title: Tobacco

text: Many species of tobacco are in the genus of herbs "Nicotiana". It is part of the nightshade family (Solanaceae) indigenous to North and South America, Australia, south west Africa, and the South Pacific.


title: Tobacco

text: Most nightshades contain varying amounts of nicotine, a powerful neurotoxin to insects. However, tobaccos tend to contain a much higher concentration of nicotine than the others. Unlike many other Solanaceae species, they do not contain tropane alkaloids, which are often poisonous to humans and other animals.


title: Tobacco

text: Despite containing enough nicotine and other compounds such as germacrene and anabasine and other piperidine alkaloids (varying between species) to deter most herbivores, a number of such animals have evolved the ability to feed on "Nicotiana" species without being harmed. Nonetheless, tobacco is unpalatable to many species due to its other attributes. For example, although the cabbage looper is a generalist pest, tobacco's gummosis and trichomes can harm early larvae survival. As a result, some tobacco plants (chiefly "N. glauca") have become established as invasive weeds in some places.


title: Tobacco

text: Tobacco, alongside its related products, can be infested by parasites such as the "Lasioderma serricorne" (tobacco beetle) and the "Ephestia elutella" (tobacco moth), which are the most widespread and damaging parasites to the tobacco industry. Infestation can range from the tobacco cultivated in the fields to the leaves used for manufacturing cigars, cigarillos, cigarettes, etc. Both the larvae of "Lasioderma serricorne" and caterpillars of "Ephestia elutella" are considered a pest.


title: Tobacco

text: Tobacco is cultivated similarly to other agricultural products. Seeds were at first quickly scattered onto the soil. However, young plants came under increasing attack from flea beetles ("Epitrix cucumeris" or "E. pubescens"), which caused destruction of half the tobacco crops in United States in 1876. By 1890, successful experiments were conducted that placed the plant in a frame covered by thin cotton fabric. Today, tobacco seeds are sown in cold frames or hotbeds, as their germination is activated by light. In the United States, tobacco is often fertilized with the mineral apatite, which partially starves the plant of nitrogen, to produce a more desired flavor.


title: Tobacco

text: After the plants are about tall, they are transplanted into the fields. Farmers used to have to wait for rainy weather to plant. A hole is created in the tilled earth with a tobacco peg, either a curved wooden tool or deer antler. After making two holes to the right and left, the planter would move forward two feet, select plants from his/her bag, and repeat. Various mechanical tobacco planters like Bemis, New Idea Setter, and New Holland Transplanter were invented in the late 19th and 20th centuries to automate the process: making the hole, watering it, guiding the plant in — all in one motion.


title: Tobacco

text: Tobacco is cultivated annually, and can be harvested in several ways. In the oldest method, still used today, the entire plant is harvested at once by cutting off the stalk at the ground with a tobacco knife; it is then speared onto sticks, four to six plants a stick, and hung in a curing barn. In the 19th century, bright tobacco began to be harvested by pulling individual leaves off the stalk as they ripened. The leaves ripen from the ground upwards, so a field of tobacco harvested in this manner entails the serial harvest of a number of "primings", beginning with the "volado" leaves near the ground, working to the "seco" leaves in the middle of the plant, and finishing with the potent "ligero" leaves at the top. Before harvesting, the crop must be "topped" when the pink flowers develop. Topping always refers to the removal of the tobacco flower before the leaves are systematically harvested. As the industrial revolution took hold, the harvesting wagons which were used to transport leaves were equipped with man-powered stringers, an apparatus that used twine to attach leaves to a pole. In modern times, large fields are harvested mechanically, although topping the flower and in some cases the plucking of immature leaves is still done by hand.


title: Tobacco

text: In the U.S., North Carolina and Kentucky are the leaders in tobacco production, followed by Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina and Pennsylvania.


title: Tobacco

text: Curing and subsequent aging allow for the slow oxidation and degradation of carotenoids in tobacco leaf. This produces certain compounds in the tobacco leaves and gives a sweet hay, tea, rose oil, or fruity aromatic flavor that contributes to the "smoothness" of the smoke. Starch is converted to sugar, which glycates protein, and is oxidized into advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs), a caramelization process that also adds flavor. Inhalation of these AGEs in tobacco smoke contributes to atherosclerosis and cancer. Levels of AGEs are dependent on the curing method used.


title: Tobacco

text: Some tobaccos go through a second stage of curing, known as "fermenting" or "sweating". Cavendish undergoes fermentation pressed in a "casing" solution containing sugar and/or flavoring.


title: Tobacco

text: Production of tobacco leaf increased by 40% between 1971, when 4.2 million tons of leaf were produced, and 1997, when 5.9 million tons of leaf were produced. According to the Food and Agriculture organization of the UN, tobacco leaf production was expected to hit 7.1 million tons by 2010. This number is a bit lower than the record-high production of 1992, when 7.5 million tons of leaf were produced. The production growth was almost entirely due to increased productivity by developing nations, where production increased by 128%. During that same time, production in developed countries actually decreased. China's increase in tobacco production was the single biggest factor in the increase in world production. China's share of the world market increased from 17% in 1971 to 47% in 1997. This growth can be partially explained by the existence of a low import tariff on foreign tobacco entering China. While this tariff has been reduced from 66% in 1999 to 10% in 2004, it still has led to local, Chinese cigarettes being preferred over foreign cigarettes because of their lower cost.


title: Tobacco

text: Every year, about 5.9 million tons of tobacco are produced throughout the world. The top producers of tobacco are China (36.3%), India (12.9%), Brazil (11.9%) and Zimbabwe (3.5%).


title: Tobacco

text: Around the peak of global tobacco production, 20 million rural Chinese households were producing tobacco on 2.1 million hectares of land. While it is the major crop for millions of Chinese farmers, growing tobacco is not as profitable as cotton or sugarcane, because the Chinese government sets the market price. While this price is guaranteed, it is lower than the natural market price, because of the lack of market risk. To further control tobacco in their borders, China founded a State Tobacco Monopoly Administration (STMA) in 1982. The STMA controls tobacco production, marketing, imports, and exports, and contributes 12% to the nation's national income. As noted above, despite the income generated for the state by profits from state-owned tobacco companies and the taxes paid by companies and retailers, China's government has acted to reduce tobacco use.


title: Tobacco

text: India's Tobacco Board is headquartered in Guntur in the state of Andhra Pradesh. India has 96,865 registered tobacco farmers and many more who are not registered. In 2010, 3,120 tobacco product manufacturing facilities were operating in all of India. Around 0.25% of India's cultivated land is used for tobacco production.


title: Tobacco

text: Since 1947, the Indian government has supported growth in the tobacco industry. India has seven tobacco research centers, located in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Bihar, Mysore, and West Bengal houses the core research institute.


title: Tobacco

text: In Brazil, around 135,000 family farmers cite tobacco production as their main economic activity. Tobacco has never exceeded 0.7% of the country's total cultivated area. In the southern regions of Brazil, Virginia, and Amarelinho, flue-cured tobacco, as well as burley and Galpão Comum air-cured tobacco, are produced. These types of tobacco are used for cigarettes. In the northeast, darker, air- and sun-cured tobacco is grown. These types of tobacco are used for cigars, twists, and dark cigarettes. Brazil's government has made attempts to reduce the production of tobacco but has not had a successful systematic antitobacco farming initiative. Brazil's government, however, provides small loans for family farms, including those that grow tobacco, through the "Programa Nacional de Fortalecimento da Agricultura Familiar".


title: Tobacco

text: The International Labour Office reported that the most child-laborers work in agriculture, which is one of the most hazardous types of work. The tobacco industry houses some of these working children. Use of children is widespread on farms in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. While some of these children work with their families on small, family-owned farms, others work on large plantations.


title: Tobacco

text: In late 2009, reports were released by the London-based human-rights group Plan International, claiming that child labor was common on Malawi (producer of 1.8% of the world's tobacco) tobacco farms. The organization interviewed 44 teens, who worked full-time on farms during the 2007-8 growing season. The child-laborers complained of low pay and long hours, as well as physical and sexual abuse by their supervisors. They also reported experiencing green tobacco sickness, a form of nicotine poisoning. When wet leaves are handled, nicotine from the leaves gets absorbed in the skin and causes nausea, vomiting, and dizziness. Children were exposed to levels of nicotine equivalent to smoking 50 cigarettes, just through direct contact with tobacco leaves. Nicotine exposure in children can permanently alter brain structure and function.


title: Tobacco

text: Major tobacco companies have encouraged global tobacco production. Philip Morris, British American Tobacco, and Japan Tobacco each own or lease tobacco-manufacturing facilities in at least 50 countries and buy crude tobacco leaf from at least 12 more countries. This encouragement, along with government subsidies, has led to a glut in the tobacco market. This surplus has resulted in lower prices, which are devastating to small-scale tobacco farmers. According to the World Bank, between 1985 and 2000, the inflation-adjusted price of tobacco dropped 37%. Tobacco is the most widely smuggled legal product.


title: Tobacco

text: Tobacco production requires the use of large amounts of pesticides. Tobacco companies recommend up to 16 separate applications of pesticides just in the period between planting the seeds in greenhouses and transplanting the young plants to the field. Pesticide use has been worsened by the desire to produce larger crops in less time because of the decreasing market value of tobacco. Pesticides often harm tobacco farmers because they are unaware of the health effects and the proper safety protocol for working with pesticides. These pesticides, as well as fertilizers, end up in the soil, waterways, and the food chain. Coupled with child labor, pesticides pose an even greater threat. Early exposure to pesticides may increase a child's lifelong cancer risk, as well as harm his or her nervous and immune systems.


title: Tobacco

text: As with all crops, tobacco crops extract nutrients (such as phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium) from soil, decreasing its fertility.


title: Tobacco

text: Furthermore, the wood used to cure tobacco in some places leads to deforestation. While some big tobacco producers such as China and the United States have access to petroleum, coal, and natural gas, which can be used as alternatives to wood, most developing countries still rely on wood in the curing process. Brazil alone uses the wood of 60 million trees per year for curing, packaging, and rolling cigarettes.


