Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!cbnews!military From: djm@castle.ed.ac.uk (D Murphy) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: Re: Chemicals weapons in Iraq Message-ID: <1990Aug21.025441.2458@cbnews.att.com> Date: 21 Aug 90 02:54:41 GMT References: <1990Aug8.030444.25822@cbnews.att.com> <1990Aug16.030606.15802@cbnews.att.com> Sender: military@cbnews.att.com (William B. Thacker) Organization: Edinburgh University Chemistry Lines: 33 Approved: military@att.att.com From: D Murphy In article <1990Aug16.030606.15802@cbnews.att.com> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes: - - -From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) ->From: "Mitchell F. Wyle" ->1. "Dust Bomb" If one puts Plutonium dust in one's petroleum, what -> happens? Does it sink and cause no harm? Does it dissolve and -> make the oil radioactive? - -Oil is not a good solvent for inorganic materials like metals and metal -salts. You might get a suspension of the dust in the oil, depending on -details like relatively densities and the viscosity of the oil. My -guess would be that it would settle out... but that settling might be -very slow in thick crude. In any case, filtering, although possibly -difficult, would clean it out. - Erm, I hate to worry you, Henry, but the extraction process used at the BNF Sellafield plant for reproceessing irradiated oxide fuels uses an organic solvent to get the Pu out of a highly acidic aqueous solution. It would be possible to dissolve the Pu in acid, then extract it into an organic solvent, which you could then incorporate into a napalm-like material. IMHO I doubt if it is worth the effort - the only use of Pu in warfare is to make very big explosions, since deaths by lung cancer (the most likely effect of such a weapon) would not occur soon enough to be tactically useful. Murff...