Britain has plutonium for 17,000 Nagasaki bombs

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain has amassed a stockpile of more than 100 metric tons of plutonium — enough for 17,000 bombs of the size that flattened Japan’s Nagasaki in 1945, a report from the country’s top science institution said on Friday.

The toxic stockpile, which has doubled in the last decade, comes mainly from reprocessing of spent uranium fuel from the country’s nuclear power plants, so to stop it growing the practice must end, the Royal Society said.


“There should be no more separation of plutonium once current contracts have been fulfilled,” said the report “Strategy options for the UK’s separated plutonium.”

Plutonium, one of the most radiotoxic materials known, is produced when spent uranium fuel from power stations is reprocessed to retrieve reusable uranium.

Reuters