Former Truck Driver Reconstructs A-bomb 332
mdsolar writes "Coster-Mullen taught himself how to build an A-bomb. 'The secret of the atomic bomb,' he says, 'is how easy they are to make.' His findings are available in a book he continuously updates and publishes himself called Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man, which has received rave reviews from the National Resource Defense Council: 'Nothing else in the Manhattan Project literature comes close to his exacting breakdown of the bomb's parts.'"
How long? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Both puppies AND kittens? Is he trying to remain neutral in the Cats vs. Dogs wars? Or does he just have allergies?
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He's been playing cats against dogs for years. It's really a power pull he's playing between the two sides. One minute he'll be whispering in the dog's ear to get the cat, and the next, he'll be telling cats how to get the dogs.
It's genius really. He's positioned himself to be popular among both sides while getting them to compete with each other while ignoring him and look what happens while both the cats and dogs were looking the other way:
Now he has an atomic bomb.
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Likely he'll use the mouse as a trigger mechanism for his cat and dog hating bomb.
Exhibit A:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Feyr8IUthCA [youtube.com]
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Big deal, the original idea and proposal to FDR was from a former patent clerk.
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And you know he got his ideas from others patent applications that he buried.
Better adjust your tinfoil hat... (Score:2)
Considering this book was first discussed on Slashdot [slashdot.org] two years ago, was published nearly seven years ago, and his work was widely discussed on newgroups, forums, and mailing lists where nuclear historians hang out as much as a decade ago...
The government has had plenty of opportunity to do so, and has d
Re:2004 (Score:5, Informative)
In future news... (Score:2, Funny)
Former truck driver magically disappears from society after publishing 'how to make A-bomb"
Re:In future news... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Still, I predict that someone will make a mock up and leave it in a public place. You know how people react to stray devices laying around.
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If you had to, you could probably disarm a nuke easily enough, or at least, prevent it from going critical. Gun type design you'd simply locate the uranium slug and (carefully) jam a nice thick wad of something between it and the target. Preferably something that would not be easily penetrated by a bullet.
As for an implosion device, even stopping one of the controlled explosions or disrupting the explosive lenses (may look something like a silver soccer ball with wires coming out of each face) so that the
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Exactly the highly techincal part of nuclear bombs is enriching uranium to the right levels of the correct isotopes. Once you have enough the rest is Childs play
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You dont, simultaneity would be impossible. Planck time is still time.
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Here is a question though: I think you can buy heavy water, so what would happen if someone built a powerful particle accelerator in their garage and smashed some charged heavy water molecules into a cup of heavy water?
You can use that sort of system to initiate fusion - of few atoms. What you're describing is very similar to a Fusor, they're Mostly Harmless and in fact many people do build such devices in their garages.
Got to be a mighty big particle accelerator to compress a cup of heavy water to the same extent as a fission bomb primary, though... fusion isn't a chain reaction, you can't just fuse two deuterium atoms in a cup and expect the rest of the D2O to emulate the trick, so it's useless as a weapon. I suppose yo
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May not end well (Score:3)
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Everybody needs some goons.
Well, shit. No wonder my world domination plans never worked. I thought it was minions I needed.
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Henchmen, you amateurs!
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not so easy for North Korea and Pakistan (Score:3)
So claiming to be able to make a bomb and actually getting them work properly are two different things.
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with yields about a tenth of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
Only a tenth? I won't need the sunglasses then, will I?
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I won't need the sunglasses then, will I?
A truck windscreen was good enough for Fenyman.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_gadget#Explosion [wikipedia.org]
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Both their first bomb tests fizzled with yields about a tenth of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
Not the same. Gun-type bombs are so easy that the US and South Africa (at least) built them and did not bother to test them.
NK and Pakistan also did tests only for the more difficult implosion design. If they have sufficient highly enriched uranium, they will not waste it on a test.
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They didn't test the uranium device because they didn't have any extra U235. If they had tested it then it would have taken another 3 years to purify enough U235 for another bomb.
They wanted to test it but couldn't so they crossed their fingers and hit the button.