title: Tobacco

text: Several tobacco plants have been used as model organisms in genetics. Tobacco BY-2 cells, derived from "N. tabacum" cultivar 'Bright Yellow-2', are among the most important research tools in plant cytology. Tobacco has played a pioneering role in callus culture research and the elucidation of the mechanism by which kinetin works, laying the groundwork for modern agricultural biotechnology. The first genetically modified plant was produced in 1982, using "Agrobacterium tumefaciens" to create an antibiotic-resistant tobacco plant. This research laid the groundwork for all genetically modified crops.


title: Tobacco

text: Because of its importance as a research tool, transgenic tobacco was the first genetically modified (GM) crop to be tested in field trials, in the United States and France in 1986; China became the first country in the world to approve commercial planting of a GM crop in 1993, which was tobacco.


title: Tobacco

text: Many varieties of transgenic tobacco have been intensively tested in field trials. Agronomic traits such as resistance to pathogens (viruses, particularly to the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV); fungi; bacteria and nematodes); weed management via herbicide tolerance; resistance against insect pests; resistance to drought and cold; and production of useful products such as pharmaceuticals; and use of GM plants for bioremediation, have all been tested in over 400 field trials using tobacco.


title: Tobacco

text: Currently, only the US is producing GM tobacco. The Chinese virus-resistant tobacco was withdrawn from the market in China in 1997. From 2002 to 2010, cigarettes made with GM tobacco with reduced nicotine content were available in the US under the market name Quest.


title: Tobacco

text: Smoking in public was, for a long time, reserved for men, and when done by women was sometimes associated with promiscuity; in Japan, during the Edo period, prostitutes and their clients often approached one another under the guise of offering a smoke. The same was true in 19th-century Europe.


title: Tobacco

text: Following the American Civil War, the use of tobacco, primarily in cigars, became associated with masculinity and power. Today, tobacco use is often stigmatized; this has spawned quitting associations and antismoking campaigns. Bhutan is the only country in the world where tobacco sales are illegal. Due to its propensity for causing detumescence and erectile dysfunction, some studies have described tobacco as an anaphrodisiacal substance.


title: Tobacco

text: In Christian denominations of the conservative holiness movement, such as the Allegheny Wesleyan Methodist Connection and Evangelical Wesleyan Church, the use of tobacco and other drugs is prohibited; ¶42 of the 2014 Book of Discipline of the Allegheny Wesleyan Methodist Connection states:


title: Tobacco

text: Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (popularly known as Mormons) adhere to the Word of Wisdom, a religious health code that is interpreted as prohibiting the consumption of tobacco as well as alcohol, coffee, and tea.


title: Tobacco

text: Most Islamic scholars have condemned tobacco due to its harmful effects on health. The earliest fatwa (religious opinion) against tobacco use dates from 1602, and today, most major Islamic sects prohibit muslims from using it. While tobacco is not mentioned in the Quran, the Quran does instruct muslims to live healthy lives.


title: Tobacco

text: Sikhism, a monotheistic religion from India, considers tobacco consumption as a taboo and very bad for health and spirituality. Initiated Sikhs are never to consume tobacco in any form.


title: Tobacco

text: Research on tobacco use is limited mainly to smoking, which has been studied more extensively than any other form of consumption. An estimated 1.1 billion people, and up to one-third of the adult population, use tobacco in some form. Smoking is more prevalent among men (however, the gender gap declines with age), the poor, and in transitional or developing countries. A study published in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report found that in 2019 approximately one in four youths (23.0%) in the U.S. had used a tobacco product during the past 30 days. This represented approximately three in 10 high school students (31.2%) and approximately one in eight middle school students (12.5%).


title: Tobacco

text: Rates of smoking continue to rise in developing countries, but have leveled off or declined in developed countries. Smoking rates in the United States have dropped by half from 1965 to 2006, falling from 42% to 20.8% in adults. In the developing world, tobacco consumption is rising by 3.4% per year.


title: Tobacco

text: Tobacco smoking harms health because of the toxic chemicals in tobacco smoke, including carbon monoxide, cyanide, and carcinogens, which have been proven to cause heart and lung diseases and cancer.


title: Tobacco

text: Thousands of different substances in cigarette smoke, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (such as benzopyrene), formaldehyde, cadmium, nickel, arsenic, tobacco-specific nitrosamines, and phenols contribute to the harmful effects of smoking.


title: Tobacco

text: According to the World Health Organization, tobacco is the single greatest cause of preventable death globally. WHO estimates that tobacco caused 5.4 million deaths in 2004 and 100 million deaths over the course of the 20th century. Similarly, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describe tobacco use as "the single most important preventable risk to human health in developed countries and an important cause of premature death worldwide." Due to these health consequences, it is estimated that a 10 hectare (approximately 24.7 acre) field of tobacco used for cigarettes causes 30 deaths per year – 10 from lung cancer and 20 from cigarette-induced diseases like cardiac arrest, gangrene, bladder cancer, mouth cancer, etc.


title: Tobacco

text: The harms caused by inhaling tobacco smoke include diseases of the heart and lungs, with smoking being a major risk factor for heart attacks, strokes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (emphysema), and cancer (particularly cancers of the lungs, larynx, mouth, and pancreas). Cancer is caused by inhaling carcinogenic substances in tobacco smoke.


title: Tobacco

text: Inhaling secondhand tobacco smoke (which has been exhaled by a smoker) can cause lung cancer in nonsmoking adults. In the United States, about 3,000 adults die each year due to lung cancer from secondhand smoke exposure. Heart disease caused by secondhand smoke kills around 46,000 nonsmokers every year.


title: Tobacco

text: In children, exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke is associated with a higher incidence and severity of respiratory illnesses, middle ear disease, and asthma attacks. Each year in the United States, secondhand smoke exposure causes 24,500 infants to be born with low birthweight, 71,900 preterm births, 202,300 episodes of asthma, and 790,000 health care visits for ear infections.


title: Tobacco

text: The addictive alkaloid nicotine is a stimulant, and popularly known as the most characteristic constituent of tobacco. In drug effect preference questionnaires, a rough indicator of addictive potential, nicotine scores almost as highly as opioids. Users typically develop tolerance and dependence. Nicotine is known to produce conditioned place preference, a sign of psychological enforcement value. In one medical study, tobacco's overall harm to user and self was determined at three percent below cocaine, and 13 percent above amphetamines, ranking sixth most harmful of the 20 drugs assessed.


title: Tobacco

text: Polonium-210 is a radioactive trace contaminant of tobacco, providing additional explanation for the link between smoking and bronchial cancer.


title: Tobacco

text: The radioactive particles build up over time in the lungs and a UCLA study has estimated that the radiation from 25 years of smoking would cause over 120 deaths per thousand smokers.


title: Tobacco

text: Tobacco has a significant economic impact. The global tobacco market in 2010 was estimated at US$760 billion, excluding China. The global revenues from tobacco taxes in 2013-2014 was approximately $269 billion.


title: Tobacco

text: In China, cigarette manufacturing is one of the few profitable state-owned industries. For example, in 1998 the 1 429 state-owned enterprises in Yunnan province had revenue of Renminbi (RMB) 69.1 billion (US$8.3 billion) while 8 cigarette manufacturing plants alone accounted for about 53 percent (or RMB 36.2 billion) of total provincial industry sales. The Chinese government also collects tax on tobacco products. Tax revenues from cigarettes increased from 740 to 842 billion Chinese yuan between 2014 and 2016. This generated an additional 101 billion Chinese yuan in tax revenues for the government.


title: Tobacco

text: In India, tobacco generates approximately 20 billion Indian Rupees (US$0.45 billion) of income per annum as a result of employment, income and government revenue.


title: Tobacco

text: Statistica estimates that in the U.S. alone, the tobacco industry has a market of US$121 billion, despite the fact the CDC reports that US smoking rates are declining steadily. In terms of health expenditures, cigarette smoking contributed to more than $225 billion (or 11.7%) of annual healthcare spending in the U.S. in 2014. Smoking-attributable healthcare spending increased more than 30% for Medicaid between 2010 and 2014.


title: Tobacco

text: In the US, the decline in the number of smokers, the end of the Tobacco Transition Payment Program in 2014, and competition from growers in other countries, made tobacco farming economics more challenging.


title: Tobacco

text: Of the 1.22 billion smokers worldwide, 1 billion of them live in developing or transitional economies, and much of the disease burden and premature mortality attributable to tobacco use disproportionately affect the poor. While smoking prevalence has declined in many developed countries, it remains high in others, and is increasing among women and in developing countries. Between one-fifth and two-thirds of men in most populations smoke. Women's smoking rates vary more widely but rarely equal male rates.


title: Tobacco

text: Tobacco users must also spend a significant amount of money on cigarettes to maintain regular use, as tobacco products are often heavily taxed by governments. For example, a pack a day smoker in the state of New York would have to spend around $4,690.25 a year on cigarettes alone.


title: Tobacco

text: In Indonesia, the lowest income group spends 15% of its total expenditures on tobacco. In Egypt, more than 10% of low-income household expenditure is on tobacco. The poorest 20% of households in Mexico spend 11% of their income on tobacco.


title: Tobacco

text: The tobacco industry advertises its products through a variety of media, including sponsorship, particularly of sporting events. Because of the health risks of these products, this is now one of the most highly regulated forms of marketing. Some or all forms of tobacco advertising are banned in many countries.


title: Tobacco

text: Tobacco does a great deal to pollute the environment. Cigarette bumps or packages can easily end up in seas or lakes. Tobacco, by leading to disease, then leads to environmental pollution. It can drive up medication use. The medication industry in turn contributes to pollution, by the production process, by the disposal of medication, by packaging, etc.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium is a radioactive chemical element with the symbol Pu and atomic number 94. It is an actinide metal of silvery-gray appearance that tarnishes when exposed to air, and forms a dull coating when oxidized. The element normally exhibits six allotropes and four oxidation states. It reacts with carbon, halogens, nitrogen, silicon, and hydrogen. When exposed to moist air, it forms oxides and hydrides that can expand the sample up to 70% in volume, which in turn flake off as a powder that is pyrophoric. It is radioactive and can accumulate in bones, which makes the handling of plutonium dangerous.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium was first synthetically produced and isolated in late 1940 and early 1941, by a deuteron bombardment of uranium-238 in the cyclotron at the University of California, Berkeley. First, neptunium-238 (half-life 2.1 days) was synthesized, which subsequently beta-decayed to form the new element with atomic number 94 and atomic weight 238 (half-life 88 years). Since uranium had been named after the planet Uranus and neptunium after the planet Neptune, element 94 was named after Pluto, which at the time was considered to be a planet as well. Wartime secrecy prevented the University of California team from publishing its discovery until 1948.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium is the element with the highest atomic number to occur in nature. Trace quantities arise in natural uranium-238 deposits when uranium-238 captures neutrons emitted by decay of other uranium-238 atoms.


