July 16, 1945, marked a turning point in history with the first nuclear test, named Trinity, in the New Mexico desert in the ...

Since the first nuclear explosion in history during the Trinity test in 1945, nuclear weapons have significantly shaped the ...

Barbara Scollin and D. Ray Smith bring the 12th part of her story on Kenneth D. Nichols. We learn of the nail-biting effort ...

was bee-busy making plutonium and its byproducts ... Soviet physicists had separated U-235 by thermal diffusion (a process used at Oak Ridge, Tenn.) at the Dnepropetrovsk power plant in 1942 ...

Nuclear reactions show the irradiation of uranium-235 at the Savannah River Site. This produced the intermediate neptunium-237, which was then transformed into plutonium-238. Pu-238 fueled the first ...

It either must be enriched—made more concentrated in a rare form of uranium (U-235)—or converted into plutonium (Pu-239). Heavy water can play a role in breeding weapons-grade plutonium from ...

Pike County residents are no strangers to concerns about nuclear contamination. For decades, the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant has been a focal point of radiation exposure ...

then some of the more common uranium 238 would be transmuted into "element 94," now called plutonium. Like uranium 235, element 94 would be an incredibly powerful explosive. In 1941, von ...

Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs) are nuclear fission reactors in which either the fuel and/or the coolant is a molten salt. Molten salt is salt which liquifies at elevated temperatures and can store ...

This, as he found out, isn’t something you should do lightly, as the one he used ended up containing an interesting mix of radioactive materials, including small amounts of plutonium-239 ...

Uranium has two main naturally occurring isotopes - uranium-235, with 92 protons and 143 ... These reactors also tend to produce more plutonium as a waste product that can be used in weapons.