Plutonium is not a fun word to speak, hear, or write. Used to depict an actinide metal we've known about for some time, it has become synonymous with human-caused destruction on a hard-to-comprehend ...

The National Nuclear Security Administration has decided a cache of plutonium sent from Japan years ago will be processed and disposed of for the foreseeable future at the Savannah River Site, a ...

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

On a tract of government land along the Savannah River in South Carolina, an army of workers is building one of the nation’s most ambitious nuclear enterprises in decades: a plant that aims to ...

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, ...

SEATTLE – For much of the 20th century, a sprawling complex in the desert of southeastern Washington state turned out most of the plutonium used in the nation’s nuclear arsenal, from the first atomic ...

Twenty years ago, I began to learn about plutonium-238, the isotope of plutonium used in space. I was familiar with plutonium-239, built up in nuclear power plants and used in nuclear weapons. My ...

China is building two advanced nuclear reactors with Russian assistance that will produce plutonium for Beijing’s rapid buildup of nuclear weapons, according to a new Air Force think tank study. The ...

The U.S. government launched a new operation extracting rare materials from Cold War era nuclear waste that is likely to ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. A spacecraft is only as strong as its power source, which is why when NASA was designing its ...

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 ...

A Savannah River Site building that produced the plutonium used for NASA's Galileo, Ulysses and Cassini spacecraft is set to be decommissioned. The Department of Energy's Office of Environmental ...