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It was pretty hard, back then. But 65 years is a long time ago and tools that were state of the art back then are common today. While you need supercomputers to make "real" simulations, I bet this PC has enough power to run a basic boom-or-fizzle model of a nuke. Production technology, measurement tools, I really doubt 40s technology can be that hard to match. The difficulty has always been weapons-grade uranium (or plutonium). That's not exactly something you'd find in the corner store...
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You can get it on Amazon though: ;)
http://www.amazon.com/Harcos-Labratory-Nuclear-Uranium-Yellowcake/dp/B00380OEV0 [amazon.com]
http://www.amazon.com/Harcos-Labratory-Nuclear-Energy-Plutonium/dp/B00380MGJC [amazon.com]
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I literally had my mouse pointer hovered above one of those before I realized what I would be clicking.
While not really being NSFW in the classic sense, I really really don't want my employer to see my weblogs including things like "Free Shipping on Yellowcake Uranium!"
Though I am tempted to pull out my laptop to check out what the users who looked at those items went on to purchase...
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It was just the first one. Marty took the Delorean, which at that time required plutonium to time travel, back to 1955 with no extra plutonium. Hence the reference:
Marty: Doc look, all we need is a little plutonium!
Doc: Oh! I'm sure that in 1985, plutonium is available at every corner drug store, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by. Marty, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you're stuck here.
At the end of the first movie the fission reactor had been replaced by a "Mr. Fusion" from the future that would run on empty soda cans and banana peals, and the plot of the second movie involved Biff from 2015 "borrowing" the time machine to give Biff from 1955 a 2015 sports almanac so that he could become rich by betting on sporting events and
Sensationalist headline is sensationalist (Score:4, Insightful)
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Which is why the vision of a nuclear weapon free future is almost certain to never happen. That particular cat is out of the bag, and not going back in any time soon.
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Well, there's one way: Construct a non-nuclear bomb that's easier and cheaper to build and has at least the same level of destruction.
It's a Little Boy gun-type bomb (Score:5, Interesting)
which are a rather simple design; among other things, they don't have any safety features.
Broadly, what you need is two correctly sized-and-shaped chunks of enriched uranium with enough U-235 to cause a chain reaction, a smoothbore gun barrel (IIRC Little Boy used one of 6" diameter), and some gunpowder in silk bags to drive one piece of uranium into the other. There are a few other parts to this, such as the tamper and the fuze, but the toughest part should be obtaining enough enriched uranium.
Certainly the featured bomb is not a fully-working model. It'll be a reproduction with inert material standing in for the U-235, no gunpowder, and an inert fuze.
Re:It's a Little Boy gun-type bomb (Score:4, Funny)
Certainly the featured bomb is not a fully-working model. It'll be a reproduction with inert material standing in for the U-235, no gunpowder, and an inert fuze.
That seems a bit overkill. Couldn't he at least use two coconut halves for the U-235, a little bit of gunpower and a real fuse? Then at least you'd get a bang and a "clop!" when you set it off.
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> Couldn't he at least use two coconut halves for the U-235, a little bit of gunpower and a real fuse?
Then the headline would have read "Former Castaway Professor Reconstructs A-Bomb".
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That seems a bit overkill. Couldn't he at least use two coconut halves for the U-235, a little bit of gunpower and a real fuse? Then at least you'd get a bang and a "clop!" when you set it off.
You've got two empty halves of coconuts and you're banging them together!
no worries, (Score:4, Funny)
Re:It's a Little Boy gun-type bomb (Score:4, Informative)
It's a little bit more complicated than that. The average time between neutron emissions in the fissile material for a gun-type bomb has to be substantially longer than the assembly time. Otherwise you'll get predetonation and the device will fizzle. If the design doesn't incorporate a neutron source, the parts will just sit there until there's finally a spontaneous emission that can start a chain reaction.
To avoid that unpredictable delay, during which the pieces might move back out of perfect alignment, real-world gun-type designs have incorporated neutron sources that release extra neutrons at just the right moment. The most common design uses an explosion to mix polonium and beryllium, which then release enough neutrons to trigger the reaction. That kind of neutron generator was used in the Little Boy device.
