Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are breathing new life into the scientific ...
A person reflects in the window of the U.S. Department of Energy, with the official portrait of U.S. President Donald Trump on the wall, following a partial government shutdown in Washington, D.C., ...
It appears that the U.S.'s plutonium-238 shortage is coming an end. The radioisotope is crucial for fueling long-term deep space missions, but as of 2017, a shortage was on the horizon. But ...
On August 10, 1945, a handwritten note on a major wartime document placed an additional restriction on the atomic age, which was: “It is not to be released over Japan without express authority from ...
After years of debate and developing open space trails into Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, a former bomb factory, warning signs are up.
Plutonium can be used to make nuclear bombs. But it can also be recycled and used as a fuel in nuclear reactors. According to the authors of a Nature editorial, the UK—which has the largest civilian ...
NASA's newest Mars rover, Curiosity, is one in a long line of spacecraft to be powered by the radioactive element, plutonium. Yet, with this chemical quickly becoming scarce, it may be the last, ...
In 1977, the Voyager 1 spacecraft left Earth on a five-year mission to explore Jupiter and Saturn. Thirty-six years later, the car-size probe is still exploring, still sending its findings home. It ...
The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), whose tenth review conference is coming up in August, is in trouble, and not only because of the crescendo of complaints about the failure of the ...
A chemistry professor created a plutonium compound that behaves much more like lighter elements, giving scientists new information about how this element works. Plutonium has long been part of many ...
No names. No pictures. No direct conversation. And don't touch the plutonium. Those were the ground rules before NPR was allowed a rare opportunity to see nuclear inspectors learning their craft. The ...