> It's also very difficult to store because while an individual weapon may not be a critical mass, if you have tens or hundreds of weapons you have to worry about them getting close enough to worry about accidentally assembling a critical mass just from proximity, which, would of course, be bad.
Plutonium is an alpha emitter, and I believe the pits are plutonium alloyed with gallium and plated with gold to manage that and reduce chemical interactions with their immediate environment - there’s no “critical mass” storage problem, I think.
Plutonium is an alpha emitter, and I believe the pits are plutonium alloyed with gallium and plated with gold to manage that and reduce chemical interactions with their immediate environment - there’s no “critical mass” storage problem, I think.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(nuclear_weapon)#Material_...]