title: Plutonium

text: Both plutonium-239 and plutonium-241 are fissile, meaning that they can sustain a nuclear chain reaction, leading to applications in nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors. Plutonium-240 exhibits a high rate of spontaneous fission, raising the neutron flux of any sample containing it. The presence of plutonium-240 limits a plutonium sample's usability for weapons or its quality as reactor fuel, and the percentage of plutonium-240 determines its grade (weapons-grade, fuel-grade, or reactor-grade). Plutonium-238 has a half-life of 87.7 years and emits alpha particles. It is a heat source in radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which are used to power some spacecraft. Plutonium isotopes are expensive and inconvenient to separate, so particular isotopes are usually manufactured in specialized reactors.


title: Plutonium

text: Producing plutonium in useful quantities for the first time was a major part of the Manhattan Project during World War II that developed the first atomic bombs. The Fat Man bombs used in the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945, and in the bombing of Nagasaki in August 1945, had plutonium cores. Human radiation experiments studying plutonium were conducted without informed consent, and several criticality accidents, some lethal, occurred after the war. Disposal of plutonium waste from nuclear power plants and dismantled nuclear weapons built during the Cold War is a nuclear-proliferation and environmental concern. Other sources of plutonium in the environment are fallout from numerous above-ground nuclear tests, now banned.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium, like most metals, has a bright silvery appearance at first, much like nickel, but it oxidizes very quickly to a dull gray, although yellow and olive green are also reported. At room temperature plutonium is in its α ("alpha") form. This, the most common structural form of the element (allotrope), is about as hard and brittle as gray cast iron unless it is alloyed with other metals to make it soft and ductile. Unlike most metals, it is not a good conductor of heat or electricity. It has a low melting point () and an unusually high boiling point (). This gives a large range of temperatures (over 2,500 kelvin wide) at which plutonium is liquid, but this range is neither the greatest among all actinides nor among all metals. The low melting point as well as the reactivity of the native metal compared to the oxide leads to plutonium oxides being a preferred form for applications such as nuclear fission reactor fuel (MOX-fuel).


title: Plutonium

text: Alpha decay, the release of a high-energy helium nucleus, is the most common form of radioactive decay for plutonium. A 5 kg mass of Pu contains about atoms. With a half-life of 24,100 years, about of its atoms decay each second by emitting a 5.157 MeV alpha particle. This amounts to 9.68 watts of power. Heat produced by the deceleration of these alpha particles makes it warm to the touch. due to its much shorter half life heats up to much higher temperatures and glows red hot with blackbody radiation if left without external heating or cooling. This heat has been used in Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (see below).


title: Plutonium

text: Resistivity is a measure of how strongly a material opposes the flow of electric current. The resistivity of plutonium at room temperature is very high for a metal, and it gets even higher with lower temperatures, which is unusual for metals. This trend continues down to 100 K, below which resistivity rapidly decreases for fresh samples. Resistivity then begins to increase with time at around 20 K due to radiation damage, with the rate dictated by the isotopic composition of the sample.


title: Plutonium

text: Because of self-irradiation, a sample of plutonium fatigues throughout its crystal structure, meaning the ordered arrangement of its atoms becomes disrupted by radiation with time. Self-irradiation can also lead to annealing which counteracts some of the fatigue effects as temperature increases above 100 K.


title: Plutonium

text: Unlike most materials, plutonium increases in density when it melts, by 2.5%, but the liquid metal exhibits a linear decrease in density with temperature. Near the melting point, the liquid plutonium has very high viscosity and surface tension compared to other metals.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium normally has six allotropes and forms a seventh (zeta, ζ) at high temperature within a limited pressure range. These allotropes, which are different structural modifications or forms of an element, have very similar internal energies but significantly varying densities and crystal structures. This makes plutonium very sensitive to changes in temperature, pressure, or chemistry, and allows for dramatic volume changes following phase transitions from one allotropic form to another. The densities of the different allotropes vary from 16.00 g/cm to 19.86 g/cm.


title: Plutonium

text: The presence of these many allotropes makes machining plutonium very difficult, as it changes state very readily. For example, the α form exists at room temperature in unalloyed plutonium. It has machining characteristics similar to cast iron but changes to the plastic and malleable β ("beta") form at slightly higher temperatures. The reasons for the complicated phase diagram are not entirely understood. The α form has a low-symmetry monoclinic structure, hence its brittleness, strength, compressibility, and poor thermal conductivity.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium in the δ ("delta") form normally exists in the 310 °C to 452 °C range but is stable at room temperature when alloyed with a small percentage of gallium, aluminium, or cerium, enhancing workability and allowing it to be welded. The δ form has more typical metallic character, and is roughly as strong and malleable as aluminium. In fission weapons, the explosive shock waves used to compress a plutonium core will also cause a transition from the usual δ phase plutonium to the denser α form, significantly helping to achieve supercriticality. The ε phase, the highest temperature solid allotrope, exhibits anomalously high atomic self-diffusion compared to other elements.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium is a radioactive actinide metal whose isotope, plutonium-239, is one of the three primary fissile isotopes (uranium-233 and uranium-235 are the other two); plutonium-241 is also highly fissile. To be considered fissile, an isotope's atomic nucleus must be able to break apart or fission when struck by a slow moving neutron and to release enough additional neutrons to sustain the nuclear chain reaction by splitting further nuclei.


title: Plutonium

text: Pure plutonium-239 may have a multiplication factor (k) larger than one, which means that if the metal is present in sufficient quantity and with an appropriate geometry (e.g., a sphere of sufficient size), it can form a critical mass. During fission, a fraction of the nuclear binding energy, which holds a nucleus together, is released as a large amount of electromagnetic and kinetic energy (much of the latter being quickly converted to thermal energy). Fission of a kilogram of plutonium-239 can produce an explosion equivalent to . It is this energy that makes plutonium-239 useful in nuclear weapons and reactors.


title: Plutonium

text: The presence of the isotope plutonium-240 in a sample limits its nuclear bomb potential, as plutonium-240 has a relatively high spontaneous fission rate (~440 fissions per second per gram—over 1,000 neutrons per second per gram), raising the background neutron levels and thus increasing the risk of predetonation. Plutonium is identified as either weapons-grade, fuel-grade, or reactor-grade based on the percentage of plutonium-240 that it contains. Weapons-grade plutonium contains less than 7% plutonium-240. Fuel-grade plutonium contains from 7% to less than 19%, and power reactor-grade contains 19% or more plutonium-240. Supergrade plutonium, with less than 4% of plutonium-240, is used in U.S. Navy weapons stored in proximity to ship and submarine crews, due to its lower radioactivity. The isotope plutonium-238 is not fissile but can undergo nuclear fission easily with fast neutrons as well as alpha decay. All plutonium isotopes can be "bred" into fissile material with one or more neutron absorptions, whether followed by beta decay or not. This makes non-fissile isotopes of Plutonium a fertile material.


title: Plutonium

text: Twenty radioactive isotopes of plutonium have been characterized. The longest-lived are plutonium-244, with a half-life of 80.8 million years, plutonium-242, with a half-life of 373,300 years, and plutonium-239, with a half-life of 24,110 years. All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives that are less than 7,000 years. This element also has eight metastable states, though all have half-lives less than one second. Plutonium-244 has been found in interstellar space and is has the longest half-life of any non-primordial radioisotope.


title: Plutonium

text: The known isotopes of plutonium range in mass number from 228 to 247. The primary decay modes of isotopes with mass numbers lower than the most stable isotope, plutonium-244, are spontaneous fission and alpha emission, mostly forming uranium (92 protons) and neptunium (93 protons) isotopes as decay products (neglecting the wide range of daughter nuclei created by fission processes). The primary decay mode for isotopes with mass numbers higher than plutonium-244 is beta emission, mostly forming americium (95 protons) isotopes as decay products. Plutonium-241 is the parent isotope of the neptunium decay series, decaying to americium-241 via beta emission.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium-238 and 239 are the most widely synthesized isotopes. Plutonium-239 is synthesized via the following reaction using uranium (U) and neutrons (n) via beta decay (β) with neptunium (Np) as an intermediate:


title: Plutonium

text: Neutrons from the fission of uranium-235 are captured by uranium-238 nuclei to form uranium-239; a beta decay converts a neutron into a proton to form neptunium-239 (half-life 2.36 days) and another beta decay forms plutonium-239. Egon Bretscher working on the British Tube Alloys project predicted this reaction theoretically in 1940.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium-238 is synthesized by bombarding uranium-238 with deuterons (D, the nuclei of heavy hydrogen) in the following reaction:


title: Plutonium

text: In this process, a deuteron hitting uranium-238 produces two neutrons and neptunium-238, which spontaneously decays by emitting negative beta particles to form plutonium-238. Plutonium-238 can also be produced by neutron irradiation of neptunium-237.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium isotopes undergo radioactive decay, which produces decay heat. Different isotopes produce different amounts of heat per mass. The decay heat is usually listed as watt/kilogram, or milliwatt/gram. In larger pieces of plutonium (e.g. a weapon pit) and inadequate heat removal the resulting self-heating may be significant.


title: Plutonium

text: At room temperature, pure plutonium is silvery in color but gains a tarnish when oxidized. The element displays four common ionic oxidation states in aqueous solution and one rare one:


title: Plutonium

text: The color shown by plutonium solutions depends on both the oxidation state and the nature of the acid anion. It is the acid anion that influences the degree of complexing—how atoms connect to a central atom—of the plutonium species. Additionally, the formal +2 oxidation state of plutonium is known in the complex [K(2.2.2-cryptand)] [PuCp″], Cp″ = CH(SiMe).


