in 1985, plutonium is available in every corner drugstore, but in 1955, it's a little hard to come by.

Every actor looks all his life for a part that will combine his talents with his personality... 'The Odd Couple' was mine. That was the plutonium I needed. It all started happening after that.

What's all this fuss about plutonium? How can something named after a Disney character be dangerous?

Plutonium has a quite extraordinary relationship with people. They made it, and it kills them.

Nor are we the culmination of evolution, except in the sense that there has never been another species so bizarrely ingenious that it could create both iambic pentameter and plutonium.

The concept of this so-called "TerraPower reactor" is that you, in the same reactor, you both burn and breed. So, instead of making plutonium and then extracting it, we take uranium - the 99.3 percent that you normally don't do anything with - we convert that, and we burn it.

My job was to produce plutonium that was used for atomic bomb.

There was a concept a long time ago that you would do a different type of reactor called a "fast reactor," that would make a bunch of another element called plutonium, and then you would pull that out, and then you would burn that. That's called "breeding" in a fast reactor. That is bad because plutonium is nuclear weapons material. It's messy. The processing you have to get through is not only environmentally difficultly, it's extremely expensive.

Here seems now no reasonable justification for continuing any civil plutonium program.

I, who had been in favour of nuclear energy for generating electricity ... I suddenly realised that anybody who has a nuclear reactor can extract the plutonium from the reactor and make nuclear weapons, so that a country which has a nuclear reactor can, at any moment that it wants to, become a nuclear weapons power. And I, right from the beginning, have been terribly worried by the existence of nuclear weapons and very much against their use.

We know North Korea has the plutonium that can go into the bomb.

Chips of plutonium are twinkling in every lung.

Iran was nearing completion of a new reactor capable of producing plutonium for a bomb.