Richard Stringer wrote: Nope the cores are not made or assembled there Where did you hear that plutonium cores were not made at Rocky Flats or the isotope enrichment was not carried out at Oak Ridge? According to U.S. Department of Energy (http://tis.eh.doe.gov/portal/feature/rflow.pdf[^]),
For almost 40 years, nuclear weapons parts were produced at the Rocky Flats Plant, which is located on 11 square miles about 16 miles northwest of downtown Denver. This industrial facility used radioactive materials and more than 8,000 chemicals in its operations. From 1952 to 1989, Rocky Flats workers used plutonium to build nuclear weapons triggers, called "pits." The pits were shipped to Texas to be incorporated into weapons. Working with plutonium metal is difficult. The metal can spontaneously catch on fire when exposed to air causing near by materials to ignite. The type of plutonium examined in the studies was weapons grade (mainly plutonium-239, -240), which remains in the environment for thousands of years. The plant also used other materials such as uranium and beryllium to make weapons parts. Other chemicals such as carbon tetrachloride, a cleaning solvent, were used in large quantities in the manufacturing processes. Precautions were taken to control particulate toxic substances. For example, air was filtered in buildings before it was released to the environment, to reduce the amounts of airborne contaminants. However, minimal effort was made to keep carbon tetrachloride from being released into the atmosphere. Workplace accidents, spills, fires, emissions, leaking storage containers and day-to-day operations allowed plutonium and many chemicals to be released from the plant site. Rocky Flats stopped weapons production in 1989, and cleanup of contamination at the site began in 1992.
At Oak Ridge, uranium enrichment left large quantities of radioactive waste that was "dumped on the ground or stored in ponds are leaching through the soil to the groundwater, and moving off the reservation. Scientists also are learning that more uranium was vented into the atmosphere through the decades than previously imagined," according to a comprehensive report in The Tennessean. Apparently, large quantities of uranium hexa
