NASA Restarts Plutonium Production

Celarent Darii writes "In what looks like good news for the American Space program, NASA has restarted production of plutonium. According to the article, after the closure of Savannah Rivers reactor NASA purchased plutonium from Russia, but since 2010 this was no longer possible. The native production of plutonium is a step forward for the space program to achieve the energy density for long term space exploration."

Let's hope they learned their lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

We didn't stop producing plutonium just because it wasn't economically feasible (when did that stop the government from doing anything) -- the history of plutonium in the United States has been littered with accidents and costly, multi-decade cleanup projects that cost billions of dollars. See Rocky Flats, [wikipedia.org] et al.

Re:1.21 Jiggawatts

[Anonymous Coward]

So if that's all it takes we'd better hope that THE TERRORISTS don't figure out that strapping a block of C4 to a smoke detector is going to cause ELEVENTY BILLION DOLLARS WORTH OF DAMAGE.

You have such an over active imagination it's equal parts cute, fascinating and scary, all at once.