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Pantex Plant


Name: Pantex Plant
Category: Nuclear / Radioactive
Archive ID#: TX3126
 
Description: Originally the final assembly facility for the nation's nuclear weapons, Pantex is currently the nation's only nuclear weapons disassembly and plutonium storage site. An old WWII Army munitions plant, the facility was converted to nuclear device assembly in 1951, when it was taken over by the Atomic Energy Commission. The plant has grown into a complex of assembly and manufacturing facilities, where high explosives for the bombs were manufactured and joined with the plutonium "pits," the explosive core of the nuclear weapons, to form a completed warhead. In the present disassembly operation, the same thing is done in reverse. The Department of Energy would like to store as many of the expected 20,000 plutonium pits at Pantex as they are allowed to. The plant employs around 2,400 people at its 1,600 acre site, operated by Mason & Hanger-Silas Mason Co. Inc.
Location: 17 miles NE of Amarillo
(POINT(-101.559722 35.311569))
(show on map)
Address: Amarillo TX, 79120
Links: http://www.pantex.com/
LCS: Nuclear / Radioactive
tag: Nuclear Weapons
   
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