This week, New Jersey’s public utilities commission awarded clean-energy credits to three vintage nuclear reactors. In doing so, the state joined New York, Illinois, and Connecticut in falling for the nuclear industry’s latest scheme: keeping itself afloat with public money that was supposed to incentivize a cleaner, greener future. Bills moving through legislatures in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Maryland could soon mean all the top nuclear energy-producing states in the northeast would be using public funds to prop up an aging and uncompetitive technology.

Less than two weeks after the infamous reactor meltdown at Chernobyl, officials decided to risk the lives of three men to potentially save millions of lives. A larger disaster could have spread radioactive fallout across Europe.

Before expanding nuclear power to combat climate change, we need answers to the global health effects of radioactivity, says nuclear historian Kate Brown.

If dollars were votes, newly reintroduced legislation aimed at boosting nuclear energy innovation and advanced reactors would be a winner, thanks to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ strong endorsement today. The world’s second-richest person is the founder and chairman of Bellevue, Wash.-based TerraPower, a startup that’s working on next-generation nuclear fission reactors.

Exactly eight years ago, an earthquake off the east coast of Japan set a massive tsunami on a collision course with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The wall of water overwhelmed the reactors’ cooling mechanisms and over the next four days the plant suffered three nuclear meltdowns. It became the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. In response, Germany, Switzerland and some others around the world accelerated their plans to ditch nuclear power as an energy source.

Discuss is a Globe Opinion feature in which two people – from politicians to journalists, academics to authors – engage in a conversation that flows out of a single question. Today’s topic: The hazards of the atomic age.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, warned on Thursday against rising ten...

Two security experts from the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory drove to San Antonio, Texas, in March 2017 with a sensitive mission: to retrieve dangerous nuclear materials from a nonprofit research lab there. Their task, according to documents and interviews, was to ensure that the radioactive materials did not fall into the wrong hands on the way back to Idaho, where the government maintains a stockpile of nuclear explosive materials for the military and others.

The United States is on the verge of losing more than half of its low-carbon energy as the fight against climate change reaches a critical point — a reality the country hasn’t fully grappled with. That’s according to findings recently published by researchers at UC San Diego, Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon University in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

India today successfully test-fired its indigenously developed nuclear capable long range ballistic missile Agni-5 with a strike range of 5,000 km. The missile was launched from Dr Abdul Kalam Island off the Odisha coast. The surface-to-surface missile was launched with the help of a mobile launcher from launch pad number 4 of the Integrated Test Range at Dr Abdul Kalam Island, earlier known as Wheeler Island, in the Bay of Bengal at 9:48 am. This was the sixth trial of the state-of-the-art Agni-5 ballistic missile.

If the power goes out in your home, you can usually settle in with some candles, a flashlight, and a good book. You wait it out, because the lights will probably be back on soon. But if you’re on Mars, your electricity isn’t just keeping the lights on — it’s literally keeping you alive. In that case, a power outage becomes a much bigger problem. NASA scientists think they’ve found a way to avoid that possibility altogether: creating a nuclear reactor. This nuclear reactor, known as Kilopower, is about the size of a refrigerator...

On January 22, FirstEnergy Corporation announced that its faulty and nearly-self-destructed Davis-Besse power reactor east of Toledo, Ohio, will be closed well before its license expires. But the shutdown is not because the reactor represents reckless endangerment of public health and safety. FirseEnergy was fine with that. No, the old rattle trap can’t cover its costs any more, not with the electricity market dominated by cheaper natural gas, and renewable wind and solar.

The Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific Ocean was used by the US government to test 30 megatons of weapons – equivalent to 2,000 Hiroshima blasts – between 1948 and 1958.

In his annual New Year's address on Monday, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un warned the United States that his country's completed nuclear arsenal is now a button-push away. "The U.S. should know that the button for nuclear weapons is on my table," he said, according to the Associated Press translation, in a speech carried by state television. "The entire area of the U.S. mainland is within our nuclear strike range. ... The United States can never start a war against me and our country."

People still live in shadow of Mayak, site of one of history's most hushed-up nuclear disasters.

The leader of the group that won this year's Nobel Peace Prize has urged nuclear nations to adopt a United Nations treaty banning atomic weapons in order to prevent "the end of us". The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was awarded the prize by a Nobel committee that cited the spread of nuclear weapons and the growing risk of an atomic war.

Mankind's destruction caused by a nuclear war is just one "impulsive tantrum away", the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), warned on Sunday as the United States and North Korea exchange threats over the nation's nuclear tests. "Will it be the end of nuclear weapons, or will it be the end of us?" ICAN head Beatrice Fihn said in a speech after receiving the peace prize on behalf of the anti-nuclear group.

On a remote atoll, thousands of cubic metres of radioactive waste lies buried under a concrete dome. Now rising sea levels are threatening to spill its contents into the Pacific Ocean.

After weeks of denying its existence, the Russian government this week acknowledged the strange surge of radiation that billowed over Europe in September. The French nuclear safety regulator IRSN first detected the radioactive element ruthenium 106 in the air in late September, tracing its origins to the Ural Mountains in the border region between Russia and Kazakhstan. Other European cities like Stockholm, Milan, and Budapest also began picking up radiation traces.

Experts are issuing urgent warnings of a possible radiation leak following the collapse of a tunnel at North Korea's Punggye-ri nuclear test site, an accident that reportedly killed at least 200 people. "Should [the Punggye-ri site] sink, there is a possibility" that hazardous radioactive gas could be released into the atmosphere, warned South Korea weather agency chief Nam Jae-cheol during a parliamentary meeting on Monday, ahead of reports of the incident.