In 1977, the Voyager 1 spacecraft left Earth on a five-year mission to explore Jupiter and Saturn. Thirty-six years later, the car-size probe is still exploring, still sending its findings home. It ...

Close-up observations of Pluto would be impossible without the use of generators that rely on cancer-causing plutonium to produce electricity and heat for New Horizons' instrumentation. Pluto is much ...

Do you remember the scene in “Back to the Future” where the mad scientist, Dr. Emmett Brown, explains to Marty McFly that his DeLorean time machine runs on plutonium? That it needs plutonium for “a ...

British Energy, the nuclear electricity generator, yesterday called for an immediate moratorium on the reprocessing of spent fuel at Sellafield, warning that otherwise the UK would be left with an ...

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The New Horizons spacecraft has already cruised to the far reaches of the solar system, beyond the last full-fledged planet, and has entered the realm of the dwarfs. Like the outer solar system ...