One day I'll start actually reading headlines... (Score:2)
...not just flicking over them with my eyeballs on autopilot. I read "Former Truck Driver Reconstructs A Bomb" and thought - "So what? Is this a particular bomb, a historical bomb or something". It was only about 10 seconds later when my brain caught up and made me re-check what I'd actually read.
Would it really have hurt to add an extra 5 characters into the headline?
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Maybe not, but by leaving them out they've gotten you to share a funny story which brightened up my day.
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Which 5? "asdfh"?
Avoiding the G-Man: you're doing it wrong
;)
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...omic ...
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Oops, too early for me to be a /. editor too.
"...tomic ..."
I didn't confuse it with the meaning of the article, because this came out a few years ago, and was posted here then too. Only a few things come to mind when I see "truck driver" and "bomb" in the title.
1) Truck driver eats too many beans at a greasy spoon diner, gets food poisoning.
2) The FUD stories just post 9/11 about fuel trucks being hijacked and used as rolling bombs (totally media/gov't driven fiction).
3) The guy who's been researching the
Reconstructs A-bomb? (Score:2)
There is nothing fundamentally difficult about making an A-bomb, particularly a plutonium-based bomb, except obtaining the fissionable material, handling it, and keeping people from finding out about it.
Re:Reconstructs A-bomb? (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, you've got it wrong. It's a uranium-type gun-type bomb that is dead simple to build and practically foolproof if you've done the elementary physics and workmanship right. The only hard part with that is getting the highly enriched uranium. A plutonium-based implosion-type bomb is another story. The hollow spherical high-explosive lense and the arrangement of synchronized detonators is very, very exacting, and the very specialized grade of krytron tube to set it off just right so it doesn't fizzle.
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Sure its easy . . . (Score:2)
Just be careful you don't end up like this guy [wikimedia.org].
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NSA (Score:2)
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i doubt anyone at the NSA is that naive
Back in primary school, at the age of 11-12, i read about the theory of nuclear fision (mostly the basic principals used in a fision reactor), i dont remember wether i also knew about critical mass and the uranium gun-type design, but i truely believe i would have understood the basic design.
Sure, working out the exact dimensions of various parts would have been beyond the working knowledge of a 12-year old, but once out of high school that shouldn't have been a real p
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I'm sure someone up at the NSA is saying to themselves "OK wait, this guy is a truck driver and before that was a photographer....and now he's reverse engineered the goddamn A-bomb??". How is that possible?
Yeah, the order is all wrong. As sibling Vectormatic points out, A-Bomb knowledge comes first, then you become a truck driver and finally a photographer.
This has been known for years... (Score:3)
Simple design, extremely complex materials.
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It's also tricky to figure out all the physics and finer engineering points (how much to use, etc.) the first time. After that it's not nearly as difficult.
But yes, the engineering behind obtaining enriched uranium is enormously more complex than building the bomb itself.
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The GP is correct. Remember how USA didn't need any test for the gun-type bomb before deploying it against Japan? The actual calculations involved aren't too hard; you can do the modelling easily on a home computer in short time, assuming that you know the relevant physical properties (neutron interaction cross-section for the part of neutron spectrum the bomb will use, neutron reflection coefficients if you want to reflectors for improved power, and so on). If you have the materials, you can use them exces
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I think the real purpose of his work is more historical. It's less, "how does one build an A-bomb" and more "how did they build an A-bomb?"
There was a pretty good magazine article about him a few years back -- I think in Rolling Stone, or maybe Esquire, of all places. They'd spent a lot of time interviewing him, and the picture you got was that he found tiny, probably irrelevant, details of the bomb's construction fascinating. The work he's done for a hobby isn't that of an engineer per-se, but more that
Hard to come by ! (Score:2)
Seriously, though, atomic weapons are kind of like supersonic jets. They require a fairly high engineering know-how just to make one that barely works at all. To make one that works really well, you need a tremendous amount of know-how (usually gained through repeated attempts), many hours of supercomputer modelling, and highly exotic materials.
Unfortunately, sometimes even a primitive,
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So it's like making any kind of good armor in World of Warcraft, essentially.
