World's Oldest Nuclear Bomb Material Found in Washington

A cool historical artifact has recently been discovered in Washington, but don't expect to see it in a museum anytime soon. The world's oldest weapons-grade plutonium was found at Hanford, according to a New Scientist article today.

Plutonium-239 ("weapons-grade" plutonium or "pure" plutonium) manufactured at Hanford was used in the first ever nuclear weapons test (and fired in anger three weeks later), but the material found in a glass jar inside of a buried safe at Hanford apparently predates that by seven months and was produced in an Oak Ridge, Tennessee facility also in use by the Manhattan Project.

There is some confusion on the part of authorities as to why this material would be abandoned for future generations to discover like a cast-off arrowhead in the dirt, particularly at a time when producing weapons-capable plutonium was so difficult. The speculation is that it contaminated the safe it was being stored in and so was disposed of. Yeah, just throw a little dirt on it and leave it at Hanford. The half-life of this stuff is only some 24,000 years.

Photo of Hanford courtesy of vectorsnob.