Sixty-nine nations, however, have not signed it, including all of the nuclear powers such as the US, UK, Russia, China, France, India, Pakistan and North Korea, as well as NATO member states (apart from the Netherlands who voted against), Japan and Australia.

With a 50th nation ratifying it, the treaty outlawing nuclear weapons for all countries will come into force in 90 days

Contaminated water that will reportedly be released into the sea from the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant contains a radioactive substance that has the potential to damage human DNA, a Greenpeace investigation has said.

Japan’s government has reportedly decided to release more than 1m tonnes of contaminated water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the sea, setting it on a collision course with local fishermen who say the move will destroy their industry. Media reports said work to release the water, which is being stored in more than 1,000 tanks, would begin in 2022 at the earliest and would take decades to complete.

John Pilger's penetrating documentary which looks at world-wide propaganda surrounding the nuclear arms race. When the two American atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, they were code-named Fat Man and Little Boy, and President Truman announced after the event: "The experiment has been an overwhelming success."

Atomic bombs hastened the end of World War II. But they launched another kind of war, a cold one, that threatened the entire planet with nuclear annihilation. So it’s understandable that on the 75th anniversary of the atomic bomb explosion that devastated Hiroshima (August 6, 1945), reflections tend to emphasize the geopolitical dramas during the decades that followed.

Seventy-five years after the dropping of the first atomic bomb in Hiroshima, one nuclear non-proliferation after the other is lapsing. A new arms race is already taking shape between Russia, the United States and China.

Laser weapons can hit at the speed of light, and they are quickly deploying to each potential fighting domain, whether on property, at the atmosphere , and in sea. But what about beneath the sea? Open-source funding documents, the oldest of which date back to 2011, reveal the Navy’s plans to arm Virginia-class nuclear subs with high performance laser weapons.

When you hear about radioactive material you tend to think that it would be best not to go near it. A team of physicists and chemists from the University of Bristol in England don't quite think that way, though. The team, in fact, hope to recycle radioactive material from disused nuclear power plants in the South West of England to create diamond battery power — ultra-long-lasting power sources.

Iran is no longer abiding by many of the restrictions in the landmark 2015 nuclear deal, but that doesn’t mean it’s about to build a bomb, either.

On a blustery Sunday in Okuma last spring, a crowd was seated under red-and-white tents awaiting the arrival of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. They had gathered to celebrate the opening of a new town hall, and the reopening, just a few days earlier, of the town of Okuma itself.

Antarctica's ice sheets are still releasing radioactive chlorine from marine nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s, a new study finds. This suggests regions in Antarctica store and vent the radioactive element differently than previously thought. The results also improve scientists' ability to use chlorine to learn more about Earth's atmosphere.

North Korea has confirmed it test-fired a new type of a ballistic missile, a significant escalation from the short-range tests it has conducted since May. The missile - which was able to carry a nuclear weapon - was the North's 11th test this year. But this one, fired from a platform at sea, was capable of being launched from a submarine.

Radiation levels in the Russian city of Severodvinsk rose by up to 16 times on Aug. 8 after an accident that authorities said involved a rocket test on a sea platform.

Controlling carbon in the atmosphere will require a mix of energy technologies—potentially including nuclear reactors, which emit no carbon but are seen as risky because of a few major accidents. That risk could be greatly reduced.

Human-caused climate change and air pollution remain major global-scale problems and are both due mostly to fossil fuel burning. Mitigation efforts for both of these problems should be undertaken concurrently in order to maximize effectiveness. Such efforts can be accomplished largely with currently available low-carbon and carbon-free alternative energy sources like nuclear power and renewables, as well as energy efficiency improvements.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned that the decline of nuclear power in advanced economic countries would lead to an additional four billion tonnes of CO2 emissions by 2040. The warning comes in the group’s report ‘Nuclear Power in a Clean Energy System’, published 28 May. There is currently 422GW of nuclear power installed in the world, making it the second-largest source of low carbon energy in the world.

Holtec International has won a round in its fight to open a nuclear-waste storage facility, but the company’s opponents say they’re not giving up. A three-judge panel this week rejected nearly 50 objections to the Camden firm’s proposal for a "consolidated interim storage facility” that would initially hold up to 8,680 metric tons of uranium in a remote area of southeastern New Mexico.

Nuclear power plants are so big, complicated and expensive to build that more are shutting down than opening up. An Oregon company, NuScale Power, wants to change that trend by building nuclear plants that are the opposite of existing ones: smaller, simpler and cheaper.

The mysterious cube arrived in the summer of 2013. Physicist Timothy Koeth had agreed to go to a parking lot for an unspecified delivery. Inside a blue cloth sack, swathed in paper towels, he found a small chunk of uranium. It was about 5 centimeters across, with “a white piece of paper wrapped around it, like a ransom note on a stone,” Koeth says. On the paper was a message: “Taken from the reactor that Hitler tried to build. Gift of Ninninger.”