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 ...

This week's chemical element is plutonium, which has the symbol Pu and the atomic number 94. Inspired by the previous two elements in the periodic table, uranium and neptunium, plutonium's name came ...

In 1946, shortly after the end of World War II, the physicist Louis Slotin stood in front of a low table at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, concentrating intensely on the object in front of him.

Thermal images of North Korea's main nuclear site show Pyongyang may have reprocessed more plutonium than previously thought. The analysis by 38 North, a Washington-based North Korean monitoring ...

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia's lower house of parliament on Wednesday approved a move to withdraw from a landmark agreement with the United States aimed at reducing vast stockpiles of weapons-grade ...

One of the oldest known samples of plutonium has been dug up from a waste trench in Hanford, Wash., near the now-decommissioned nuclear production site along the Columbia River. During the process of ...

Plutonium gets inside cells by hitching a ride on the iron-transport protein transferrin—but only when iron comes along for the ride, scientists at Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern ...

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 ...

The clean-up of a decommissioned US nuclear weapons plant has unearthed one of the oldest known samples of man-made plutonium. Workers found roughly half a gram of weapons-grade plutonium-239 (Pu-239) ...

Plutonium enters the body by breathing in contaminated air or swallowing contaminated food or water. Once inside, plutonium particles tend to quickly settle in the lungs, bones, and liver. Plutonium ...

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 may be the most feared and fearsome substance in the entire periodic table. It's best known as the main ingredient of atomic bombs like the infamous Fat Man, dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August ...