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Stories about: uranium


Obama to Safeguard Grand Canyon from Uranium Mining

Obama has scaled up efforts to protect the environment, a path visible mostly due to a recent uranium mining ban proposal, seeking to protect the beauty and the historical value of the Grand Canyon. Once this legal measure, recently announced and already cherished by conservation groups all across the US, is implem...

9 January 2012
08:03 GMT

Bill Gates Talks with China About New Nuclear Reactor

Bill Gates has recently announced he plans to develop a new nuclear reactor, powered by depleted uranium. In order to achieve this goal, he is counting on China's support. In his opinion, this strategy represents a cost-effective method of producing energy while complying with high safety standards. So far, th...

8 December 2011
02:58 GMT

Life May Have Developed Influenced by Nuclear Reactors

Astrobiologists say that naturally-occurring nuclear reactors may have contributed, or at least influenced, the development of life here on Earth. Since the constructs occur by themselves, it is entirely possible that they exist on extrasolar planets as well. While the amount of data available on this issue is hazy...

2 December 2011
08:58 GMT

India Designs a Safer Nuclear Power Plant Running on Thorium

India plans to experience the benefits of thorium, a chemical element which can replace uranium in the process of obtaining nuclear power. Thorium appears to be a much safer and cost-effective option. Since it represents one of India's natural resources, it is considerably more abundant and 200 times more energ...

2 November 2011
09:38 GMT

Uranium Can Be Used in Massive HDDs, No Radiation Involved

One might not think that depleted Uranium is good for much, but some chemists disagree, saying that Uranium atoms can, in fact, be employed in the making of storage solutions with very large capacities.The reason hard disk drives are still selling better than SSDs is because they are much less expensive and capaciou...

30 April 2011
06:27 GMT

LANL Team Improves Uranium Compounds for Nuclear Fuels

In a study that could lead to the development of safer, more advanced nuclear fuels, researchers at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) managed to develop advanced uranium compounds. Their achievement was based on advances in uranium chemistry. Moving forwards in this field ...

11 April 2011
07:51 GMT

EU to Open New Nuclear Research Laboratory

Regulators in the European Union approved the founding of a new, high-tech, state-of-the-art nuclear research laboratory in Germany. The goal of the facility will be to promote the Union's ability to characterize and accurately analyze minute samples of nuclear materials. The effort is being conducted in the nam...

3 March 2010
14:01 GMT

Pebble Bed Modular Reactor Project Canceled

For a long time, physicists have said that conventional nuclear power is a lot less safe than a prospective new technology, called pebble-bed nuclear reactor. A proof-of-concept for the new approach should have been constructed in South Africa, but the nation's government announced last week that it would effect...

24 February 2010
03:17 GMT

USGS Assesses Uranium Reserves near the Grand Canyon

According to a new investigation by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), a one-million-acre area around the Grand Canyon contains important reserves of the elusive chemical uranium. The US Department of Interior is currently looking at whether it is worth to segregate this entire area for uranium exploitation,...

19 February 2010
03:57 GMT

Global Uranium Reserves Are Running Low

Over the past few years, governments around the world have started turning their attention to nuclear energy again, mostly because other energetic sectors are becoming increasingly susceptible to price fluctuations on the international market. With global warming and climate change, using fossil fuels becomes an incr...

17 November 2009
10:00 GMT

The Planet May Have Went Nuclear in the Past

According to a group of researchers, it may be that the earliest forms of life on the planet might have been made possible by the influence of thousands of small, nuclear fission reactors blasting everything around them with radiation. The model would account for the reason why a radioactive substance has all but dis...

30 October 2009
19:51 GMT

Element 114 Indeed Exists, Study Confirms

Uranium is the heaviest chemical element that can be found in nature. Over the years, scientists have been trying to discover other, heavier chemicals, and their efforts yielded plutonium in the 1940s, which went on to be used for weapons of mass destruction. Others have been discovered since, but our ability to synt...

30 September 2009
05:01 GMT

Japanese Spacecraft Finds Uranium on the Moon

The Japanese Kaguya spacecraft, launched in 2007, transmitted back readings that confirmed the presence of the rare chemical uranium on the surface of the Moon. For the first time, astronomers and astrophysicists have definitive proof that an energy source for a future lunar base is readily available on the Earth...

30 June 2009
05:38 GMT

Weapons-Grade Plutonium Found in US Landfill

The city of Hanford, in Washington State, houses the oldest nuclear processing sites, and is now known as the place where weapons-grade plutonium was found lying around the dump site, enclosed only in a very shaky safe box. The find, besides eliminating a threat, also completes a piece of history, as the sample now c...

21 January 2009
09:10 GMT

Bush Wants Grand Canyon's Deadly Uranium

The recent resolution of the Bush administration managed to lift the ban on the exploitation of uranium mines in the Grand Canyon. This could cause the contamination of the Colorado river's water, severe wildlife damage and increased toxicity of the area.According to the associated news release, a last year'...

