Next week federal officials will address concerns and take environmentalists on a tour of a nuclear bomb factory that could ...

A rare radioactive isotope stands between NASA and its next generation of deep-space exploration. Plutonium-238, the fuel ...

The Trump administration envisions making at least 80 plutonium pits a year at Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to ...

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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 ...

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 ...

Plutonium, a radioactive element, is produced when uranium, another radioactive element, absorbs neutrons, and most of it is artificially produced, except for a small amount found in uranium ore.

WASHINGTON — NASA is facing the prospect of trying to explore deep space without the aid of the long-lasting nuclear batteries it has relied upon for decades to send spacecraft to destinations where ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...