Author: Fission Today

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on March 4 authorized staff to issue a construction permit for TerraPower’s Kemmerer Power Station Unit 1 in Kemmerer, Wyoming—the first commercial reactor the agency has approved for construction in nearly a decade, and the first approval for a commercial non–light water reactor design in more than 40 years. The permit was issued to US SFR Owner LLC (USO), a wholly owned TerraPower subsidiary, which filed the application in March 2024, requesting authorization to build the hybrid sodium-cooled advanced reactor on a site near PacifiCorp’s retiring Naughton coal plant in Kemmerer. NRC staff accepted the…

DOE to Make Mixed Oxide Fuel at Savanah River Site to Boost HALEU Supplies SRNL to Recover Isotopes from Legacy Nuclear Materials Q&A Interview with ZetaJoule About its High Temperature Research Reactor ONE Nuclear Energy  IPO plans to Fund SMR Expected in 2026 Copenhagen Atomics Secures Thorium Supply from Norway DOE to Make MOX Fuel at SRS DOE’s Office of Environmental Management Restarts One-of-a-Kind Facility in South Carolina to Fuel America’s Nuclear Future The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Environmental Management (EM) announced the decision to restart HB-Line operations at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina.…

I have been busy this summer (and spring, and the winter before that… and the fall before that… and the summer before that…), but one of the things I’ve been busy with has finally launched: Doomsday Machines, a new blog dedicated to exploring the post-apocalyptic imagination from several different perspectives. It will include discussions of post-apocalyptic media, documents that shed light on how governments thought and think about the end of the world, and explorations of the task of creating practical “models” for what the end of the world could look like. Among other exciting things. If you’re interested in…

French President Macron has announced that France will increase its nuclear arsenal at a speech today at the naval port hosting French nuclear armed submarines. He also said the new French nuclear doctrine could “provide for the temporary deployment of elements of our strategic air forces to allied countries,” though affirmed that control over the weapons would remain in French hands. In a joint declaration issued today, President Macron and Chancellor Merz have agreed to increase French-German cooperation, including “German conventional participation in French nuclear exercises and joint visits to strategic sites” and “consultations regarding the appropriate mix of conventional,…

Going Native in the Trump Jungle: How it became Legal to Attack Iran 3 March 2026 Dr Binoy Kampmark , The allies of the United States have gone native, feral even, in the jungle of international relations planted by President Donald J. Trump. While we keep hearing about how awful Russia’s war against Ukraine is, with its shattering of international law and its dismissiveness of the provisions of the United Nations Charter, the Israeli-US attack on Iran has been given the seal of approval by America’s client states and supporters. Countries such as the UK, France, Germany, Australia and Canada, for instance, were…

A meaningful map of the underexplored electrolyte universe Source link

No recent US administration has gone as far as the current one in trying to put the US nuclear sector back on its feet again. President Trump has made nuclear energy a top priority and pursued an aggressive, hands-on programme to accelerate deployment of advanced reactors, build domestic fuel capability and reshape the institutions that license and oversee the industry. But all of this and billions in subsidies are unlikely to revive the moribund industry. Paul Hockenos reports. Credits: SkazovD | Shutterstock, All rights deserved. The potential of nuclear power is one of the few things that US politicians on…

America has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rebuild its energy backbone. For the first time in decades, capital investment, technological innovation, and bipartisan political will are aligning to modernize the infrastructure that powers our economy. Whether we seize this moment will define our nation’s strength for decades to come. Meeting rising energy demand is both an economic imperative and a matter of national security. If we fail to build, we will strain working families, weaken our national dynamism, and watch competitors abroad move faster to secure energy independence and industrial leadership. This is the time to choose innovation over inertia, building…

A number of questions have been raised in recent months about the tactics and the capabilities of Valar Atomics, a California-based startup. The firm is one of ten competing in a Department of Energy program to show one or more of them can achieve criticality for its nuclear design by next July. Valar Atomics has raised eyebrows with two publicity stunts. The first was a “cold critically” exercise at LLNL which was intended to promote the progress of the reactor design. The second was arranging for the transport of a mock up of its microreactor on a C-17 flying it…

I happened to look at a slide deck from Sandia National Laboratories from 2007 that someone had posted on Reddit late last night (you know, as one does, instead of sleeping), and one particular slide jumped out at me:  It’s a little graphic advertising the different kinds of modeling software that are part of something called the SIERRA framework, as part of a pretty standard “overview” presentation on computer modeling at Sandia that was given at a meeting in Luxembourg. Did you catch the part that made me stop and audibly say, “uhhhhh“? Look at the lower right: So, that…