Plutonium processing history

Gerber, M.S., The Plutonium Production Story at the Hanford Site Processes and Facility History, WHC-MR-0521, Rev. 0, Westinghouse Hanford Company, Richland, WA, 1996. 

The Purex process is the only one with commercial-scale operating history. This military technology has been modified to treat domestic spent nuclear fuel. The focus of international commercial efforts to reprocess domestic spent fuel is to recover uranium and plutonium in the spent fuel. 

Seaborg s discovery and subsequent isolation of plutoniiun were major events in the history of chemistry, but, like Fermi s achievement, it remained to be seen whether they could be translated into a production process useful to the bomb effort. In fact, Seaborg s challenge seemed even more daunting, for while piles had to be scaled up ten to twenty times, a separation plant for plutonium would involve a scale-up of the laboratory experiment on the order of a billion-fold. 

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