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By Edwin Cartlidge of Nature magazine The Fukushima nuclear disaster, already casting a long shadow over the nuclear industry, has claimed another victim.

A hard-to-detect but stable form of iron helps convert subsurface plutonium from barely to very soluble, according to scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Rai Enviro-Chem, LLC. Plutonium resides underground at weapons sites around the world.

Nestled more than half a kilometer deep in a salt mine, the plutonium slowly decays, taking some 250,000 years to become uranium. As the U.S. debates what to do with the nuclear waste produced by its fleet of 104 reactors, the radioactive legacy of decades of nuclear bomb-making sits entombed in the U.S.

Plutonium has a half-life of about 24,000 years. And scientists have known for decades that even in small doses, it is highly toxic , leading to radiation illness, cancer and often to death. After the March nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, people the world over worried that plutonium poisoning might affect those near the compromised plant--and beyond

(PhysOrg.com) -- Portuguese physicists might have finally solved the decades old mystery of why the Pioneer probes, launched in the early 70’s, haven’t been decelerating from the Sun’s gravitational pull at the rate expected; it seems it might be something as mundane as adding in the tiny forces that occur when minute traces of heat from the plutonium on board the probes bounce off their receiving dishes, creating a counterforce, which in turn, causes the craft to slow; if ever so slightly.