wandering stars

Now a team of scientists—physicists Frank von Hippel and Richard Garwin along with environmental scientists Rodney Ewing and Allison Macfarlane—suggest that burying plutonium is the only reasonable solution to this problematic stockpile in a comment to be published in Nature on May 10. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) They also recommend the U.K., which is presently debating what to do with its nearly 100 metric tons of plutonium, should lead the way by studying how to immobilize the “element from hell” in ceramic pucks that can then be buried in deep caverns or even deeper boreholes.