Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are breathing new life into the scientific ...
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 ...
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., ...
John E. Gunning and Robert G. Kennedy III is “Beta-VOR: An Economical Betavoltaic Electrical Power Source for Deep Space ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
The vast majority of the radioactive plutonium on the planet is man-made—roughly 500 metric tons, or enough to make 100,000 nuclear weapons. Much of it is the legacy of the nuclear arms race between ...
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 ...