The original "Fat Man" is still with us.

Manhattan Project Plutonium, Lost to Obscurity, Recovered by Scientists

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Radioactive signatures identify one of the first pieces of plutonium seen by human eyes January 15, 2015 |By Andy Extance “Fat Man,” the atomic bomb dropped by the U.S. on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, carried about 6.2 kilograms of enriched plutonium, roughly the size of a softball. The origin of that deadly hunk of metal can be traced back via a tiny sliver weighing less than three millionths of a gram, created in the labs of Manhattan Project researchers. It is a historic fragment, embodying both stunning scientific achievement and deep tragedy—that one bomb killed and wounded at least 64,000 people (estimates vary) as well as hastened Japan’s surrender. And in 2007 this historic sample, the first plutonium ever seen by researchers, vanished from the public eye. Now it has resurfaced in a plastic box in a windowless, secure six-foot by six-foot room in the University of California, Berkeley’s Hazardous Material Facility. The tiny lump, derived from Nobel Prize–winning chemist Glenn Seaborg’s original discovery of the element, was accompanied by only limited documentation about its origins. But a Berkeley team has found radioactive fingerprints indicating the sliver indeed comes from the Manhattan Project. They published their findings on the arXiv physics preprint server on December 24, and are now pushing to return this bit of history to public display.

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