In pure solid form, not that difficult. Even [sup]238[/sup]Pu, with a half-life of about 88 years, only gives off gammas; you could handle it with a pair of gloves, or even with bare hands with little more risk than handling lead. There’s no special hazard in injesting it in incidental quantities, as absorption from particulates would be minimal. If it were reduced to dust and inhaled, however, the results would likely be fatal. Plutonium also has various allotropes (states where the density or other material properties suddenly change) and so machining or manipulating it can be dangerous. In a suspended liquid (done during purification) it can become supercritical if the form factor of the containing vessel changes, causing a criticality excursion.
For the purpose of long-term storage, the material should mixed with [sup]240[/sup]Pu, rendering it non-useful for weaponization, but still usable with processing for a mixed oxide fuel. (This won’t prevent its use in a “dirty bomb”, but the effects of such bombs are questionable; like chemical warfare bombs, the utility is really the terror threat, not the actual damage it would cause, which would very likely be underwhelming.) You can also vitrify excess plutonium or used fuel, making it very difficult and time-consuming to recover for any malevolent purpose (essentially beyond the means of a terrorist organization); however, this also makes it difficult to recover for reprocessing should we decide that we need this for future power generation.
Sticking nuclear materials in a hole in the ground is an obtuse, short-sighted would-be solution that really fails to solve anything except putting it out of sight. Handling and processing carries its own attendant hazards, of course, and the list of near-accidents and excursions is worrisome to say the least (although more modern designs are far closer to being operationally fail-safe).
Stranger