title: Plutonium

text: A +8 oxidation state is possible as well in the volatile tetroxide . Though it readily decomposes via a reduction mechanism similar to , can be stabilized in alkaline solutions and chloroform.


title: Plutonium

text: Metallic plutonium is produced by reacting plutonium tetrafluoride with barium, calcium or lithium at 1200 °C. Metallic plutonium is attacked by acids, oxygen, and steam but not by alkalis and dissolves easily in concentrated hydrochloric, hydroiodic and perchloric acids. Molten metal must be kept in a vacuum or an inert atmosphere to avoid reaction with air. At 135 °C the metal will ignite in air and will explode if placed in carbon tetrachloride.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium is a reactive metal. In moist air or moist argon, the metal oxidizes rapidly, producing a mixture of oxides and hydrides. If the metal is exposed long enough to a limited amount of water vapor, a powdery surface coating of PuO is formed. Also formed is plutonium hydride but an excess of water vapor forms only PuO.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium shows enormous, and reversible, reaction rates with pure hydrogen, forming plutonium hydride. It also reacts readily with oxygen, forming PuO and PuO as well as intermediate oxides; plutonium oxide fills 40% more volume than plutonium metal. The metal reacts with the halogens, giving rise to compounds with the general formula PuX where X can be F, Cl, Br or I and PuF is also seen. The following oxyhalides are observed: PuOCl, PuOBr and PuOI. It will react with carbon to form PuC, nitrogen to form PuN and silicon to form PuSi.


title: Plutonium

text: The organometallic chemistry of plutonium complexes is typical for organoactinide species; a characteristic example of an organoplutonium compound is plutonocene. Computational chemistry methods indicate an enhanced covalent character in the plutonium-ligand bonding.


title: Plutonium

text: are pyrophoric, meaning they can ignite spontaneously at ambient temperature and are therefore handled in an inert, dry atmosphere of nitrogen or argon. Bulk plutonium ignites only when heated above 400 °C. PuO spontaneously heats up and transforms into PuO, which is stable in dry air, but reacts with water vapor when heated.


title: Plutonium

text: Crucibles used to contain plutonium need to be able to withstand its strongly reducing properties. Refractory metals such as tantalum and tungsten along with the more stable oxides, borides, carbides, nitrides and silicides can tolerate this. Melting in an electric arc furnace can be used to produce small ingots of the metal without the need for a crucible.


title: Plutonium

text: Cerium is used as a chemical simulant of plutonium for development of containment, extraction, and other technologies.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium is an element in which the 5f electrons are the transition border between delocalized and localized; it is therefore considered one of the most complex elements. The anomalous behavior of plutonium is caused by its electronic structure. The energy difference between the 6d and 5f subshells is very low. The size of the 5f shell is just enough to allow the electrons to form bonds within the lattice, on the very boundary between localized and bonding behavior. The proximity of energy levels leads to multiple low-energy electron configurations with near equal energy levels. This leads to competing 5f7s and 5f6d7s configurations, which causes the complexity of its chemical behavior. The highly directional nature of 5f orbitals is responsible for directional covalent bonds in molecules and complexes of plutonium.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium can form alloys and intermediate compounds with most other metals. Exceptions include lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium and caesium of the alkali metals; and magnesium, calcium, strontium, and barium of the alkaline earth metals; and europium and ytterbium of the rare earth metals. Partial exceptions include the refractory metals chromium, molybdenum, niobium, tantalum, and tungsten, which are soluble in liquid plutonium, but insoluble or only slightly soluble in solid plutonium. Gallium, aluminium, americium, scandium and cerium can stabilize the δ phase of plutonium for room temperature. Silicon, indium, zinc and zirconium allow formation of metastable δ state when rapidly cooled. High amounts of hafnium, holmium and thallium also allows some retention of the δ phase at room temperature. Neptunium is the only element that can stabilize the α phase at higher temperatures.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium alloys can be produced by adding a metal to molten plutonium. If the alloying metal is sufficiently reductive, plutonium can be added in the form of oxides or halides. The δ phase plutonium–gallium and plutonium–aluminium alloys are produced by adding plutonium(III) fluoride to molten gallium or aluminium, which has the advantage of avoiding dealing directly with the highly reactive plutonium metal.


title: Plutonium

text: Trace amounts of plutonium-238, plutonium-239, plutonium-240, and plutonium-244 can be found in nature. Small traces of plutonium-239, a few parts per trillion, and its decay products are naturally found in some concentrated ores of uranium, such as the natural nuclear fission reactor in Oklo, Gabon. The ratio of plutonium-239 to uranium at the Cigar Lake Mine uranium deposit ranges from to . These trace amounts of Pu originate in the following fashion: on rare occasions, U undergoes spontaneous fission, and in the process, the nucleus emits one or two free neutrons with some kinetic energy. When one of these neutrons strikes the nucleus of another U atom, it is absorbed by the atom, which becomes U. With a relatively short half-life, U decays to Np, which decays into Pu. Finally, exceedingly small amounts of plutonium-238, attributed to the extremely rare double beta decay of uranium-238, have been found in natural uranium samples.


title: Plutonium

text: Due to its relatively long half-life of about 80 million years, it was suggested that plutonium-244 occurs naturally as a primordial nuclide, but early reports of its detection could not be confirmed. However, its long half-life ensured its circulation across the solar system before its extinction, and indeed, evidence of the spontaneous fission of extinct Pu has been found in meteorites. The former presence of Pu in the early Solar System has been confirmed, since it manifests itself today as an excess of its daughters, either Th (from the alpha decay pathway) or xenon isotopes (from its spontaneous fission). The latter are generally more useful, because the chemistries of thorium and plutonium are rather similar (both are predominantly tetravalent) and hence an excess of thorium would not be strong evidence that some of it was formed as a plutonium daughter. Pu has the longest half-life of all transuranic nuclides and is produced only in the r-process in supernovae and colliding neutron stars; when nuclei are ejected from these events at high speed to reach Earth, Pu alone among transuranic nuclides has a long enough half-life to survive the journey, and hence tiny traces of live interstellar Pu have been found in the deep sea floor. Because Pu also occurs in the decay chain of Pu, it must thus also be present in secular equilibrium, albeit in even tinier quantities.


title: Plutonium

text: Minute traces of plutonium are usually found in the human body due to the 550 atmospheric and underwater nuclear tests that have been carried out, and to a small number of major nuclear accidents. Most atmospheric and underwater nuclear testing was stopped by the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which of the nuclear powers was signed and ratified by the United States, United Kingdom and Soviet Union. France would continue atmospheric nuclear testing until 1974 and China would continue atmospheric nuclear testing until 1980. All subsequent nuclear testing was conducted underground.


title: Plutonium

text: Enrico Fermi and a team of scientists at the University of Rome reported that they had discovered element 94 in 1934. Fermi called the element "hesperium" and mentioned it in his Nobel Lecture in 1938. The sample actually contained products of nuclear fission, primarily barium and krypton. Nuclear fission, discovered in Germany in 1938 by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, was unknown at the time.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium (specifically, plutonium-238) was first produced, isolated and then chemically identified between December 1940 and February 1941 by Glenn T. Seaborg, Edwin McMillan, Emilio Segrè, Joseph W. Kennedy, and Arthur Wahl by deuteron bombardment of uranium in the cyclotron at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.


title: Plutonium

text: Neptunium-238 was created directly by the bombardment but decayed by beta emission with a half-life of a little over two days, which indicated the formation of element 94. The first bombardment took place on December 14, 1940, and the new element was first identified through oxidation on the night of February 23–24, 1941.


title: Plutonium

text: A paper documenting the discovery was prepared by the team and sent to the journal "Physical Review" in March 1941, but publication was delayed until a year after the end of World War II due to security concerns. At the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, Egon Bretscher and Norman Feather realized that a slow neutron reactor fuelled with uranium would theoretically produce substantial amounts of plutonium-239 as a by-product. They calculated that element 94 would be fissile, and had the added advantage of being chemically different from uranium, and could easily be separated from it.


title: Plutonium

text: McMillan had recently named the first transuranic element neptunium after the planet Neptune, and suggested that element 94, being the next element in the series, be named for what was then considered the next planet, Pluto. Nicholas Kemmer of the Cambridge team independently proposed the same name, based on the same reasoning as the Berkeley team. Seaborg originally considered the name "plutium", but later thought that it did not sound as good as "plutonium". He chose the letters "Pu" as a joke, in reference to the interjection "P U" to indicate an especially disgusting smell, which passed without notice into the periodic table. Alternative names considered by Seaborg and others were "ultimium" or "extremium" because of the erroneous belief that they had found the last possible element on the periodic table.


title: Plutonium

text: Hahn and Strassmann, and independently Kurt Starke, were at this point also working on transuranic elements in Berlin. It is likely that Hahn and Strassmann were aware that plutonium-239 should be fissile. However, they did not have a strong neutron source. Element 93 was reported by Hahn and Strassmann, as well as Starke, in 1942. Hahn's group did not pursue element 94, likely because they were discouraged by McMillan and Abelson's lack of success in isolating it when they had first found element 93. However, since Hahn's group had access to the stronger cyclotron at Paris at this point, they would likely have been able to detect plutonium had they tried, albeit in tiny quantities (a few becquerels).


title: Plutonium

text: The chemistry of plutonium was found to resemble uranium after a few months of initial study. Early research was continued at the secret Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago. On August 20, 1942, a trace quantity of this element was isolated and measured for the first time. About 50 micrograms of plutonium-239 combined with uranium and fission products was produced and only about 1 microgram was isolated. This procedure enabled chemists to determine the new element's atomic weight. On December 2, 1942, on a racket court under the west grandstand at the University of Chicago's Stagg Field, researchers headed by Enrico Fermi achieved the first self-sustaining chain reaction in a graphite and uranium pile known as CP-1. Using theoretical information garnered from the operation of CP-1, DuPont constructed an air-cooled experimental production reactor, known as X-10, and a pilot chemical separation facility at Oak Ridge. The separation facility, using methods developed by Glenn T. Seaborg and a team of researchers at the Met Lab, removed plutonium from uranium irradiated in the X-10 reactor. Information from CP-1 was also useful to Met Lab scientists designing the water-cooled plutonium production reactors for Hanford. Construction at the site began in mid-1943.


