As a college student in the 1980s, I was often in a natural sciences laboratory building on campus. There was a door in a corridor opposite the vending machines. This door had a nuclear trefoil sticker on it and appeared to have the security precautions of a door to a custodian's closet. On the sticker was written 239Pu.

Of all the buildings on Science Hill, this one was considered to be the most seismically sound. An older large laboratory building was scheduled for seismic retrofit and the consensus was that if the big one hit before the retrofit, that building was a goner.

In 1989, a big one—if not THE big one—hit. The old seismically unsound building did fine. The new and safe building with the Plutonium inside came within five seconds of complete collapse. Going on a quarter century later, that building is still externally buttressed with large i-beams. The trefoil sticker is gone.

College campuses and fissile material don't go well together.

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