Repurposing surplus plutonium as reactor fuel could cut costs, ease the advanced nuclear fuel bottleneck, and offer a more permanent nonproliferation solution than dilute and dispose. America has some ...

A newly released report from the Union of Concerned Scientists argues for reusing existing nuclear weapon cores from ...

More commonly, fission is used to generate energy within a nuclear power plant. Power plants typically use uranium and plutonium isotopes because these reactions are easiest to control ...

In early nuclear bombs, like the ones the U.S. dropped on Japan in World War II, the fission of plutonium or uranium and the fatal energy released were the end of the story. In modern weapons ...

Subtle quantum effects within atomic nuclei can dramatically affect how some nuclei break apart. By studying 100 isotopes ...

(Credit: Progressive Conservative Party of New Brunswick’s channel on Youtube) Our Origen-2 calculations showed that CANDU spent fuel will be mostly composed of uranium (98.8 percent) that did not ...

As it was said (and sang) in 1979, plutonium is forever…with thousands of years of radioactivity from nuclear fission (especially plutonium 239). Jeff Bezos—proving again that he is not ...

the second stage is more concerned with plutonium fission. When a Pu-239 nucleus captures a neutron, it has a 27-38% chance of becoming Pu-240 instead of undergoing fission. It is thus present in ...

But the dangerous treasure—”fission products” from plutonium manufacture—may some day revolutionize many branches of industry. Last week Stanford Research Institute issued a weighty report ...

One of the primary forms of waste from a typical nuclear light water reactor (LWR) is the spent fuel from the fission reaction. These consist of roughly 3% waste isotopes, 1% plutonium isotopes ...

Plutonium pits are hollow spheres that cause the nuclear explosion of these deadly weapons. Usually, a chemical explosion will compress the pit, triggering a fission reaction within the plutonium.