title: Plutonium

text: In November 1943 some plutonium trifluoride was reduced to create the first sample of plutonium metal: a few micrograms of metallic beads. Enough plutonium was produced to make it the first synthetically made element to be visible with the unaided eye.


title: Plutonium

text: The nuclear properties of plutonium-239 were also studied; researchers found that when it is hit by a neutron it breaks apart (fissions) by releasing more neutrons and energy. These neutrons can hit other atoms of plutonium-239 and so on in an exponentially fast chain reaction. This can result in an explosion large enough to destroy a city if enough of the isotope is concentrated to form a critical mass.


title: Plutonium

text: During the early stages of research, animals were used to study the effects of radioactive substances on health. These studies began in 1944 at the University of California at Berkeley's Radiation Laboratory and were conducted by Joseph G. Hamilton. Hamilton was looking to answer questions about how plutonium would vary in the body depending on exposure mode (oral ingestion, inhalation, absorption through skin), retention rates, and how plutonium would be fixed in tissues and distributed among the various organs. Hamilton started administering soluble microgram portions of plutonium-239 compounds to rats using different valence states and different methods of introducing the plutonium (oral, intravenous, etc.). Eventually, the lab at Chicago also conducted its own plutonium injection experiments using different animals such as mice, rabbits, fish, and even dogs. The results of the studies at Berkeley and Chicago showed that plutonium's physiological behavior differed significantly from that of radium. The most alarming result was that there was significant deposition of plutonium in the liver and in the "actively metabolizing" portion of bone. Furthermore, the rate of plutonium elimination in the excreta differed between species of animals by as much as a factor of five. Such variation made it extremely difficult to estimate what the rate would be for human beings.


title: Plutonium

text: During World War II the U.S. government established the Manhattan Project, which was tasked with developing an atomic bomb. The three primary research and production sites of the project were the plutonium production facility at what is now the Hanford Site, the uranium enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the weapons research and design laboratory, now known as Los Alamos National Laboratory.


title: Plutonium

text: The first production reactor that made plutonium-239 was the X-10 Graphite Reactor. It went online in 1943 and was built at a facility in Oak Ridge that later became the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.


title: Plutonium

text: In January 1944, workers laid the foundations for the first chemical separation building, T Plant located in 200-West. Both the T Plant and its sister facility in 200-West, the U Plant, were completed by October. (U Plant was used only for training during the Manhattan Project.) The separation building in 200-East, B Plant, was completed in February 1945. The second facility planned for 200-East was canceled. Nicknamed Queen Marys by the workers who built them, the separation buildings were awesome canyon-like structures 800 feet long, 65 feet wide, and 80 feet high containing forty process pools. The interior had an eerie quality as operators behind seven feet of concrete shielding manipulated remote control equipment by looking through television monitors and periscopes from an upper gallery. Even with massive concrete lids on the process pools, precautions against radiation exposure were necessary and influenced all aspects of plant design.


title: Plutonium

text: On April 5, 1944, Emilio Segrè at Los Alamos received the first sample of reactor-produced plutonium from Oak Ridge. Within ten days, he discovered that reactor-bred plutonium had a higher concentration of the isotope plutonium-240 than cyclotron-produced plutonium. Plutonium-240 has a high spontaneous fission rate, raising the overall background neutron level of the plutonium sample. The original gun-type plutonium weapon, code-named "Thin Man", had to be abandoned as a result—the increased number of spontaneous neutrons meant that nuclear pre-detonation (fizzle) was likely.


title: Plutonium

text: The entire plutonium weapon design effort at Los Alamos was soon changed to the more complicated implosion device, code-named "Fat Man". With an implosion weapon, plutonium is compressed to a high density with explosive lenses—a technically more daunting task than the simple gun-type design, but necessary to use plutonium for weapons purposes. Enriched uranium, by contrast, can be used with either method.


title: Plutonium

text: Construction of the Hanford B Reactor, the first industrial-sized nuclear reactor for the purposes of material production, was completed in March 1945. B Reactor produced the fissile material for the plutonium weapons used during World War II. B, D and F were the initial reactors built at Hanford, and six additional plutonium-producing reactors were built later at the site.


title: Plutonium

text: By the end of January 1945, the highly purified plutonium underwent further concentration in the completed chemical isolation building, where remaining impurities were removed successfully. Los Alamos received its first plutonium from Hanford on February 2. While it was still by no means clear that enough plutonium could be produced for use in bombs by the war's end, Hanford was by early 1945 in operation. Only two years had passed since Col. Franklin Matthias first set up his temporary headquarters on the banks of the Columbia River.


title: Plutonium

text: According to Kate Brown, the plutonium production plants at Hanford and Mayak in Russia, over a period of four decades, "both released more than 200 million curies of radioactive isotopes into the surrounding environment—twice the amount expelled in the Chernobyl disaster in each instance". Most of this radioactive contamination over the years were part of normal operations, but unforeseen accidents did occur and plant management kept this secret, as the pollution continued unabated.


title: Plutonium

text: In 2004, a safe was discovered during excavations of a burial trench at the Hanford nuclear site. Inside the safe were various items, including a large glass bottle containing a whitish slurry which was subsequently identified as the oldest sample of weapons-grade plutonium known to exist. Isotope analysis by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory indicated that the plutonium in the bottle was manufactured in the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge during 1944.


title: Plutonium

text: The first atomic bomb test, codenamed "Trinity" and detonated on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, used plutonium as its fissile material. The implosion design of "the gadget", as the Trinity device was code-named, used conventional explosive lenses to compress a sphere of plutonium into a supercritical mass, which was simultaneously showered with neutrons from the "Urchin", an initiator made of polonium and beryllium (neutron source: (α, n) reaction). Together, these ensured a runaway chain reaction and explosion. The overall weapon weighed over 4 tonnes, although it used just 6.2 kg of plutonium in its core. About 20% of the plutonium used in the Trinity weapon underwent fission, resulting in an explosion with an energy equivalent to approximately 20,000 tons of TNT.


title: Plutonium

text: An identical design was used in the "Fat Man" atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, killing 35,000–40,000 people and destroying 68%–80% of war production at Nagasaki. Only after the announcement of the first atomic bombs was the existence and name of plutonium made known to the public by the Manhattan Project's Smyth Report.


title: Plutonium

text: Large stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium were built up by both the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. The U.S. reactors at Hanford and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina produced 103 tonnes, and an estimated 170 tonnes of military-grade plutonium was produced in the USSR. Each year about 20 tonnes of the element is still produced as a by-product of the nuclear power industry. As much as 1000 tonnes of plutonium may be in storage with more than 200 tonnes of that either inside or extracted from nuclear weapons.


title: Plutonium

text: SIPRI estimated the world plutonium stockpile in 2007 as about 500 tonnes, divided equally between weapon and civilian stocks.


title: Plutonium

text: Radioactive contamination at the Rocky Flats Plant primarily resulted from two major plutonium fires in 1957 and 1969. Much lower concentrations of radioactive isotopes were released throughout the operational life of the plant from 1952 to 1992. Prevailing winds from the plant carried airborne contamination south and east, into populated areas northwest of Denver. The contamination of the Denver area by plutonium from the fires and other sources was not publicly reported until the 1970s. According to a 1972 study coauthored by Edward Martell, "In the more densely populated areas of Denver, the Pu contamination level in surface soils is several times fallout", and the plutonium contamination "just east of the Rocky Flats plant ranges up to hundreds of times that from nuclear tests". As noted by Carl Johnson in Ambio, "Exposures of a large population in the Denver area to plutonium and other radionuclides in the exhaust plumes from the plant date back to 1953." Weapons production at the Rocky Flats plant was halted after a combined FBI and EPA raid in 1989 and years of protests. The plant has since been shut down, with its buildings demolished and completely removed from the site.


title: Plutonium

text: In the U.S., some plutonium extracted from dismantled nuclear weapons is melted to form glass logs of plutonium oxide that weigh two tonnes. The glass is made of borosilicates mixed with cadmium and gadolinium. These logs are planned to be encased in stainless steel and stored as much as underground in bore holes that will be back-filled with concrete. The U.S. planned to store plutonium in this way at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which is about north-east of Las Vegas, Nevada.


title: Plutonium

text: On March 5, 2009, Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a Senate hearing "the Yucca Mountain site no longer was viewed as an option for storing reactor waste". Starting in 1999, military-generated nuclear waste is being entombed at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.


title: Plutonium

text: In a Presidential Memorandum dated January 29, 2010, President Obama established the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future. In their final report the Commission put forth recommendations for developing a comprehensive strategy to pursue, including:


title: Plutonium

text: During and after the end of World War II, scientists working on the Manhattan Project and other nuclear weapons research projects conducted studies of the effects of plutonium on laboratory animals and human subjects. Animal studies found that a few milligrams of plutonium per kilogram of tissue is a lethal dose.


title: Plutonium

text: In the case of human subjects, this involved injecting solutions containing (typically) five micrograms of plutonium into hospital patients thought to be either terminally ill, or to have a life expectancy of less than ten years either due to age or chronic disease condition. This was reduced to one microgram in July 1945 after animal studies found that the way plutonium distributed itself in bones was more dangerous than radium. Most of the subjects, Eileen Welsome says, were poor, powerless, and sick.


title: Plutonium

text: From 1945 to 1947, eighteen human test subjects were injected with plutonium without informed consent. The tests were used to create diagnostic tools to determine the uptake of plutonium in the body in order to develop safety standards for working with plutonium. Ebb Cade was an unwilling participant in medical experiments that involved injection of 4.7 micrograms of Plutonium on 10 April 1945 at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This experiment was under the supervision of Harold Hodge. Other experiments directed by the United States Atomic Energy Commission and the Manhattan Project continued into the 1970s. "The Plutonium Files" chronicles the lives of the subjects of the secret program by naming each person involved and discussing the ethical and medical research conducted in secret by the scientists and doctors. The episode is now considered to be a serious breach of medical ethics and of the Hippocratic Oath.


