"By the way, have you ever held a piece of plutonium in your hand? Well, you want to do that because there is something it does for you. People at Los Alamos gave me a piece to hold. It was shpaed like a half of a hollow sphere. It was nickel-placted so that the alpha particles from it would not reach the skin. But the marvelous thing about it was the temperature of it. Here, day in day out, producting enough heat to keep itself quite warm, not for 10 years, not for a hundred years, but for thousands of years. It gives you an immediate sense of energy capacity."
- -John Wheeler, chief physicist at Hanford.
From Sanger, p.159.
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