Plutonium, a radioactive element, is produced when uranium, another radioactive element, absorbs neutrons, and most of it is artificially produced, except for a small amount found in uranium ore.

Plutonium has since been key to a number of more successful missions. The Voyager space probes contain batteries that still provide an estimated 300 watts of power today, down from 500 watts when they ...

Fifty years ago, late at night in a laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, a young nuclear chemist named Glenn Seaborg and his fellow scientists made one of the far-reaching ...

The plutonium-244 hints at how heavy metals form in stars. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. A rare version of the radioactive ...

The San Francisco Health Department is sounding the alarm over high levels of radioactive "plutonium 239" detected in the air ...

Scientists have reported a major advance in understanding the biological chemistry of radioactive metals, opening up new avenues of research into strategies for remedial action in the event of ...

The Navy, which operated at the shipyard from 1945 to 1974 and is responsible for cleaning the 500-acre shipyard on the ...

Plutonium is a radioactive, silver metal that can be used to create or destroy. While it was used for destruction soon after it was made, today the element is used mostly for creating energy ...

JAPANESE scientists have been acknowledged as creating a highly toxic substance potentially more radioactive than plutonium, despite the country' horrific nuclear past and the synthetic element having ...

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 ...

Between 1951 and 1992, the United States set off nearly a thousand nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site, an empty and awesome stretch of desert whose cratered surface resembles the face of the moon.

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 ...