title: Plutonium

text: The government covered up most of these radiation mishaps until 1993, when President Bill Clinton ordered a change of policy and federal agencies then made available relevant records. The resulting investigation was undertaken by the president's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, and it uncovered much of the material about plutonium research on humans. The committee issued a controversial 1995 report which said that "wrongs were committed" but it did not condemn those who perpetrated them.


title: Plutonium

text: The isotope plutonium-239 is a key fissile component in nuclear weapons, due to its ease of fission and availability. Encasing the bomb's plutonium pit in a tamper (an optional layer of dense material) decreases the amount of plutonium needed to reach critical mass by reflecting escaping neutrons back into the plutonium core. This reduces the amount of plutonium needed to reach criticality from 16 kg to 10 kg, which is a sphere with a diameter of about . This critical mass is about a third of that for uranium-235.


title: Plutonium

text: The Fat Man plutonium bombs used explosive compression of plutonium to obtain significantly higher densities than normal, combined with a central neutron source to begin the reaction and increase efficiency. Thus only 6.2 kg of plutonium was needed for an explosive yield equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT. Hypothetically, as little as 4 kg of plutonium—and maybe even less—could be used to make a single atomic bomb using very sophisticated assembly designs.


title: Plutonium

text: Spent nuclear fuel from normal light water reactors contains plutonium, but it is a mixture of plutonium-242, 240, 239 and 238. The mixture is not sufficiently enriched for efficient nuclear weapons, but can be used once as MOX fuel. Accidental neutron capture causes the amount of plutonium-242 and 240 to grow each time the plutonium is irradiated in a reactor with low-speed "thermal" neutrons, so that after the second cycle, the plutonium can only be consumed by fast neutron reactors. If fast neutron reactors are not available (the normal case), excess plutonium is usually discarded, and forms one of the longest-lived components of nuclear waste. The desire to consume this plutonium and other transuranic fuels and reduce the radiotoxicity of the waste is the usual reason nuclear engineers give to make fast neutron reactors.


title: Plutonium

text: The most common chemical process, PUREX ("P"lutonium–"UR"anium "EX"traction), reprocesses spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium and uranium which can be used to form a mixed oxide (MOX) fuel for reuse in nuclear reactors. Weapons-grade plutonium can be added to the fuel mix. MOX fuel is used in light water reactors and consists of 60 kg of plutonium per tonne of fuel; after four years, three-quarters of the plutonium is burned (turned into other elements). Breeder reactors are specifically designed to create more fissionable material than they consume.


title: Plutonium

text: MOX fuel has been in use since the 1980s, and is widely used in Europe. In September 2000, the United States and the Russian Federation signed a Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement by which each agreed to dispose of 34 tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium. The U.S. Department of Energy plans to dispose of 34 tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium in the United States before the end of 2019 by converting the plutonium to a MOX fuel to be used in commercial nuclear power reactors.


title: Plutonium

text: MOX fuel improves total burnup. A fuel rod is reprocessed after three years of use to remove waste products, which by then account for 3% of the total weight of the rods. Any uranium or plutonium isotopes produced during those three years are left and the rod goes back into production. The presence of up to 1% gallium per mass in weapons-grade plutonium alloy has the potential to interfere with long-term operation of a light water reactor.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium recovered from spent reactor fuel poses little proliferation hazard, because of excessive contamination with non-fissile plutonium-240 and plutonium-242. Separation of the isotopes is not feasible. A dedicated reactor operating on very low burnup (hence minimal exposure of newly formed plutonium-239 to additional neutrons which causes it to be transformed to heavier isotopes of plutonium) is generally required to produce material suitable for use in efficient nuclear weapons. While "weapons-grade" plutonium is defined to contain at least 92% plutonium-239 (of the total plutonium), the United States have managed to detonate an under-20Kt device using plutonium believed to contain only about 85% plutonium-239, so called '"fuel-grade" plutonium. The "reactor-grade" plutonium produced by a regular LWR burnup cycle typically contains less than 60% Pu-239, with up to 30% parasitic Pu-240/Pu-242, and 10–15% fissile Pu-241. It is unknown if a device using plutonium obtained from reprocessed civil nuclear waste can be detonated, however such a device could hypothetically fizzle and spread radioactive materials over a large urban area. The IAEA conservatively classifies plutonium of all isotopic vectors as "direct-use" material, that is, "nuclear material that can be used for the manufacture of nuclear explosives components without transmutation or further enrichment".


title: Plutonium

text: The isotope plutonium-238 has a half-life of 87.74 years. It emits a large amount of thermal energy with low levels of both gamma rays/photons and spontaneous neutron rays/particles. Being an alpha emitter, it combines high energy radiation with low penetration and thereby requires minimal shielding. A sheet of paper can be used to shield against the alpha particles emitted by plutonium-238. One kilogram of the isotope can generate about 570 watts of heat.


title: Plutonium

text: These characteristics make it well-suited for electrical power generation for devices that must function without direct maintenance for timescales approximating a human lifetime. It is therefore used in radioisotope thermoelectric generators and radioisotope heater units such as those in the Cassini, Voyager, Galileo and New Horizons space probes, and the Curiosity and Perseverance (Mars 2020) Mars rovers.


title: Plutonium

text: The twin Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977, each containing a 500 watt plutonium power source. Over 30 years later, each source is still producing about 300 watts which allows limited operation of each spacecraft. An earlier version of the same technology powered five Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Packages, starting with Apollo 12 in 1969.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium-238 has also been used successfully to power artificial heart pacemakers, to reduce the risk of repeated surgery. It has been largely replaced by lithium-based primary cells, but there were somewhere between 50 and 100 plutonium-powered pacemakers still implanted and functioning in living patients in the United States. By the end of 2007, the number of plutonium-powered pacemakers was reported to be down to just nine. Plutonium-238 was studied as a way to provide supplemental heat to scuba diving. Plutonium-238 mixed with beryllium is used to generate neutrons for research purposes.


title: Plutonium

text: There are two aspects to the harmful effects of plutonium: the radioactivity and the heavy metal poison effects. Isotopes and compounds of plutonium are radioactive and accumulate in bone marrow. Contamination by plutonium oxide has resulted from nuclear disasters and radioactive incidents, including military nuclear accidents where nuclear weapons have burned. Studies of the effects of these smaller releases, as well as of the widespread radiation poisoning sickness and death following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have provided considerable information regarding the dangers, symptoms and prognosis of radiation poisoning, which in the case of the Japanese survivors was largely unrelated to direct plutonium exposure.


title: Plutonium

text: During the decay of plutonium, three types of ionizing radiation are released, namely alpha, beta, and gamma. Either acute or longer-term exposure carries a danger of serious health outcomes including radiation sickness, genetic damage, cancer, and death. The danger increases with the amount of exposure. Alpha radiation can travel only a short distance and cannot travel through the outer, dead layer of human skin. Beta radiation can penetrate human skin, but cannot go all the way through the body. Gamma radiation can go all the way through the body.


title: Plutonium

text: Even though alpha radiation cannot penetrate the skin, ingested or inhaled plutonium does irradiate internal organs. Alpha particles generated by inhaled plutonium have been found to cause lung cancer in a cohort of European nuclear workers. The skeleton, where plutonium accumulates, and the liver, where it collects and becomes concentrated, are at risk. Plutonium is not absorbed into the body efficiently when ingested; only 0.04% of plutonium oxide is absorbed after ingestion. Plutonium absorbed by the body is excreted very slowly, with a biological half-life of 200 years. Plutonium passes only slowly through cell membranes and intestinal boundaries, so absorption by ingestion and incorporation into bone structure proceeds very slowly. Donald Mastick accidentally swallowed a small amount of Plutonium(III) chloride, which was detectable for the next thirty years of his life, but appeared to suffer no ill effects.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium is more dangerous when inhaled than when ingested. The risk of lung cancer increases once the total radiation dose equivalent of inhaled plutonium exceeds 400 mSv. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the lifetime cancer risk from inhaling 5,000 plutonium particles, each about 3 µm wide, is 1% over the background U.S. average. Ingestion or inhalation of large amounts may cause acute radiation poisoning and possibly death. However, no human being is known to have died because of inhaling or ingesting plutonium, and many people have measurable amounts of plutonium in their bodies.


title: Plutonium

text: The "hot particle" theory in which a particle of plutonium dust irradiates a localized spot of lung tissue is not supported by mainstream research—such particles are more mobile than originally thought and toxicity is not measurably increased due to particulate form. When inhaled, plutonium can pass into the bloodstream. Once in the bloodstream, plutonium moves throughout the body and into the bones, liver, or other body organs. Plutonium that reaches body organs generally stays in the body for decades and continues to expose the surrounding tissue to radiation and thus may cause cancer.


title: Plutonium

text: A commonly cited quote by Ralph Nader states that a pound of plutonium dust spread into the atmosphere would be enough to kill 8 billion people. This was disputed by Bernard Cohen, an opponent of the generally accepted linear no-threshold model of radiation toxicity. Cohen estimated that one pound of plutonium could kill no more than 2 million people by inhalation, so that the toxicity of plutonium is roughly equivalent with that of nerve gas.


title: Plutonium

text: Several populations of people who have been exposed to plutonium dust (e.g. people living down-wind of Nevada test sites, Nagasaki survivors, nuclear facility workers, and "terminally ill" patients injected with Pu in 1945–46 to study Pu metabolism) have been carefully followed and analyzed. Cohen found these studies inconsistent with high estimates of plutonium toxicity, citing cases such as Albert Stevens who survived into old age after being injected with plutonium. "There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during 1940s; according to the hot-particle theory, each of them has a 99.5% chance of being dead from lung cancer by now, but there has not been a single lung cancer among them."


title: Plutonium

text: Investigating the toxicity of plutonium in humans is just as important as looking at the effects in fauna of marine systems. Plutonium is known to enter the marine environment by dumping of waste or accidental leakage from nuclear plants. Although the highest concentrations of plutonium in marine environments are found in the sediments, the complex biogeochemical cycle of plutonium means that it is also found in all other compartments.


