Science

Plutonium was discovered in 1941, and the element now exists on a more than 1000 ton scale. Since it was discovered it has been used once in a nuclear weapon that killed a significant number of people, at Nagasaki, where it was used to end a what started as an oil war, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor to eliminate the US fleet on its flank as it drove for the oil fields in what was then Dutch East India, now Indonesia.

That was the last and only nuclear war. It is notable that in the last and only nuclear war, the number of people killed by petroleum weapons of mass destruction dwarfed the number of people killed at Nagasaki, even if one were to add the people killed by the other nuclear weapon, the one that utilized naturally occurring uranium, the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima.

Since 1945, oil wars, some on a very large scale with a vast death toll, have persisted; nuclear wars have not.

Multi-ton scale plutonium only became available by the late 1950s or mid-1960's at best, probably later, and in isolated form, only by the 1980s. The largest isolated quantity is currently in the UK.

Today, yesterday, and tomorrow, every day of this year, every day of next year, 19,000 people roughly will die from air pollution, largely from the combustion of oil, gas, and coal.

The standard language I use to make this point is here:

If we take an unusually high estimate of the death toll at Nagasaki, around 100,000 people, this means that air pollution is generating a "Nagasaki" roughly every six days.

Since 1946, there have been a few instances in which plutonium led to a few deaths, generally in criticality accidents, probably fewer people than died on the oil platform when the oil rig in the Deep Horizon accident killed 8 people instantly; to this we can add other oil related explosions, but these are trivial in comparison to the vast death toll associated with the use of petroleum.

I think this history, in which the total number of deaths related to the use of plutonium represents less than a few hours worth of the number of deaths routinely caused by petroleum suggests that plutonium isn't all that "deadly."

By comparison, petroleum and its products are extremely "deadly."

When plutonium is used in nuclear reactors in peaceful productive settings, it saves human lives, myths and mysticism and marketing aside:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895).

If we are to ban any form of energy, fossil fuels should be the target, and the banning of fossil fuels is 100% dependent on the use of plutonium, whatever its minor risks.