Two security experts from the Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory drove to San Antonio in March 2017 with a sensitive mission: to retrieve dangerous nuclear materials from a nonprofit ...
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 ...
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., ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
After a 25-year hiatus, the Unites States has produced its first non-weapons grade plutonium needed to power space probes when solar energy won’t suffice. NASA has been using a radioactive material ...
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 ...