Plutonium is a radioactive, silvery-gray metal that is part of the actinide series in the periodic table. It has the chemical symbol 'Pu' and atomic number 94. Discovered in 1940 by a team of American researchers, plutonium is notable for its use in nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons due to its fissile properties, which means it can sustain a nuclear reaction.
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Plutonium is the chemical element with atomic number 94 and symbol . It is a actinide. It has no stable isotopes and exhibits several accessible oxidation states. Its solid has multiple structural phases, so both nuclear composition and crystal structure matter when specifying a plutonium sample.[ref]
What a material:
- only exists in trace amounts in nature,but it can be produced at kilogram scale in breeder reactors
- it is only intentionally produced for one application, and one application only basically: nuclear weapons