US nuclear relic found in bottle

A bottle discarded at a waste site in the US contains the oldest sample of bomb-grade plutonium made in a nuclear reactor, scientists say. The sample dates to 1944 and is a relic from the infancy of the US nuclear weapons programme. A team from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory used nuclear forensic techniques to date the sample and track down its origins. Details appear in the latest edition of the journal Analytical Chemistry. The researchers have described their study as "nuclear archaeology". But any handling of the sample has to be done by trained personnel in protective suits - as it is still highly radioactive. The type of plutonium in the bottle - known as Pu-239 - has a half-life (the time it takes for the radioactivity to fall by half) of 24,110 years. The bottle in question was discovered in a burial trench at the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state, north-western US. Established as part of the Manhattan Project in 1943, Hanford was home to the world's first full-scale plutonium production facility. The Manhattan Project was the US' bid to build the world's first nuclear weapon during World War II. The project's roots lay in fears that Nazi Germany was investigating similar technology.