Author: Fission Today

Hot Air balloons float through the sky over the Rio Grande River near Albuquerque, New Mexico, as part of the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. This blog will continue the discussion on the EPCA specific to two past, unpublished EPCA cases that predate the litigation against the City of Berkeley. The first is a building performance regulation that applied to both existing and new construction in which the City of Albuquerque was enjoined from implementing its code because of EPCA preemption. Second, the State of Washington successfully defended a facial constitutional challenge against its adopted statutory building performance standard for new…

A new theory-guided framework could help scientists probe the properties of new semiconductors for next-generation microelectronic devices, or discover materials that boost the performance of quantum computers.Research to develop new or better materials typically involves investigating properties that can be reliably measured with existing lab equipment, but this represents just a fraction of the properties that scientists could potentially probe in principle. Some properties remain effectively “invisible” because they are too difficult to capture directly with existing methods.Take electron-phonon interaction — this property plays a critical role in a material’s electrical, thermal, optical, and superconducting properties, but directly capturing it using…

As 2025 comes to a conclusion, nuclear risks seem more serious than ever before. Nuclear-armed states are modernising arsenals, spending is soaring past $100bn a year, and the casual invocation of nuclear threats and nuclear proliferation have returned to mainstream geopolitical discourse. Yet, ICAN is pushing back against this dark current, and building the resistance that will delegitimise nuclear weapons altogether. We didn’t end the nuclear arms race this year, but we did reshape some of the political conversation around it. ICAN, and its allies in governments, international institutions, along with our dynamic partners around the world are building up…

Session Wrap-Up, Vetoes, and HB 2100 The legislature returned Wednesday where they must proceed to pass an omnibus budget and a school finance bill to meet their constitutional obligations. Since adjournment, Governor Kelly vetoed several pieces of policy which both the House and Senate will consider this week for veto overrides.  The Climate + Energy Project was closely tracking the ESG Bill, HB 2100. The Governor did NOT veto the bill, nor did she sign it. It will become law without her signature, per announcement by her office on Monday.  While it’s too soon to determine if it’s a possibility, leadership intends…

Graphite is a key structural component in some of the world’s oldest nuclear reactors and many of the next-generation designs being built today. But it also condenses and swells in response to radiation — and the mechanism behind those changes has proven difficult to study.Now, MIT researchers and collaborators have uncovered a link between properties of graphite and how the material behaves in response to radiation. The findings could lead to more accurate, less destructive ways of predicting the lifespan of graphite materials used in reactors around the world.“We did some basic science to understand what leads to swelling and,…

Palantir’s Palestine: How AI Gods Are Building Our Extinction “Zionism is evil,” she says with the quiet certainty of someone who has spent a lifetime studying its fruits. “It is purely evil. It has created disasters, misery, atrocities, wars, aggression, unhappiness, insecurity for millions of Palestinians and Arabs. This ideology has no place whatsoever in a just world. None The machines are not coming for us. They are already here. And the men who control them have made their intentions terrifyingly clear. BettBeat Medi, Dec 26, 2025 But Zionism, in its current iteration, is not merely an ideology. It is a…

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MIT researchers have developed a technique that enables real-time, 3D monitoring of corrosion, cracking, and other material failure processes inside a nuclear reactor environment.This could allow engineers and scientists to design safer nuclear reactors that also deliver higher performance for applications like electricity generation and naval vessel propulsion.During their experiments, the researchers utilized extremely powerful X-rays to mimic the behavior of neutrons interacting with a material inside a nuclear reactor.They found that adding a buffer layer of silicon dioxide between the material and its substrate, and keeping the material under the X-ray beam for a longer period of time, improves…

The Trump government has taken a battleaxe to US climate programmes and yanked the country out of international climate diplomacy. By dismantling agencies and budgets, it undermines the US’s capacity to anticipate, mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. There is no way to put a positive spin on it. A future Democratic administration will need consecutive terms in office to reverse the carnage. Paul Hockenos reports. Credits: DarwelShots | Shutterstock, All rights reserved. In less than 100 days, the cuts and closures reversed just about all of the Biden administration climate and renewable energy measures, as well as much…

What’s the current status of fusion energy?Before we can have commercial fusion power plants, 3 key milestones must first be met:Net fusion energy gain: output energy from fusion reactions to be greater than the input energy.A working demonstration power plant: to prove that we can harness fusion power reliablyEconomic viability: fusion power must be cost-competitive with alternativesFor MFE, the first milestone of net fusion energy gain has not yet been achieved. While experimental MFE devices have been successfully producing fusion energy, the output energy remains less than the input energy. However, progress has been steady since the first fusion device…