nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope

Nuclear-Powered Rockets — NASA Plans First Launch in 2028

In 2015 Gagnon said: “The nuclear industry views space as a new market for their deadly product. Nuclear generators on space missions, nuclear-powered mining colonies on Mars and other planetary bodies and even nuclear reactors on rockets to Mars are being sought. Thus, there are many opportunities for things to go wrong.”

by Karl H Grossman, April 17, 2026, https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/17/800021876/community/nuclear-powered-rockets-nasa-plans-for-launch-in-29/

NASA got through the Artemis II mission last week with a few minor “anomalies,” as NASA calls problems, but in 2028 it plans to launch a nuclear-powered rocket to Mars as an initial step to using nuclear-powered rockets in space.

An accident involving a nuclear-powered rocket could be no small anomaly.

The NASA plan was heralded in a section titled “America underway on nuclear power in space” in a NASA announcement on March 24th headed “NASA Unveils Initiatives to Achieve America’s National Space Policy.”

It said that “after decades of study and in response to the National Space Policy, NASA announced a major step forward in bringing nuclear power and propulsion from the lab to space. NASA will launch the Space Reactor‑1 Freedom, the first nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft, to Mars before the end of 2028, demonstrating advanced nuclear electric propulsion in deep space.”

Scientific American followed with an article the same day headlined: “NASA announces a nuclear-powered Mars mission by 2028.” The subhead: “The U.S. space agency will aim to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars—a first—in a bid to show that nuclear propulsion can be used to send missions into deep space.”

Pursuing use of nuclear propulsion in space has been a NASA aim for many years—indeed, going back to the 1960s.

This was highlighted by NBC News correspondent Tom Costello, who covers space issues, in 2023 going to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama where work has been done and remains underway on developing nuclear rockets.

Costello reported: “NASA looks at going to the moon…and to Mars. And to get to Mars, they’re going nuclear….While science and exploration are the driving motivators, there’s also a competitive factor, China. The Chinese government is very secretive, and a lot of their plans involve their military preparations. And so, there’s a reason for us to get there first. And NASA wants to get there faster…So to cut travel time, America is going back to the future.”

“This project was called NERVA,” Costello continued, citing NERVA (which stands for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application), “the 1960s a government program that most Americans have never heard of to develop nuclear powered rockets. It turns out they made big progress back in the 60s, running expensive tests.”

In Huntsville, he said, “they’ve got an exact replica to scale of the Saturn V [rocket]…Future astronauts will need that kind of lift. But once they’re in space, they can use a much smaller engine, a nuclear engine, to go all the way to Mars and back…It’s happening now at the Marshall Space Flight Center…This is where they put [together] components of nuclear thermal rockets.”

Things did not go smoothly for NERVA.

“NASA: Lost its NERVA,” was the heading in an article in Ad Astra in 2005 by longtime space journalist Leonard David. He wrote about how, “For NASA, it has been a long time in coming—permission to use the ‘N’ word: for nuclear power in space. In many ways, it has been the political, financial and technological third rail of space exploration—too hot of an issue to handle easily—radioactive to boot.”

He wrote that NERVA’s “success was short-lived. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, U.S. President Richard Nixon nixed NASA and NERVA funding dramatically…Eventually, NERVA lost its funding and the project was scuttled in 1973.

It’s not just the U.S. that is intending to use nuclear-powered rockets in space. “Nuclear-powered rockets will win the new space race,” was the headline last year in The Washington Post. The sub-head: “Russia and China are working hard for a nuclear-powered advantage in space. The U.S. must up its game.

“Space nuclear propulsion and power are not hypotheticals,” said the article. “China is investing heavily in both terrestrial and space-based nuclear technologies, with plans to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars by 2033. Russia, too, has announced ambitious goals.”

The headline in a 2024 article in the South China Morning Post: “Starship rival: Chinese scientists build prototype engine for nuclear-powered spaceship to Mars.” Its subhead told of how a “1.5 megawatt-class…fission reactor passes initial ground tests as global race for space. The lithium-cooled system is designed to expand from a container-sized volume into a structure as large as a 20-story building in space.”

