Atomic

French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced a $1.43-billion investment in atomic power Monday, going against Europe's antinuclear tide following the Fukushima disaster in Japan. Despite growing safety concern among neighboring countries, Sarkozy said abandoning the development and building of new nuclear reactors made no sense. "There is no alternative to nuclear energy today," he told reporters. Sarkozy also promised "substantial resources" to strengthen research into nuclear safety and a further $1.85-billion investment in renewable energy sources, including solar and wind power.

When tens of thousands of antigovernment protesters filled Cairo's Tahrir Square for 18 tense days and toppled Egypt's brutal dictator early this year, Mohamed ElBaradei visited the street revolutionaries exactly once — briefly — and never went back. Since then, ElBaradei has made repeated appearances on American TV talk shows to portray himself as the leader of Egypt's opposition movement and to argue that he now should become the country's first freely elected president. Revisionism is a recurrent theme in ElBaradei's memoir, "The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times.

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva have trapped atoms of the elusive antimatter form of hydrogen for nearly 17 minutes, a major step toward understanding what happened to this mysterious substance when the universe was created 13.6 billion years ago. Physicists plan to study the antihydrogen intensively to see how it interacts with gravity and other forces of nature, looking for slight differences between its behavior and that...

Japan did not properly protect its nuclear plants against the threat of tsunami before the March 11 disaster that caused radiation to spew from the Fukushima Daiichi facility, concludes a preliminary report released Wednesday by international nuclear experts. "The tsunami hazard for several sites was underestimated," says a three-page summary released by a United Nations nuclear safety team investigating the aftermath of a magnitude 9 earthquake that triggered a nearly 50-foot-high wall of water, deluging the plant.

Japan did not properly protect its nuclear plants against tsunami threats prior to the March 11 disaster that caused radiation to spew from the Fukushima Daiichi plant, a preliminary report released Wednesday by international nuclear experts concluded. "The tsunami hazard for several sites was underestimated," according to a three-page summary released by a United Nations nuclear safety team probing the aftermath of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake that triggered a nearly 50-foot-high wall of water, deluging the plant.

The head of the U.N.'s atomic agency said Monday that the brewing crisis at Japan's reactors in the wake of the country's devastating earthquake and tsunami should lead officials around the world to reassess the international nuclear framework. "The agency's role in nuclear safety may need to be reexamined, along with the role of our safety standards," Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in a briefing to the agency's governing board. "It is already clear that arrangements for putting international nuclear experts in touch with each other quickly during a crisis need to be improved.

Japan's earthquake-stricken nuclear facilities are unlikely to suffer the kind of catastrophic accident that occurred in Chernobyl 25 years ago, the Japanese director-general of the U.N.'s nuclear agency said Monday. The design and structure of Japanese nuclear power plants are different from the Soviet-era facility where an April 26, 1986, explosion blew the roof off the northern Ukrainian complex's No. 4 reactor, unleashing a radiation cloud that swept across Europe and around the world.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has been providing updates on the damaged Japanese nuclear plants on its Facebook page. "Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency has informed the IAEA's Incident and Emergency Centre that there has been an explosion at the Unit 1 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, and that they are assessing the condition of the reactor core," the latest statement said. "The explosion was reported to NISA by the plant operator, TEPCO, at 0730 CET. Further details were not immediately available.

Japanese officials have told a U.N. atomic watchdog group that there was an initial increase in radioactivity around a nuclear plant Saturday following the 8.9-magnitude earthquake, but that levels "have been observed to lessen in recent hours. " Officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency released a statement in Vienna on Saturday saying they had been informed by Japanese authorities that an explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi plant occurred outside the primary containment vessel.

Call it Extreme Makeover: Chemistry Edition. That imposing, yellowing chart gracing the walls of every science classroom is about to get an update. The adjustments planned for the Periodic Table of the Elements will more accurately reflect the true nature of 10 kinds of atoms ? carbon, nitrogen and oxygen among them ? that play a key role in such real-world issues as detecting counterfeit food, tracing pollutants in rivers and nailing baseball players sneaking steroids. The Commission on Isotopic Abundances and Atomic Weights at the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has decided the time has come to ensure that the figures listed on the official Table of Standard Atomic Weights properly indicate the variability that exists in nature.