Can plutonium produced in a reactor get into the wrong hands, and somebody with an elementary chemical training turn it into a bomb?
Well, it’s false. The plutonium that you get from a reactor is a form of plutonium that’s extraordinarily difficult to work with. And a potential bomb manufacturer would have to have a sophistication matched by the great national laboratories of the land, in order to make any kind of a satisfactory weapon out of it at all. One must realize that to use plutonium for weapons, that in those countries that have done that, including our own, that an isotopically pure form of plutonium is produced precisely for that purpose, precisely for the purpose of making weapons. If you have plutonium out of a reactor, you do not have those possibilities open to you. The material is hot. The material is highly radioactive. It’s dimensionally unstable. It’s all kinds of things that the bomb designer does not want to have to deal with at all. And someone with a chemical background could possibly separate the material. But having separated it, there would be a very long way to go.
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