The article began by saying a “a collaboration of more than 10 research institutes and universities across China have made significant strides toward interplanetary travel with the development of a nuclear fission technology.”

 The Russians are bullish on the speed a nuclear-powered rocket could, they believe, attain. “Mars in 30 days? Russia unveils prototype of plasma engine,” was the headline last year of an article put out by World Nuclear News.

It began: “A laboratory protype of a plasma electric rocket engine based on a magnetic plasma accelerator has been produced by Rosatom scientists, who say it could slash travel time to Mars to one or two months.” (Rosatom is the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation.)

The Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space was formed in 1992 at a gathering in Washington, D.C. and now has membership throughout the world. It has organized protests at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to NASA launches of spacecraft using radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Using the heat of plutonium-238, the RTG’s generate electricity to run instruments, not to propel spacecraft.

The largest protest organized by the Global Network involved the Cassini space probe mission to Saturn in 1997 with 73 pounds of plutonium in three RTGs, the largest amount of plutonium ever on a spacecraft.

The most dangerous portion of that mission was when NASA had the Cassini probe perform a “slingshot maneuver,” sending it back towards Earth to use Earth’s gravity to increase its velocity. If, as NASA said in an Environmental Impact Statement for Cassini, there was an “inadvertent reentry” into the Earth’s atmosphere in that maneuver causing it to disintegrate and release its plutonium, an estimated “5 billion billion…of the world population…could receive 99 percent of the radiation exposure.”

NASA insisted at the time that beyond the orbit of Mars, it was necessary to use plutonium-powered RTGs. However, in 2011 NASA launched its Juno space probe to Jupiter which instead of RTGs used three solar arrays to generate onboard electricity. Juno orbited and studied Jupiter, where sunlight is a hundredth of what it is on Earth.

In the U.S., in 2021 a report titled “Space Nuclear Propulsion for Human Mars Exploration” was issued by a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine of the U.S.

The 104-page report also lays out “synergies” in space nuclear activities between the NASA and the U.S. military. It said: “The report stated: “Space nuclear propulsion and power systems have the potential to provide the United States with military advantages…NASA could benefit programmatically by working with a DoD [Department of Defense] program having national security objectives.”’

What might be an “anomaly” involving a nuclear-powered rocket.

“Is using nuclear materials for space travel dangerous, genius, or a little of both?” was the heading of a 2021 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

With the U.S. setting a goal of “a human mission to Mars,” said the articleby Susan D’Agostino, “the words ‘nuclear’ and ‘space’ are again popping up together….Nuclear propulsion systems for space exploration—should they materialize—are expected to offer significant advantages, including the possibility of sending spacecraft farther, in less time, and more efficiently than traditional chemical propulsion systems.”

“But,” the piece went on, “extreme physical conditions on the launchpad, in space, and during reentry raise questions about risk-mitigation measures, especially when nuclear materials are present. To realize the goal of nuclear-propelled, human mission to Mars, scientists must overcome significant challenges that include—but go beyond—the technical. That is, any discussion about such an uncommon journey must also consider relevant medical, environmental, economic, political, and ethical questions.”

The piece said that “attaching what amounts to a nuclear reactor to a human-occupied spaceship is not without risks.”

An article in 2023 by Bob McDonald of the Canadian Broadcasting System was headed: “Nuclear powered rockets could take us to Mars, but will the public accept them?”

“Nuclear rockets are not a new idea,” it noted. “Now, with the prospect of sending humans to Mars in the 2030s, the idea is being revived in an effort to shorten the roughly seven months it takes a conventional rocket to get to Mars. This might be a boon for future astronauts who face a seven-month, one-way journey using current technology.”

“The idea is to use a small fission reactor to heat up a liquid fuel to very high temperatures, turning it into a hot gas that would shoot out a rocket nozzle at high velocity, providing thrust,” it continued.

