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Originally Posted by Skybird
Quiztime. Is Plutonium a "natural" element"? It was not created by mother nature, but by man, in the lab. Naturally, to our knowledge it does not exist anywhere in the nature known to man.
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No time to address the rest atm I shall leave that for tomorrow,
however.....
Yes, plutonium is found in nature. It's not common because the conditions required to
produce it are not very common and it has a somewhat short half life.
However, there is still enough around on earth to be detectable if you look for it around
uranium deposits.
IIRC it is formed through neutron exchange (?) which occurs in nature quite a lot in stars
and also a little on earth.
The earth probably had a lot of it around a few billion years ago before it all decayed.
There are no purely man-made elements.