title: Plutonium

text: For example, various zooplankton species that aid in the nutrient cycle will consume the element on a daily basis. The complete excretion of ingested plutonium by zooplankton makes their defecation an extremely important mechanism in the scavenging of plutonium from surface waters. However, those zooplankton that succumb to predation by larger organisms may become a transmission vehicle of plutonium to fish.


title: Plutonium

text: In addition to consumption, fish can also be exposed to plutonium by their geographical distribution around the globe. One study investigated the effects of transuranium elements (plutonium-238, plutonium-239, plutonium-240) on various fish living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ). Results showed that a proportion of female perch in the CEZ displayed either a failure or delay in maturation of the gonads. Similar studies found large accumulations of plutonium in the respiratory and digestive organs of cod, flounder and herring.


title: Plutonium

text: Plutonium toxicity is just as detrimental to larvae of fish in nuclear waste areas. Undeveloped eggs have a higher risk than developed adult fish exposed to the element in these waste areas. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory displayed that carp and minnow embryos raised in solutions containing plutonium isotopes did not hatch; eggs that hatched displayed significant abnormalities when compared to control developed embryos. It revealed that higher concentrations of plutonium have been found to cause issues in marine fauna exposed to the element.


title: Plutonium

text: Care must be taken to avoid the accumulation of amounts of plutonium which approach critical mass, particularly because plutonium's critical mass is only a third of that of uranium-235. A critical mass of plutonium emits lethal amounts of neutrons and gamma rays. Plutonium in solution is more likely to form a critical mass than the solid form due to moderation by the hydrogen in water.


title: Plutonium

text: Criticality accidents have occurred in the past, some of them with lethal consequences. Careless handling of tungsten carbide bricks around a 6.2 kg plutonium sphere resulted in a fatal dose of radiation at Los Alamos on August 21, 1945, when scientist Harry Daghlian received a dose estimated to be 5.1 sievert (510 rems) and died 25 days later. Nine months later, another Los Alamos scientist, Louis Slotin, died from a similar accident involving a beryllium reflector and the same plutonium core (the so-called "demon core") that had previously claimed the life of Daghlian.


title: Plutonium

text: In December 1958, during a process of purifying plutonium at Los Alamos, a critical mass was formed in a mixing vessel, which resulted in the death of a chemical operator named Cecil Kelley. Other nuclear accidents have occurred in the Soviet Union, Japan, the United States, and many other countries.


title: Plutonium

text: Metallic plutonium is a fire hazard, especially if the material is finely divided. In a moist environment, plutonium forms hydrides on its surface, which are pyrophoric and may ignite in air at room temperature. Plutonium expands up to 70% in volume as it oxidizes and thus may break its container. The radioactivity of the burning material is an additional hazard. Magnesium oxide sand is probably the most effective material for extinguishing a plutonium fire. It cools the burning material, acting as a heat sink, and also blocks off oxygen. Special precautions are necessary to store or handle plutonium in any form; generally a dry inert gas atmosphere is required.


title: Plutonium

text: The usual transportation of plutonium is through the more stable plutonium oxide in a sealed package. A typical transport consists of one truck carrying one protected shipping container, holding a number of packages with a total weight varying from 80 to 200 kg of plutonium oxide. A sea shipment may consist of several containers, each of them holding a sealed package. The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission dictates that it must be solid instead of powder if the contents surpass 0.74 TBq (20 Curies) of radioactive activity. In 2016, the ships "Pacific Egret" and "Pacific Heron" of Pacific Nuclear Transport Ltd. transported 331 kg (730 lbs) of plutonium to a United States government facility in Savannah River, South Carolina.


title: Plutonium

text: The U.S. Government air transport regulations permit the transport of plutonium by air, subject to restrictions on other dangerous materials carried on the same flight, packaging requirements, and stowage in the rearmost part of the aircraft.


title: Plutonium

text: In 2012 media revealed that plutonium has been flown out of Norway on commercial passenger airlines—around every other year—including one time in 2011. Regulations permit an airplane to transport 15 grams of fissionable material. Such plutonium transportation is without problems, according to a senior advisor ("seniorrådgiver") at Statens strålevern.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: Multiple light novels have been published. An anime television series adaptation by Bones aired in 2016 in two parts, the first part aired between April and June 2016, and the second part aired between October and December 2016. An anime film, "", was released in March 2018. A third season aired between April and June 2019. A fourth season will premiere in January 2023.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: A spin-off television series adaptation of "Bungo Stray Dogs Wan!" aired from January to March 2021. A live-action film, "", was released in Japan in January 2022.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: The story focuses on a young adult named Atsushi Nakajima. After being kicked out of his orphanage, Atsushi stops the suicide of a detective named Osamu Dazai believing he was drowning in the river. During his interactions with Dazai, Atsushi learns he is gifted with a supernatural ability capable of transforming him into a berserker white tiger in the moonlight; this made the orphanage torture him and kick him out in the past. Dazai recruits him into the Agency and there he meets many other ability users as they tackle various cases and events taking place within the city of Yokohama, a place teeming with individuals with Supernatural Abilities. Atsushi becomes the target of the Port Mafia member Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, as there is a bounty on his head on the black market.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: During Atsushi's fights against the mafia, he also meets Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, the leader of the Fellowship of the Guild who placed the bounty on his head. Fitzgerald reveals there is a supernatural book capable of changing reality linked with Atsushi's tiger, hence putting a bounty on the black market. Fitzgerald disregards any superficial damage the Guild might bring to Yokohama in exchange for the book, having an airship named "Moby Dick" destroy the city. However, he is nearly killed by Atsushi and Akutagawa once joining forces while former mafia member Kyoka Izumi stops Moby Dick.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: Another man known as Fyodor Dostoyevsky appears wishing to obtain the book to in order to erase all gifted people. He sets up a fatal clash between the detectives and the mafia but the true leader behind this organization, Natsume Soseki, stops the fight. While Atsushi and Akutagawa corner the virus' originator, Dazai manages to arrest Dostoyevsky with Fitzgerald's help. However, Dostoyevsky is later revealed to have orchestrated his own imprisonment in order to lead his followers. Pages of the book are later found by Dostoyevsky's group The Decay of Angels who uses its powers to frame the Agency for a murder case. Dazai is imprisoned alongside Dostoyevsky and the government sends its military forces known as the Hunting Dogs to execute the members from the Agency. As the Agency faces defeat, they form an alliance with Fitzgerald and the mafia in exchange for one of their followers. Across the multiple fights, it is revealed there is another person above Dostoyevsky and that person must be stopped. During an encounter with one of Fyodor's allies, Sigma, Atsushi discovers that the leader of Decay of Angels is a person codenamed Kamui. Ranpo Edogawa then manages to gather the Agency and prove their innocence to the law. After this, he uses his skills to determine Kamui's identity: Ōchi Fukuchi, the leader of the Hunting Dogs. Upon being found, Fukuchi tries to kill Ranpo but is stopped Atsushi. Having realized Atsushi would not be able to face Fukuchi alone, Dazai had requested Akutagawa to aid. However, both Atsushi and Akutagawa are defeated by their enemy with the latter sacrificing himself in his last moments to let Atsushi escape.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: The manga originated from Kafka Asagiri's idea to gather multiple famous late authors and poets and draw them as young adults and teenagers with supernatural powers. Sango Harukawa provided Asagiri with designs which helped the writer write the stories easier. Asagiri stated that the designs of Atsushi and Dazai were done to contrast each other although there were some revisions done in the making of the series. Besides the common narrative produced through the manga, Asagiri also wrote light novels which would be aimed for casual readers. The light novels were also written with the idea of having more books released per year. The lives of more writers inspired Asagiri, most notably the friendship of Osamu Dazai, Ango Sakaguchi and Sakunosuke Oda.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: Written by Kafka Asagiri and illustrated by Sango Harukawa, "Bungo Stray Dogs" began publishing the manga in Kadokawa Shoten's "seinen" magazine "Young Ace" on 4 December 2012. Kadokawa has collected its chapters into individual "tankōbon" volume. The first volume was released on 4 April 2013. As of 4 March 2022 twenty-two volumes have been released.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: The series has been licensed for North America by Yen Press with the first volume being released on 20 December 2016. The English translation is by Kevin Gifford. As of October 2021, twenty volumes have been published.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: A manga based on the light novel "Beast", which is illustrated by Shiwasu Hoshikawa, debuted in "Monthly Shōnen Ace" on 26 December 2019. This spin-off manga features Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, who joins the Armed Detective Agency, and Atsushi Nakajima as a subordinate of the Port Mafia.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: A spin-off manga centered around Dazai and Chuya's backstories titled, "Bungo Stray Dogs: Dazai, Chūya, Jūgosai", began serialization in "Monthly Shōnen Ace" in July 2022.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: An anime television series adaptation produced by Bones was directed by Takuya Igarashi and written by Yōji Enokido. Nobuhiro Arai and Hiroshi Kanno served as the chief animation directors, while the former also served as character designer along with Ryō Hirata. Taku Iwasaki composed the series' music. Kazuhiro Wakabayashi was the series' sound director at Glovision. Additionally, Yumiko Kondou was the art director, Yukari Goto was the anime's color designer, Tsuyoshi Kanbayashi was the director of photography and Shigeru Nishiyama was the editor. Granrodeo performed the anime's opening theme, titled "Trash Candy", and Luck Life performed the anime's ending theme, titled .


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: The series was split into two halves: the first half, containing twelve episodes, premiered on 7 April 2016 and ended on 23 June 2016, being broadcast on Tokyo MX, Teletama, Chiba TV, tvk, GBS (Gifu Broadcasting), Mie TV, SUN, TVQ Kyushu, and BS11. The second half, also containing twelve episodes, premiered on 6 October 2016 and ended on 22 December 2016. The series has been licensed for streaming by Crunchyroll. As for the second half, Screen Mode sung the opening theme titled "Reason Living" while Luck Life once again sung the ending theme titled .