Yep, we learned it in high school physics (Score:2)
He hasn't actually built one (Score:3)
Re:He hasn't actually built one (Score:5, Funny)
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The real secret of the bomb .. (Score:4, Informative)
It isn't how the bomb is constructed that is the hard part. 'Little boy' was very simple, but very crude. Most of the Uranium in the bomb was wasted because critical mass was not maintained long enough to consume most of the material. The yield of Little boy was only 9-10 kilotons, compared to 12-15 kilotons for 'Fat Man'. The hard part was the processing of the nuclear material to get enough of the high grade stuff concentrated enough to reach critical mass. That's the part you can't do in your garage. If you can steal enough material that will assemble to reach critical mass the rest is easy. During the war we were able to process enough Uranium for but a single bomb, and enough Plutonium for perhaps four. There was a third core available to drop on a third city in Japan if necessary and a forth was a few months away. (The first core was the Trinity test bomb, the second over Nagasaki).
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Self-published book (Score:2)
THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB (Score:2)
Let me yet again recommend everybody read THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB by Richard Rhodes. The descriptions of what the experience was like, on the ground to survivors of Hiroshima at various radii from the explosion are among the most difficult things I've ever read. I constantly read and hear flip comments about atomic weapons. If you think it's a great opportunity for humor, you're not really familiar with the actual history.
Bah! (Score:3)
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MANY years. My eighth grade (circa 1969) science project was a "working" model of a gun-type uranium bomb. If you have the fissionable material and do the math right, the engineering is almost trivial. Unfortunately for me, the hidden flash bulb that triggered when my "uranium" masses met caused my teacher to soil her underwear. I got an "F" for inappropriate subject material (overturned on appeal).
Allow me to be the first one to say: (Score:2)
Don't try this at home, kids! ;-)
Trruck driver? (Score:3)
Next time one of these guys wants to pass, you'll think twice about blocking the left lane.
More details here (Score:2)
For a more in-depth story about Coster-Mullen and his pursuit of the A-Bomb, check out this New Yorker article [newyorker.com] published in December 2008.
Two general types of nukes & rules of thumb (Score:2)
Plutonium based ones: relatively easy to get materials for, very hard to build
This has been known for years, nothing much is new here.
Truck driver, my ass. (Score:2)
The guy had a white collar job for 30 years before being a truck driver for 10. In other words, he (probably) had a college degree, which most truckers probably wouldn't have had. Sigh. I'm not even surprised by what passes for journalism anymore.
The one big new item of information (Score:2)
From the New Yorker article, here's the one big item of new info he's discovered:
In the standard historical accounts, the way that the bomb's gun mechanism worked was by shooting a cylindrical âoemaleâ uranium projectile into a concave, stationary uranium target. This act of atomic coitus created a mass sufficient to produce a critical reaction. The mass of the projectile was said to be 38.5 kilograms, and the mass of the target was said to be 25.6 kilograms. But no matter how many times Coster-Mullen did the math the numbers never quite worked out in a way that allowed the projectile and the target to fit inside the gun barrel while remaining subcritical.
The source of the error, Coster-Mullen recognized, was an assumption that every (male) researcher who studied the subject had made about the relation between projectile and target. These scholars had apparently been unable to conceive of an arrangement other than a "missionary position" bomb, in which a solid male projectile penetrated a vessel-like female target. But Coster-Mullen realized that a female-superior arrangement - in which a hollow projectile slammed down on top of a stationary cylinder of highly enriched uranium - yielded the correct size and mass.
Now that's a surprise. I wonder why the Manhattan Project did it that way, shooting the larger mass into the smaller mass. Maybe that was to get the assembly to hold together longer while the chain reaction initiated.
(For those of you who slept through the atomic weapons part of high school physics, the Hiroshima bomb was a "gun" bomb, where the tube from an artillery piece was used to fire one subcritical mass of uranium i
More HOWTO info (Score:2)
Re:whoa! (Score:4, Informative)
if he were going to gitmo it would probably have happened sometime in the last decade... this is old news. it's still cool, but it is old.
http://www.google.com/search?q=john+coster-mullen&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a [google.com]
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_samuels [newyorker.com]
http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/how-john-coster-mullen-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-reverse-engineer-the-bomb_b6222 [mediabistro.com]
http://docs.nrdc.org/nuclear/files/nuc_04110001a_024.pdf [nrdc.org]
Agreed (Score:2)
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Clancy made sure details were wrong ... (Score:3)
I'm surprised you didn't mention Sum Of All Fears [amazon.com] - not the movie (which almost completely missed the point) but the book, which goes into a fair amount of detail as to the exact amount of work it would take to manufacture not just a fission bomb (a la the bombings in Japan) but a two-stage thermonuclear fusion bomb. Even back then (and this was written in 1992) it would have been well within the reach of a moderately wealthy industrialist. ...
