We already saw how the new $1.6 billion sarcophagus—the 843-foot wide, 354-foot tall steel shield that entombs the radioactive material leaking from the damaged nuclear reactor left over from the Chernobyl disaster—was going to be put in place to replace the old concrete structure that enclosed the damaged reactor in a picture but here’s a time lapse showing the entire process. Seeing the gigantic arch structure slide in shows what a feat of engineering this was. It’s a really, really, really snug fit.

Swiss voters have thrown out a proposal to close the country’s five nuclear power plants after 45 years in operation. The Green Party initiative was rejected by 54.2% of the vote, according to final results.

Nuclear reactors running on thorium are widely held to be inherently safer than the awful pressurized-water reactors we have today. So why don’t we have thorium reactors? A new TV documentary also available online answers the question quite well.

Decades of mismanagement have landed the government with a toxic, and expensive, problem.

David Charles Hahn, who gained some notoriety in 1994 for attempting to build a homemade breeder nuclear reactor for a Boy Scout project in his mom's Michigan backyard shed, has died at the age of 39. He passed away on September 27, but his death did not draw much media attention until Monday. Breeder reactors are a type of nuclear reactor that generate more fissile material than they consume. They have been researched extensively for decades, and a number have been built, but the approach has largely been abandoned.

The state’s last nuclear power plant has straddled geological and political fault lines.

She's 21, has thyroid cancer, and wants people in her prefecture in northeastern Japan to get screened for it. That statement might not seem provocative, but her prefecture is Fukushima, and of the 173 young people with confirmed or suspected cases since the 2011 nuclear meltdowns there, she is the first to speak out.

Before the Orion of today, the Orion of the 1950s was propelled by nuclear bombs exploding behind it.

A nuclear power plant in Germany has been found to be infected with computer viruses, but they appear not to have posed a threat to the facility's operations because it is isolated from the Internet, the station's operator said on Tuesday. The Gundremmingen plant, located about 120 km (75 miles) northwest of Munich, is run by the German utility RWE. The viruses, which include "W32.Ramnit" and "Conficker", were discovered at Gundremmingen's...

Nuclear power is carbon-free and remains the source of about 20 percent of U.S. electricity. But natural gas, wind and solar are often cheaper, and unprofitable reactors are being shut down.

Japanese regulators on Wednesday approved the use of a giant refrigeration system to create an unprecedented underground frozen barrier around buildings at the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant in an attempt to contain leaking radioactive water. The Nuclear Regulation Authority said the...

In the middle of a vast exclusion zone in northern Ukraine, the world's largest land-based moving structure has been built to prevent deadly radiation spewing from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site for the next 100 years. On April 26, 1986, a botched test at the Soviet nuclear plant sent clouds of smouldering nuclear material across large swathes of Europe, forced over 50,000 people to evacuate and poisoned unknown numbers of workers involved in its clean-up.

The robots sent in to find highly radioactive fuel at Fukushima's nuclear reactors have “died”; a subterranean "ice wall" around the crippled plant meant to stop groundwater from becoming contaminated has yet to be finished. And authorities still don’t know how to dispose of highly radioactive water stored in an ever mounting number of tanks around the site.

There's a compelling argument that the world ought to be building many more nuclear power plants. We'll need vast amounts of carbon-free energy to stave off global warming. It's not at all clear that renewables can do the job alone. And nuclear is a proven technology, already providing 11 percent of electricity globally. So what's the catch? Cost. More than safety or waste issues, cost is nuclear's Achilles' heel. Modern-day reactors have become jarringly expensive...

Her first clue that something was wrong came as she ran her hands through her baby boy’s hair. “My child was losing his hair in clumps,” Meagan Beckermann recalls. A doctor traced the problem to alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that can be triggered by environmental factors.

In what would be a milestone for advanced nuclear power, China’s Nuclear Engineering Construction Corporation plans to start up a high-temperature, gas-cooled pebble-bed nuclear plant next year in Shandong province, south of Beijing. The twin 105-megawatt reactors—so-called Generation IV reactors that would be immune to meltdown—would be the first of their type built at commercial scale in the world.

Scientists in Germany flipped the switch Wednesday on an experiment they hope will advance the quest for nuclear fusion, considered a clean and safe form of nuclear power. Following nine years of construction and testing, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald injected a tiny amount of hydrogen into a doughnut-shaped device — then zapped it with the equivalent of 6,000 microwave ovens.

Controlled nuclear fusion – a clean, near-perpetual source of energy – would revolutionize the world. In recent years, significant steps on the path to a fully operational, efficient fusion reactor have been made, and this week another milestone has been reached: German engineers from the Max Planck Institute have successfully fired up their nuclear fusion reactor, announcing that they have managed to suspend plasma for the first time.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi, the first man to create and control a nuclear chain reaction, and one of the Manhattan Project scientists, dies in Chicago at the age of 53.

An explosion occurred overnight at a nuclear power plant in Doel, northern Belgium, local media reported, adding that the blast caused a fire. The exact damage from the incident remains unknown.