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 ...

Scientists have been building nuclear weapons for more than 80 years, but crafting this technology remains a challenge.

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 ...

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 ...

Japan’s plutonium stockpiles in Britain and France totaled 21.8 tons and 15.4 tons, respectively, as of December 2020. Britain shut down its only M OX plant in 2011, which means it can no longer ...