FWIW Tom Clancy (the author of Sum of All Fears) worked with actual nuclear weapons experts to make sure the details and procedures he depicted in the book were wrong. He wanted the book to sound correct but not actually be correct. You could say something similar for much of what appears in his techno thriller fiction books, sounds correct but is really quite heavy with artistic license.
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"Why haven't they, yet?" Good question. Then again, we had airliners for 30+ years before someone thought to use them as a weapon and then had the audacity to actually carry it out. I'm betting the audacity is the key component.
Well, I'm pretty sure they have considered that an atomic bomb would be useful as a weapon, and knew this back in September 2001.
They had enough audacity to hijack planes and fly them into buildings then, and I imagine a nuclear bomb would be even more effective but not require significantly more audacity, so all this suggests to me that the limiting factor must not be audacity.
(I think it's getting the needed nuclear material -- I think it's harder to get than simply going to North Korea with a case of goo
Re:whoa! (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you people even considered that they didn't make an atomic device because they don't want to?
They're people too you know? They want to live their lives like everybody else. They don't because, in their eyes, a foreign-backed foreign power is usurping what used to be their land. So they take violent action against whom they perceive as their enemies and its supporters. But that doesn't mean they'd be willing to detonate nuclear weapons because of that. Why would they contaminate the land they claim as theirs with radiation? Not to mention destroying most it in the detonation itself?
When are people going to understand that terrorism is not a mental condition? It's a way of fighting. Normally used when you're at a very disproportionate disadvantage. Give them a force comparable to the IDF and watch terrorism decline sharply. Hell, why doesn't Israel use their nuclear weapons then? They have them. Because they're the good guys? Or maybe because they don't want to destroy what they're trying to obtain?
*sigh*
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Have you people even considered that they didn't make an atomic device because they don't want to?
They're people too you know? They want to live their lives like everybody else.
Even the suicide bombers, the guys who blow themselves up with a bunch of civilians who have nothing to do with anything? Do they just want to live their lives?
But yes, I'm talking about nuclear bombs in NYC or Washington DC, not in the middle east. I certainly do believe that if the same terrorists that hijacked planes and used them as weapons could have made and used nuclear weapons, they would have done so. Yes, it might be hard to smuggle it into the US, but I imagine they can do it, and if the bomb
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Really? Repeating information that has been public for decades? I have a tin-foil hat tightener that, because I trust you, I'm willing to let you have for about $99.99. Please contact me within the next hour and I'll throw in a Ronco Turnip Twaddler gratis.
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How about a patio table top nuclear bomb [youtube.com]? ;-)
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i'm pretty sure getting a hollow sphere made out of plutonium isnt exactly a cake-walk either
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so people I know and would fear if they were wielding a fork can build A-bombs?
No, they can build the mechanism for an A-bomb. Maybe. Assuming they actually manage to buy hudnreds of kilos of uranium and an equivalent quantity of C4 without being busted by the feds, they'll probably kill themselves while trying to refine the uranium, or while wiring up the C4.
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You don't have a right to possess the hazardous materials they require though.
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The legend of tall proportions is IMHO the overblown chemical toxicity of plutonium. Plutonium is minimally chemically toxic [cdc.gov]. In fact, the whole linked document only ever mentions radio-"toxicity", not chemical toxicity!
Toxicity of plutonium derives from the biological effects of radiation emitted during the radiological decay of plutonium isotopes.
Chemically it's a nasty metal for sure, but nothing out of the ordinary. AFAIK you can handle solid plutonium with minimal protection (chemical gloves, particulate respirator). Plutonium oxides and hydrides form when exposed to moisture (with and without oxygen present), and those can spont