#metalurgy — Public Fediverse posts

'Plutonium has been described as a physicist’s dream and an engineer’s nightmare because of its superb nuclear properties and confounding physical properties. Compared to uranium, plutonium is more efficient at fission...But it has six different phases, or crystalline forms, that vary in density by up to 25 percent, and modest changes in temperature or pressure can provoke it to go from being as malleable as aluminum to as brittle as glass'

#nuclearScience #history #metalurgy #20thCentury

https://www.lanl.gov/media/publications/1663/a-phase-of-its-own