17 October 2008
05:59 GMT

Where Helium Comes from

Although being the second most abundant element in the universe, making for up to 23 percent of all ordinary matter, helium is one of the most scarce elements on Earth, having a concentration averaging about 5.2 parts per million in Earth's atmosphere. Some studies even suggested that within a few years, the hel...

25 July 2008
08:50 GMT

French Nuclear Plant Spills Radioactive Material

On July 7, eighteen tons of uranium solution containing natural uranium have been accidentally released in the surrounding environment from one of the containment tanks of the Tricastin nuclear power plant, southern France, leading to the contamination of the ground with about 75 kilograms of unenriched nuclear mater...

19 July 2008
03:26 GMT

Antineutrinos to Pose as Alarm Against Plutonium Theft

During nuclear fission reactions nuclear power plants produce a by-product element known as plutonium, which accumulates on the uranium fuel rods. Plutonium cannot occur naturally on Earth and is extremely important for the fabrication of nuclear bombs because it is used in the detonation mechanism initiating the nuc...

9 May 2008
10:10 GMT

World's Heaviest Element May Have Been Found

The heaviest chemical element known to occur naturally in Earth's crust is uranium 92 while the heaviest chemical element known to exist, a synthetic element, bears the atomic number 118. All elements heavier than uranium are highly unstable and quickly disintegrate into other stable chemical elements - this is ...

5 May 2008
06:14 GMT

Good Bye Uranium, Good Bye Nuclear Power

Not long ago, the world was dreaming of clean electric energy generated with the nuclear power plants, but you can't have nuclear power plants without nuclear fuel, can you? We're in the 21st century and we're pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than ever, despite of all the international a...

22 April 2008
10:49 GMT

Isomer Explosives, not Different from Nuclear Ones

Nuclear weapons generate high explosive energies by either fusing or splitting certain chemical elements. A new type of nuclear explosive developed by the US Department of Defense, on the other hand, uses nuclear reactions in order to determine gamma-ray emissions carrying energies about one thousand times larger tha...

14 April 2008
05:58 GMT

Ultra-efficient Nuclear Fuels, too Unstable for Use

Nuclear fission reactors produce high amounts of relatively clean electric energy by burning nuclear fuels, such as uranium. Higher-efficiency nuclear fuel is required for the next generation of nuclear reactors, which will burn longer and stronger to produce even higher amounts of energy. However, researchers say th...

10 April 2008
05:42 GMT

Say Good Bye to Nuclear Waste!

Uranium dioxide is the world's most common radioactive substance, alongside the natural uranium molecule. Most of this nuclear waste results in the nuclear reactors of the nuclear power plants, during the process of nuclear fission, or nuclear fuel 'burning', which involves splitting the uranium atom t...

17 January 2008
05:15 GMT

Nuclear Fusion Gets $1.4 Billion Boost

There is only one word on everyone's lips today: energy. And how to produce it more efficiently, without polluting the planet. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER for short, has recently received a contribution of 1.4 billion dollars from the Republic of China, which covers about 10 pe...

8 January 2008
10:16 GMT

Strange: Traditional Power Plants Emit More Radiation than Nuclear Ones

There is a general misconception that nuclear power plants produce dangerous levels of radiation during their electric energy production activity, or that they are just another disaster waiting to happen. The truth is that aside the fact that they produce energy in an extremely efficient manner, without emitting any ...

15 December 2007
04:58 GMT

Nuclear Waste Threats to Pollute Columbia River

Nuclear waste is remnant radioactive material resulted from the nuclear weapons program, or from processing in the nuclear power plants, which cannot be further used for other industrial activities. It is usually extremely radioactive, and has half life time in the range of millions of years, thus a solution must be ...

28 November 2007
08:45 GMT

Uranium Responsable for Precious Opal

Opal is one of the most precious gemstones people prefer. Scientists believe that the beautiful display of color this precious stone shows is mainly due to tiny amounts of uranium present in the composition of the stone. This discovery could prove to be valuable information for the artificial opal industry.The disco...

23 November 2007
05:02 GMT

New Uranium Molecule Created

The new molecule designed at the University of Virginia is the first uranium methylidyne ever reported, containing an uranium-carbon triple-bond. A methylidyne or methine as it is also known is a tri-valent functional group CH, derived from methane. The methine group consists of a carbon atom with two single bounds a...

14 November 2007
06:13 GMT

Better Computers are Needed to Run the Nuclear Reactors

The U.S Department of Energy has started a three-year project which will research the creation of a new generation of computers for a new kind of nuclear reactor, proposed by physics professor Michael Podowski. The reactor is called a sodium-cooled fast reactor, of SFR for short.Nuclear reactors are mainly used in nu...

2 November 2007
07:14 GMT

High Flux Isotope Uranium Reactor Back on Line

A high flux isotope reactor went online after more than a year of repairs, systems checks and improvements that cost more that $70 million. It's a research reactor at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory internationally recognized as a neutron source for materials studies and isotope pr...

18 May 2007
15:36 GMT


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