Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are breathing new life into the scientific ...

Lasers, heat and a notoriously tricky element are at the center of a quiet revolution in how the United States plans to power ...

Our researchers have shared the latest strategies for plutonium immobilisation with visitors from the Japanese Citizens' Nuclear Information Center (CNIC). During their visit to Sheffield on 13 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Plutonium gets inside cells by hitching a ride on the iron-transport protein transferrin—but only when iron comes along for the ride, scientists at Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern ...

With all the media hoopla last week about the Perseverance rover, going almost totally unreported was that its energy source is plutonium—considered the most lethal of all radioactive substances—and ...

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 ...

When NASA's next Mars rover blasts off later this month, the car-sized robot will carry with it nearly eight pounds of a special kind of plutonium fuel that's in short supply. NASA has relied on that ...

The plutonium-244 hints at how heavy metals form in stars. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. A rare version of the radioactive ...

The clean-up of a decommissioned US nuclear weapons plant has unearthed one of the oldest known samples of man-made plutonium. Workers found roughly half a gram of weapons-grade plutonium-239 (Pu-239) ...