Ebisawa pleaded guilty to a total of six counts: conspiracy to commit international trafficking of nuclear materials, international trafficking of nuclear materials, two counts of narcotics ...

Any fission reactor basically works the same. An unstable atom like uranium or plutonium breaks apart, creating fast neutrons. There’s a chance some of those neutrons will strike nearby unstable ...

Plutonium pits are hollow spheres that cause the nuclear explosion of these deadly weapons. Usually, a chemical explosion ...

By the end of the year the physicist Werner Heisenberg had calculated that nuclear fission chain reactions might be ... into "element 94," now called plutonium. Like uranium 235, element 94 ...

Each fission reaction releases a huge amount of energy ... which converts long-lived nuclear waste (the minor actinides plus, if desired, plutonium) into short-term non-fissile waste that can ...

But the neutrons are much more likely to trigger new fission events if ... in breeding weapons-grade plutonium from common uranium. In a heavy-water nuclear reactor, when neutrons bombard U ...

Nuclear energy is created by a reaction called nuclear fission. Now for the science bit. Splitting atoms such uranium or plutonium creates heat – and a lot of it. We do this by firing a neutron ...