Nuclear

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.

Rolls-Royce and the UK Space Agency study the potential for nuclear energy to be used in space exploration. The first contract between the two, the project will examine how nuclear energy can both power spacecraft and be used for deep-space propulsion.

In a promising development for tokamak-based nuclear fusion technology, the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) fusion device has set a world record by maintaining plasma at over 100 million °C for 20 seconds.

The US Department of Energy is backing five projects to develop advanced reactor designs to be built in the United States by private industry. The US$30 million initial funding is expected to grow to US$600 million over seven years.

NuScale Power has released the results of a new evaluation that indicates that a single small nuclear NuScale Power Module (NPM) reactor could economically produce almost 50 tonnes of hydrogen fuel per day by breaking apart water molecules.

President Emmanuel Macron has announced that France will replace the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle with a nuclear-powered carrier in 2038. Once completed, the carrier will displace 75,000 tonnes, have a length of 980 ft and carry a crew of 2,000.

Seattle-based USNC-Tech has developed a concept for a safer and more reliable Nuclear Thermal Propulsion system that could help realize the goal reducing Earth-Mars travel time to just three months.

DARPA has awarded a US$14-million contract to the Gryphon Technologies engineering firm to support the development and demonstration of a nuclear rocket engine for the agency's Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program.