How did Iran build a bomb, what are enriched uranium and plutonium, what role do centrifuges play, and how would the ...

You can hold plutonium in your hand, but it has the potential to destroy entire cities. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

When the fissile isotope plutonium-239 is made in nuclear reactors it is inevitably contaminated with plutonium-240. The exact ratio of the two isotopes differs from plant to plant. In the ...

Among North Korea’s feather-ruffling moves this week came the claim that the country has reprocessed 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods. What does rod reprocessing have to do with building fresh nukes?

but that’s nothing compared to acquiring the signature of plutonium-239. After 50 years of trying, physicists have finally managed to analyse the fissile isotope using nuclear magnetic resonance ...

The exposure of fissile isotopes to neutrons results in rapid ... about 1700 tons of spent fuel per year using the PUREX (plutonium-uranium-extraction) method which uses concentrated nitric ...

But what even is a demon core? Well, provocative nicknames aside, all it was in principle was a 14-ish lb (6.2 kg) mass of sub-critical fissile plutonium isotope approximately 3.5 inches (89 mm ...

The material needed must be 'fissile', which means it must ... Examples of such materials are certain isotopes of the elements uranium and plutonium. Put simply, fission is the process by which ...

That radioactive, fissile material—made from either plutonium or highly enriched uranium, combined with other exotic radioactive isotopes—must be precisely engineered and extremely “pure ...