But now, researchers are turning their attention to americium-241, a fuel under active development in Europe and ...

City of Holy Faith, have you lost faith in humanity? Do you really think the answer is more nuclear weapons? New Mexico led the way down this road to death ...

Fifty grams of plutonium-238 — the stuff that powers many deep-space missions — was produced at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. It's the first batch made in the United ...

After China's first atomic test, the US and India, as part of a covert operation, tried to place a nuclear-powered listening ...

A team of scientists has discovered a new, stable form of plutonium – and done so by accident. The famously unstable element is tricky to transport, store and dispose of, but the find could lead ...

The image on the left deptics plutonium samples, comparable in size to one that's been missing from Idaho State University for at least 14 years, beside a U.S. quarter.

The government’s plutonium plan would require an extension, and the facility, which is known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, risks running out of space before all the plutonium gets ...

Without This Plutonium, Expect Delays NASA could still explore places close enough to the sun for solar power to work. But for going far out into space, there is no substitute for plutonium-238 ...

Plutonium pits are the cores of modern nuclear weapons. Since 1989, when the Rocky Flats Colorado pit production plant was shut down, the United States has not been able to produce plutonium pits ...

The plutonium naturally radiates heat as it decays, which can be converted into electricity with a device known as a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or RTG.

Plutonium-238 is not used to make nuclear weapons (though its isotopic cousin, plutonium-239, is a common bombmaking material). Scientists do take advantage of plutonium-238's radioactive nature, ...

The half-life of plutonium-239 is 24,000 years, so if it escaped in smoke from a burning reactor and contaminated soil downwind, it would remain hazardous for tens of thousands of years.