Plutonium will be with us because nuclear weapon states are deeply devoted to having it as a military presence, the global nuclear power establishment is deeply devoted to pushing it as the fuel of the future, and the personal and political opinions of scientists often carry more weight than their scientific opinions. All of these activities require that plutonium be chemically or mechanically processed .
Plutonium is a physicist's dream but an engineer's nightmare.
With little provocation, the metal changes its density by as much as 25 percent. Only physicists would ever dream of making and using such a material. Plutonium, An Element at Odds with Itself . Los Alamos Science. So while the pro-plutonium inertia is powerful, it is not omnipotent and the future of this element and other special nuclear weapons materials is not set in stone.