New type of nuclear fission discovered

(PhysOrg.com) -- Nuclear fission, or the splitting of a heavy nucleus, usually results in symmetrical fragments of the same mass. Physicists attribute the few known examples of fission that is asymmetric to the formation ...

Sediments reveal the ancient ocean during a mass extinction event

About 183 million years ago, volcanic activity in modern South Africa unleashed an estimated 20,500 gigatons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the ocean–atmosphere system over a period of 300 to 500 thousand years. Known as ...

Atomic fingerprint identifies emission sources of uranium

Uranium is not always the same: depending on whether this chemical element is released by the civil nuclear industry or as fallout from nuclear weapon tests, the ratio of the two anthropogenic, i.e. man-made, uranium isotopes ...

Microrobots clean up radioactive waste

According to some experts, nuclear power holds great promise for meeting the world's growing energy demands without generating greenhouse gases. But scientists need to find a way to remove radioactive isotopes, both from ...

Lab confirms new commercial method for producing medical isotope

The effort to secure a stable, domestic source of a critical medical isotope reached an important milestone this month as the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory demonstrated the production, separation ...

Uranium isotopes reveal age and origin of volcanic rocks

From the beginning of time, uranium has been part of the Earth and, thanks to its long-lived radioactivity, it has proven ideal to date geological processes and deduce Earth's evolution. Natural uranium consists of two long-lived ...

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