Now, I have BA in English so please be gentle with me if this is a dumb question. What goes on in a nuclear power plant is nuclear FISSION, right? That means they’re breakin’ stuff in the reactor and capturing the resulting heat. As I recall, isn’t the fuel for the reaction Uranium 235? And isn’t some of the funky goo that results from the reaction some isotope of Plutonium?
How does anyone (even an extremely clever nuclear physicist) break something (Uranium, atomic #92) and get something bigger (Plutonium, atomic #94)? I can see breaking Uranium into Gold (#79) and Aluminum (#13). And I can see some extremely greedy types hoarding the resulting byproducts and creating humongous airlines and soda can factories–and using Plutonium (nasty goo indeed) as the nuclear fall guy to wit, “Don’t bust no U235 at home, kids, cuz you’ll have to get rid of the Plutonium.” It would also explain why we go nutz when someone else tries to develop the technology–gee maybe N Korea really wants to corner the soda can/airliner skin market and make a little gold on the side to buy some economy with.
I know I sound paranoid, but I can’t ditch the argument. What is it about the incredibly cmplex workings of nuclear fission that I fail to understand?