No names. No pictures. No direct conversation. And don't touch the plutonium. Those were the ground rules before NPR was allowed a rare opportunity to see nuclear inspectors learning their craft. The ...

Scientists have solved a question about the nature of plutonium that has remained a mystery since the Manhattan Project. Plutonium behaves like no other element in nature. The bonding of its electrons ...

JEFFERSON COUNTY, Colo. (CBS4) - When the announcement came that soil testing near the Rocky Flats former nuclear production facility yielded a higher than normal result for plutonium, Dr. Michael ...

The clean-up of a decommissioned US nuclear weapons plant has unearthed one of the oldest known samples of man-made plutonium. Workers found roughly half a gram of weapons-grade plutonium-239 (Pu-239) ...

One of the most dangerous substances known to man was found in an unlikely place: a garbage dump. Workers cleaning up the Hanford Site, a huge Department of Energy cleanup site in southeastern ...

As the fuels of the space and atom age get more powerful, they also get harder to handle. Last week General Bernard Schriever, new chief of the Air Forces Research and Development Command, announced ...

20151019_me_how_do_you_find_plutonium_go_to_nuclear_inspector_school.mp3?orgId=1&topicId=1007&d=415&p=3&story=449031762&t=progseg&e=449862133&seg=1&ft=nprml&f ...

Each kind of nuclear material has a unique radioactive fingerprint. Inspectors use that signature to identify and quantify the material. Los Alamos National Laboratory is home to weapons-grade uranium ...