Nuclear Science

The Standard Model of physics provides a framework for the subatomic world of all energies. Could a possible newfound carrier boson expand the definition of that framework?

By Mark Mancini

When physicists want accelerator particles, they head to OK Quark, answer questions about what they're looking for, and hope for a match. Nah, wait … that's not it at all.

By Kate Kershner

Batman and particle physicists have a lot in common. While Batman brawls with anarchist clowns and mutated ecoterrorists, CERN scientists chase down their own notable adversaries. Get to know five of them.

By Robert Lamb

Tour the inside of a nuclear power plant with these illustrative diagrams to learn more about how nuclear power plants work.

By Allison Loudermilk

The detonation of the world's first nuclear bomb ushered in the atomic age. It also amplified tensions between countries and sparked an era in which nations scrambled for power and seemed headed toward catastrophe.

By John Fuller

Dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II. How did the most powerful weapon in the world get developed? It started with the Manhattan Project.

By John Fuller

This human-made element can power everything from nuclear weapons to deep space missions. So what's so scary about plutonium?

By Mark Mancini

Thorium is in many ways safer than uranium for nuclear power production. But is it safe enough to bet on for our energy future?

By Jesslyn Shields

If you watched "24," you might think real-life Jack Bauers stop bad guys from detonating stolen nukes all the time. Just how hard is it to steal a nuclear weapon?

By John Fuller

Nuclear materials get used in many forms of nuclear medicine -- everything from PET scans to chemotherapy uses them. Learn how nuclear medicine works.

By Craig Freudenrich, Ph.D.

On the one hand, nuclear power offers a clean energy alternative that decreases fossil fuel dependence. On the other, it summons images of quake-ruptured Japanese power plants leaking radioactive water. What happens in reactors in good times and bad?

By Marshall Brain, Robert Lamb & Patrick J. Kiger

British authorities have found traces of polonium-210 in at least five buildings and three British Airways jets since Alexander Litvinenko fell ill.

By Julia Layton

I once saw this device shaped like a light bulb. It had a vertical support inside it, and on that support there were four vanes with four diamonds on the end. One side of the diamond was black and the other was white. I did a little research and found out that it was called a Crookes' radiometer -- how does it work?

Many ads for new clocks advertise their ability to automatically synchronize themselves with the atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado. This atomic clock is more precise because it uses the frequencies of atoms as its resonator.

Iran has announced its activation of a second set of uranium centrifuges. These machines are at the core of the uranium-enrichment process. Find out where the centrifuge fits into the equation.

By Marshall Brain

If the sight of a mushroom cloud burning above the horizon suggests that the nuclear weapon-equipped world might end with a bang, then nuclear winter presents the notion that post-World War III humanity might very well die with a whimper.

By Robert Lamb

In the comics, radiation exposure turned an average man into a pea green and angry Incredible Hulk. But in reality, what can radiation do to those exposed? Is it always a villain?

By Debra Ronca

The proposed collider would dwarf the existing Large Hadron Collider. But is the $22 billion price tag worth it?

By John Perritano

We're all exposed to tiny levels of radiation, but a blast of it can leave you in agony — that is, if it doesn't kill you outright. What is it, what causes it and how can we treat it?

By Ed Grabianowski

Over the years, nuclear reactors have been viewed as both a miracle and a menace. How does a nuclear reactor do its job? And what happens when something goes wrong?

By Patrick J. Kiger

It's lunchtime, and you've spastically spilled soda all over your desk. Chances are you could tackle that mess faster than we could say "Mr. Clean." What do you do though when the spill is radioactive?

By Jonathan Atteberry

It's hard to get beyond Fukushima Daiichi when you think about nuclear meltdowns, but in fact the first one occurred decades ago, in 1969, in Switzerland's Lake Geneva region. How does such a cataclysmic incident occur?

By Robert Lamb

The seriously ambitious experiment aims to understand the mysterious neutrino and maybe even figure out why matter won out over antimatter during the Big Bang.

By Ian O'Neill, Ph.D.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor plant aims to demonstrate that nuclear fusion could be a viable source of power in the future.

By Patrick J. Kiger

Thanks to our voracious appetite for energy, the element long linked with nuclear weapons is taking on a new role. Where does the hunt begin for uranium?

By Marianne Spoon