Nuclear

The structure that will house one of the largest and most ambitious energy experiments in history is now complete, with engineers working on the ITER Tokamak Building swinging their last pylon into place in readiness for the reactor's assembly stage.

During and after nuclear bomb tests, levels of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 spiked in the atmosphere and in our bodies. Now, researchers have used that to carbon date our immune cells, helping solve a mystery about how our immune systems age.

The Netherlands' NRG has completed a major milestone irradiation test of molten nuclear fuel salts in its High Flux Reactor north of Amsterdam.

Calder Hall, the first nuclear reactor built for industrial-scale civilian power generation and connected to a national electrical grid, has been defueled.

For the daring tippler, scientists from the University of Portsmouth have distilled an artisan "radioactive-free" vodka, branded Atomik, made from ingredients from the Exclusion Zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor site.

​A radioactive cloud spread over Europe in late 2017. Despite official denials, all the evidence pointed to Russia. A new study tracking over 1,000 atmospheric measurements suggests an unreported nuclear accident did likely occur at the Mayak facility in the Southern Ural mountains of Russia.

NASA has given the green light to begin placing the plutonium-238 dioxide fuel into the nuclear Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG) on the Mars 2020 robotic rover that will provide it with heat and electricity.

Nuclear fusion could be an essentially unlimited energy source, but large eruptions in the plasma can damage reactors. But now physicists have found a way to prevent those large eruptions, by triggering lots of small ones through the injection of tiny pellets of beryllium.

Nobody wants to get near nuclear waste, so a team of engineers is developing a new semi-autonomous robotic system to help dismantle decommissioned reactors. The two-armed mobile robot can identify, grasp, and cut objects like pipes without the operator having to control every movement.

Researchers from ETH Zurich have refined a process that can detect modern fakes of paintings by measuring excessive levels of the isotope carbon-14 released into the atmosphere through nuclear testing in the 20th century.

The Three Mile Island nuclear power station in Pennsylvania is scheduled to close in September according its owner, Exelon Generation. The site of the worst nuclear disaster in US history, the still functioning TMI-1 reactor will be deactivated on September 30, 2019.

Tokamak reactors and fusion stellarators are a couple of the experimental devices used in pursuit of nuclear fusion, but scientists at the University of Washington are taking a far less-frequented route known as a Z-pinch, with the early signs pointing to a cheaper and more efficient path forward. ​