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: On 21 July 2018, it was announced that the series would receive a third season. The cast and staff would reprise their roles from the previous two seasons. The third season premiered from 12 April 2019 and ended on 28 June 2019, being broadcast on Tokyo MX, TVA, KBS, SUN, BS11, and Wowow. Granrodeo performed the third seasons' opening theme and Luck Life performed the third season's ending theme "Lily". Funimation released the simuldub on 17 May 2019.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: In June 2020, Kadokawa announced that an anime television series adaptation of the spin-off manga, "Bungo Stray Dogs Wan!", was in production. Satonobu Kikuchi directed the series, with Kazuyuki Fudeyasu handling series composition, Hiromi Daimi designing the characters, and Bones and Nomad handling production. The main cast members reprised their roles. The series aired from 13 January to 31 March 2021 on Tokyo MX, BS11, MBS, Wowow.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: On 7 November 2021, it was announced that the series would receive a fourth season. The fourth season is set to premiere on 4 January 2023. Screen Mode will perform the opening theme "True Story", and Luck Life will perform the ending theme .


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: The anime is licensed in North America by Crunchyroll (formerly known as Funimation) with home video distribution, and in the United Kingdom by Anime Limited.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: At the " Inu-tachi no Utage Sono Ni" event on 19 February 2017 a film project based on the manga series was announced. Titled "Bungo Stray Dogs: Dead Apple", the film premiered on 3 March 2018 with the staff and cast from the anime series returning to reprise their roles.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: A live-action film was announced in July 2019. Titled "Bungo Stray Dogs The Movie: Beast", the film premiered on 7 January 2022.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: An action role-playing game titled "Bungo Stray Dogs Mayoi Inu Kaikitan" has been announced and is set to release on iOS and Android. The game will include character side stories that were not found in the anime series as well as new game-exclusive scenarios.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: A stage play based on the events in the first season of the anime was realized starting at the KAAT Kanagawa Arts Theatre in Yokohama from December 2017, with the play moving through major cities in Japan. It was also shown at the Morinomiya Piloti Hall in Osaka on 12–13 January, and at AiiA 2.5 Theater Tokyo from 31 January to 4 February. Starting in September 2018, a second stage play was done based on the light novel "Dazai Osamu and the Dark Era" and its anime adaptation in the second season of the show. It was first shown in Tokyo at the Sunshine Gekijō from 22 September to 8 October and then moved to Osaka where it ran at the Morinomiya Piloti Hall on 13–14 October. A third stage play based on the rest of the second season, thus excluding Dazai's backstory at the beginning of the season, was performed from June to July 2019 in Iwate, Fukuoka, Aichi and Osaka, and in July in Tokyo.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: "Bungo Stray Dogs" was well received in Japan. As of late 2016, the manga sold 4.1 million books. The series also appeared in the "Da Vinci" magazine poll from Kadokawa Shoten, while the franchise combined sold ¥1,878,804,092 in 2016. By 2018, the series reached 6 million copies. It came in at number 11 for the "Nationwide Bookstore Employees' Recommended Comics of 2014". Author Dan Brown was attracted by the manga when the author created a fictional version of himself to promote the story. Brown stated he was pleased with the result.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: Critical reception to the series has been positive. "The Fandom Post" said ever since its start the series has had potential to be an entertaining manga, citing the characterization of Atsushi and the power he has, later leading to interesting mystery arcs when more characters from multiple parties become involved, such as the reluctant alliance Atsushi and his rival Akutagawa form to defeat another group. The artwork was praised by UK Anime Network for how detailed are fight scenes while also praising the balance between dark and light plot storylines. Nevertheless, he found a common commentary within fans that the series suffers from a slow pace. While liking the Kunikida subplot, Anime News Network criticized the emotional focus on Atsushi's emotional state in the manga as he often is grieves about his background and the way emotions he is given to deal with when his torturer passes away make him forced.


title: Bungo Stray Dogs

text: The anime series and its film have been popular, appearing in multiple polls, involving its style, cosplay among others. Atomix listed it as the fifth best anime from 2016, praising its premise, designs and references to writers. In the "Newtype" Anime Awards 2016–2017 at the Machi Asobi Vol. 19 event, the anime series took the second place in "Best television series" behind "Fate/Apocrypha". Rebecca Silverman from Anime News Network listed the third season of the anime as one of her favorite anime from early 2019. The home media releases of the series were also popular in Japan, achieving good sales. The film "Dead Apple" was also the winner of "Newtype"s "Theatrical Film Award" in 2018. In 2019, the series once again took second place in the best television series award behind "" in the same magazine's awards.


title: Lychee

text: Lychee (US: ; UK: ; Litchi chinensis; ) is a monotypic taxon and the sole member in the genus Litchi in the soapberry family, "Sapindaceae".


title: Lychee

text: It is a tropical tree native to the Guangdong, Fujian, and Yunnan provinces of Southeast and Southwest China, where cultivation is documented from the 11th century. China is the main producer of lychees, followed by Vietnam, India, other countries in Southeast Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, Madagascar and South Africa. A tall evergreen tree, the lychee bears small fleshy fruits. The outside of the fruit is pink-red, roughly textured, and inedible, covering sweet flesh eaten in many different dessert dishes.


title: Lychee

text: Lychee seeds contain methylene cyclopropyl glycine which can cause hypoglycemia associated with outbreaks of encephalopathy in undernourished Indian and Vietnamese children who had consumed lychee fruit.


title: Lychee

text: It was described and named by French naturalist Pierre Sonnerat in his account ""Voyage aux Indes Orientales et à la Chine, fait depuis 1774 jusqu'à 1781"" (translation: "Voyage to the East Indies and China, made between 1774 and 1781"), which was published in 1782. There are three subspecies, determined by flower arrangement, twig thickness, fruit, and a number of stamens.


title: Lychee

text: "Litchi chinensis" is an evergreen tree that is frequently less than tall, sometimes reaching . Its evergreen leaves, 5 to 8 in (12.5–20 cm) long, are pinnate, having 4 to 8 alternate, elliptic-oblong to lanceolate, abruptly pointed, leaflets,


title: Lychee

text: The bark is grey-black, the branches a brownish-red. Its evergreen leaves are long, with leaflets in two to four pairs. Lychee are similar in foliage to the family Lauraceae, likely due to convergent evolution. They are adapted by developing leaves that repel water, and are called laurophyll or lauroid leaves.


title: Lychee

text: Flowers grow on a terminal inflorescence with many panicles on the current season's growth. The panicles grow in clusters of ten or more, reaching or longer, holding hundreds of small white, yellow, or green flowers that are distinctively fragrant.


title: Lychee

text: The lychee bears fleshy fruits that mature in 80–112 days depending on climate, location, and cultivar. Fruits vary in shape from round to ovoid to heart-shaped, up to 5 cm long and 4 cm wide (2.0 in × 1.6 in), weighing approximately 20 g.


title: Lychee

text: The thin, tough skin is green when immature, ripening to red or pink-red, and is smooth or covered with small sharp protuberances roughly textured. The rind is inedible but easily removed to expose a layer of translucent white fleshy aril with a floral smell and a sweet flavor. The skin turns brown and dry when left out after harvesting.


title: Lychee

text: The fleshy, edible portion of the fruit is an aril, surrounding one dark brown inedible seed that is 1 to 3.3 cm long and 0.6 to 1.2 cm wide (0.39–1.30 by 0.24–0.47 in). Some cultivars produce a high percentage of fruits with shriveled aborted seeds known as 'chicken tongues'. These fruits typically have a higher price, due to having more edible flesh. Since the floral flavor is lost in the process of canning, the fruit is usually eaten fresh.


title: Lychee

text: Cultivation of lychee began in the region of southern China, going back to 1059 AD, Malaysia, and northern Vietnam. Unofficial records in China refer to lychee as far back as 2000 BC. Wild trees still grow in parts of southern China and on Hainan Island. The fruit was used as a delicacy in the Chinese Imperial Court.


title: Lychee

text: In the 1st century during the Han dynasty, fresh lychees were a popular tribute item, and in such demand at the Imperial Court that a special courier service with fast horses would bring the fresh fruit from Guangdong. There was great demand for lychee in the Song Dynasty (960-1279), according to Cai Xiang, in his "Li chi pu" (Treatise on Lychees). It was also the favorite fruit of Emperor Li Longji (Xuanzong)'s favored concubine Yang Yuhuan (Yang Guifei). The emperor had the fruit delivered at great expense to the capital.


title: Lychee

text: The lychee attracted the attention of European travelers, such as the Spanish bishop, explorer, and sinologist Juan González de Mendoza in his "History of the great and mighty kingdom of China" (1585; English translation 1588), based on the reports of Spanish friars who had visited China in the 1570s gave the fruit high praise:


title: Lychee

text: Later the lychee was described and introduced to the West in 1656 by Michal Boym, a Polish Jesuit missionary (at that time Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth).


title: Lychee

text: Genomic studies indicate that the lychee resulted from double domestication by independent cultivation in two different regions of ancient China.


title: Lychee

text: Lychees are extensively grown in southern China, Taiwan, Vietnam and the rest of tropical Southeast Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, and in tropical regions of many other countries. They require a tropical climate that is frost-free and is not below the temperature of . Lychees require a climate with high summer heat, rainfall, and humidity, growing optimally on well-drained, slightly acidic soils rich in organic matter and mulch.


title: Lychee

text: Some 200 cultivars exist, with early and late maturing forms suited to warmer and cooler climates, respectively, although mainly eight cultivars are used for commerce in China. They are also grown as an ornamental tree, as well as for their fruit. The most common way of propagating lychee is through a method called air layering or marcotting. Air-layers, or marcotts, are made by cutting a branch of a mature tree, covering the cut with a rooting medium, such as peat or sphagnum moss, then wrapping the medium with polyethylene film and allowing the cut to root. Once significant rooting has occurred, the marcott is cut from the branch and potted.


title: Lychee

text: According to folklore, a lychee tree that is not producing much fruit can be girdled, leading to more fruit production. When the central opening of trees is carried out as part of training and pruning, stereo fruiting can be achieved for higher orchard productivity.


title: Lychee

text: Lychees are commonly sold fresh in Asian markets. The red rind turns dark brown when the fruit is refrigerated, but the taste isn't affected. It is also sold canned year-round. The fruit can be dried with the rind intact, at which point the flesh shrinks and darkens.