The skin of two workers in Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium facility were contaminated in late November, according ...

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., ...

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 ...

Oklo and LANL have conducted first plutonium fast reactor tests at NCERC, validating surplus fuel for advanced reactors like ...

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 to ...

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 ...

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 ...

The U.S. Department of Energy says it will pay South Carolina $600 million for the government’s failure to remove bomb-grade plutonium from a nuclear weapons complex that was stuck with the material ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...