Nuclear

The US Air Force is installing a nuclear micro-reactor at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. Scheduled to go into operation by 2027, the commercially-owned pilot plant could lead to next-gen micro-reactors being used in other remote locations.

California company Radiant has secured funding to develop a compact, portable, "low-cost" one-megawatt nuclear micro-reactor that fits in a shipping container, powers about 1,000 homes and uses a helium coolant instead of water.

The US Department of Energy has committed US$20 million to an Arizona-based project that will use nuclear energy to create green hydrogen, testing its capability as a liquid backup battery and as a secondary product for nuclear power installations.

The urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has put the nuclear energy debate squarely back on the agenda. So how does nuclear energy energy work, where is it headed, and can the atom become "our friend" again?

The United States, Britain, and Australia have announced a new defense cooperation agreement called the "AUKUS" alliance, which will include helping Australia build its own fleet of nuclear-powered submarines armed with conventional weapons.

MIT scientists have demonstrated how some of the biggest advances in nuclear fusion might come via projects that are smaller in stature, with the team revealing a record-setting superconductive magnet set for testing in a compact reactor in 2025.

Perovskites are quickly emerging in the solar energy field, thanks to their ability to convert photons into electricity. Now this process has been tweaked to pick up neutrons instead, making an effective detector for leaks from radioactive materials.

Physicists have confirmed a major advance in the performance of the Wendelstein 7-X fusion reactor, with efforts to address inherent energy losses in the design potentially enabling the reactor to host plasma twice as hot as the Sun's core.

"Extraordinary results" from experiments with an extraordinarily high-powered laser have just taken us a whole lot closer to the goal of fusion ignition, where the energy generated through nuclear fusion is enough to trigger a runaway effect.

As work continues to clean up the mess left by the meltdown of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011, scientists are enlisting some local help in their efforts to survey the damage, in the form of rat snakes that frequent the area.

According to local media, the Chinese government intends to finish building a prototype molten salt nuclear reactor in the city of Wuwei before the end of year, with plans to establish a number of larger-scale plants in similar settings thereafter.

A tiny, cheap molten salt reactor that fits in a shipping container could radically disrupt the nuclear power industry. Denmark's Seaborg says it will mass-manufacture them and deploy them globally on floating barges, on a paradigm-smashing timeline.