Nuclear

The United States has taken a step toward a 21st-century renaissance in civilian nuclear power as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has given the go-ahead for TerraPower's Natrium Gen IV reactor to begin construction – the first such approval for a US reactor in a decade.

In a world first, the US Department of Defense (aka the Department of War) airlifted a complete 5-MW nuclear reactor using a C-17 Globemaster III transport from March Air Reserve Base, California to Hill Air Force Base, Utah, for assembly and operation.

Nuclear power isn't just for naval ships anymore as demonstrated by the Nuclear Propulsion in merchant Shipping (NuProShip II) project led by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology which is looking at fitting nuclear reactors to heavy-duty commercial vessels.

If you have a redundant nuclear aircraft carrier lying around, you can give HGP Intelligent Energy a call. The Texas-based developer wants to repurpose the nuclear reactors used to power carriers to generate electricity for onshore data centers.

Radiant Nuclear is making big moves in its mission to bring its 1-MW microreactors to market, recently raising $300 million to scale its commercialization efforts ahead of shipments to customers in 2028.

Nuclear waste and a hydrogen economy may seem poles apart, but a new study by the University of Sharjah claims that spent fuel from nuclear power plants could be used to increase the efficiency of converting water into hydrogen and oxygen.

Russia has flown a nuclear-arm-capable cruise missile propelled by a nuclear engine. In a televised conference chaired by Russian President Vladimir Putin the 15-hour flight of the 9M730 Burevestnik (NATO name SSC-X-9 Skyfall) was confirmed.

In the shadow of a service outage that affected millions of users, outside of Richland, Washington, internet commerce giant Amazon is building the first of a series of modular nuclear power stations to protect its data services from outages.

Giving a whole new meaning to underground power, startup Deep Fission Nuclear has secured US$30 million in funding to install a micro-reactor in a mile-deep borehole by July 4, 2026 as part of the US Department of Energy's Reactor Pilot Program.

It seems that the United States is keen to get in on the nuclear renaissance as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has signed an agreement with Houston-based ENTRA1 Energy to build enough modular nuclear reactors to generate 6 GW of power.

A critical shortage of fuel for nuclear fusion reactors may have a rather counterintuitive solution. A physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) says that fusion reactor fuel could be made from nuclear waste from fission reactors.

A decades-old scientific controversy and a small bench-top apparatus at the University of British Columbia (UBC) could be the key to more efficient fusion reactors by increasing the chances of a nuclear reaction occurring.