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(PhysOrg.com) -- In any kind of nuclear reactor, there is a small amount of the radioactive isotope strontium-90 that is formed as part of the regular fission process.

Nestled more than half a kilometer deep in a salt mine, the plutonium slowly decays, taking some 250,000 years to become uranium. As the U.S. debates what to do with the nuclear waste produced by its fleet of 104 reactors, the radioactive legacy of decades of nuclear bomb-making sits entombed in the U.S.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Radioactive dating is used to determine everything from the age of dinosaur fossils to Native American arrowheads. A new technique recently developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory may give researchers another tool for radioactive dating that could be of particular use in studying the history of climate change.

At the Radioactive Isotope Beam Facility (RIBF) of the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator Science in Wako, a research team has measured the time it takes for 38 extremely rare isotopes to decay by half. This is the first study of half-lives for 18 of the isotopes. The data provide a long-awaited test of theoretical predictions of the rate at which these isotopes decay, and will help nuclear physicists to understand a fundamental source of many of the atomic elements and their isotopes

A full meltdown has been avoided so far at Japan's 40-year-old Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.