A U.S. program to promote nuclear energy around the world without increasing the threat of proliferation would instead raise the likelihood that additional nations or terrorists might acquire a devastating weapon according to nonproliferation experts.
Companies are racing to provide radioactive fuel for America's nuclear renaissance, and are powering debate along the way. Even as the government continues to oppose Iran's efforts to enrich uranium for power plants, projects to do just that are under way in the U.S.
The Bush administration's plan for a "renaissance" in nuclear power may be crimped by tightening world-wide supplies of uranium and a lack of enrichment facilities to turn the uranium into fuel for power plants.
With construction of many new nuclear reactors under discussion, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is grappling with the question of whether they should be designed to withstand a Sept. 11 style airplane attack.
The Middle East may now be entering the most precarious era of its history, with the sudden rush by Arabs, Iranians and Turks to master nuclear technology and one day unlock the secrets to the atomic bomb.
President Bush has decided to permit extensive U.S. civilian nuclear cooperation with Russia for the first time, administration officials said yesterday, reversing decades of bipartisan policy in a move that would be worth billions of dollars to Moscow but could provoke an uproar in Congress.
Nuclear reactors could be built more efficiently using supercomputers to artificially 'evolve' designs, say engineers from the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. They have found they can speed up the extremely complex process of designing a reactor and generate novel designs from scratch by simulating natural selection.
One-third of the world's 130 civilian nuclear research reactors lack security upgrades needed to prevent theft of materials that terrorists could use to build an atomic bomb, the chief U.S. nuclear proliferation official says.
Two scientists say they have come up with a way to make hydrogen fuel cheap enough to compete with gasoline, by combining nuclear and wind power.
Several of the nation's most prominent environmentalists have gone public with the message that nuclear power, long taboo among environmental advocates, should be reconsidered as a remedy for global warming.