Nuclear

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.

Chinese state media is reporting that scientists working on the EAST experimental nuclear fusion reactor have achieved a new world record by holding plasma of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds in their latest round of experiments.

Scientists have discovered a strange new form of crystal that was forged in the first nuclear weapons test. Known as a "quasicrystal," the curious creation is made out of desert sand and copper wiring arranged in an extremely rare atomic structure.

To reduce high-level radioactive waste and make nuclear reactors more economical, researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are working on ways to use real-time spectroscopic monitoring to improve the recycling of spent nuclear fuel.

The US Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and Kairos Power have announced a new agreement to build Kairos' Hermes low-power demonstration molten-salt cooled, pebble-bed reactor at the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

DARPA's nuclear space rocket project is progressing, with contracts awarded to General Atomics, Blue Origin, and Lockheed Martin for the first phase of a program to place a Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) demonstrator into low Earth orbit by 2025.

For nearly a century, scientists have been tantalized by the prospect of attaining an inexhaustible source of energy through nuclear fusion. Achieving this goal is not so easy, as it turns out, but that doesn't mean exciting advances aren't being made.

Bill Gates's next-level nuclear power station is small, cheap, efficient and fast to build. It also has a built-in, on-demand energy storage system 10 times bigger than the biggest grid-scale batteries. Thanks to a DoE grant, it will open before 2030.

We’re all familiar with the march of time, but why it does so is a mystery. In 2016 Australian physicist Joan Vaccaro proposed a new quantum theory of time, and now a team will test the hypothesis by searching for time dilation in a nuclear reactor.

Researchers have found that the concrete walls in a decommissioned power plant in Japan have not only kept their strength over the decades but have actually gotten stronger with use, thanks to a rare mineral also found in ancient Roman concrete.