A portion of "problematic plutonium" has safely been processed into a stable waste form in a UK first, a nuclear disposal group has said. The UK's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) said the can ...

Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard. Photo by Christopher Michel. Radioactive plutonium was found in the air above Bayview-Hunters Point at twice the federal government’s recommended levels, according to a ...

The United States is preparing to mine a rare nuclear resource from some of its most dangerous Cold War legacies, turning ...

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 ...

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 ...

It’s widely known that a smoke detector is a good ionizing radiation source, as they contain a small amount of americium-241, a side product of nuclear reactors. But what about other sources? [Carl ...

Reporting from Richland, Wash. — As crews demolished a shuttered nuclear weapons plant during 2017 in central Washington, specks of plutonium were swept up in high gusts and blown miles across a ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...