[Royal Wulff]

50 years ago they could - and did - build reactors for producing the stuff from bare ground to operation in 7 months.

[ghosthost]

now we can pee in a bathroom of our own choosing

[Campion]

That's plutonium 239, which is relatively easy to produce and can be used to make bombs.

The article is talking about plutonium 238, which is used for radioisotope thermal generators -- its radioactive decay is such that a big enough lump of it glows red hot all the time. We've never had much of a capacity to produce the stuff, and bought a lot of what we used from the Russians.