“The design of a nuclear rocket means they typically would produce less thrust than a chemical rocket, but nuclear engines could run continuously for weeks, constantly accelerating, ultimately reaching higher velocities in a tortoise-and-hare kind of way. Nuclear propulsion is expected to be twice as fuel-efficient as chemical rockets, largely because they can heat the gas they use for thrust to a higher temperature than chemical combustion, and hotter gas means more energy.”

“A quicker trip to Mars provides huge benefits. Astronauts would be exposed to less cosmic radiation during the journey. The psychological pressures of living in a confined space far from home would be reduced. Supplies and a rescue mission could be delivered more quickly. These rockets could also open up the outer solar system so trips to Jupiter and its large family of icy moons could eventually be within reach,” the piece went on.

“While the technology of nuclear propulsion is certainly feasible, it may not be readily embraced by the public. The accidents at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima have left many people skeptical about nuclear safety. And there will be risk,” said the piece.

“Technicians at the NASA Lewis Research Center in 1964 testing a nozzle design for a nuclear thermal rocket. A nuclear rocket wouldn’t be used to launch a spacecraft from the Earth’s surface — it would be designed to run in space only. It would have to launch into orbit on a large chemical rocket — so the public would have to accept the risk of launching a nuclear reactor on a standard rocket filled with explosive fuel.”

“And rockets have and will malfunction catastrophically, in what with black humor rocket scientists sometimes call RUD—’rapid unscheduled disassembly.’”

“No one wants to see nuclear debris raining down on the Florida coast or Disneyland, and that’s not the only possible scenario. An accident in orbit could potentially drop radioactive material into the atmosphere. These safety concerns need to be addressed before any nuclear rocket leaves the ground,” said the article.

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network since its formation, cites in the past NASA “postponing a test of a nuclear-powered spacecraft just above the Earth. They weren’t allowed to test it on Earth because of its potential for spreading contamination widely, so they intended to test it over our heads. There were concerns about the technology failing, and it falling, burning up on re-entry. At the present time there is no schedule to do those tests, but I’m sure they’re pushing ahead to do them as quickly as possible.”

“Besides the problem of an accident,” said Gagnon, “the production process for nuclear space devices leads to radioactive contamination in the laboratories where they takes place and in air and water.”

In 2015 Gagnon said: “The nuclear industry views space as a new market for their deadly product. Nuclear generators on space missions, nuclear-powered mining colonies on Mars and other planetary bodies and even nuclear reactors on rockets to Mars are being sought. Thus, there are many opportunities for things to go wrong.”

If things go wrong, these “anomalies” could be major.

NASA’s March 24 announcement also said: “When SR-1 Freedom reaches Mars, it will deploy the Skyfall payload of Ingenuity‑class helicopters to continue exploring the Red Planet. SR-1 Freedom will establish flight heritage nuclear hardware, set regulatory and launch precedent, and activate the industrial base for future fission power systems across propulsion, surface, and long‑duration missions. NASA and its U.S. Department of Energy partner will unlock the capabilities required for sustained exploration beyond the Moon and eventual journeys to Mars and the outer solar system.”

April 20, 2026 Posted by | space travel, USA | Leave a comment

Fresh off Artemis, America is now turning its attention to creating nuclear power in space.

The administration wants to launch the reactors to the moon within the next four years – a timeline that critics say could be a problem

Indeoendent, Julia Musto in New York, Tuesday 14 April 2026

The Trump administration is renewing its focus on creating nuclear power in space, releasing updated guidance for federal agencies following the historic Artemis II lunar mission.

The action is aimed at ensuring the U.S. stays ahead of China in the new space race, which will determine which political power creates the rules there in the future, as humans establish a permanent moon base and work toward getting to Mars in a nuclear-powered spacecraft.

Nuclear energy will be necessary to live and work on the moon because there is not unlimited access to solar power and lunar nights are 14.5 Earth days long. Nuclear reactors can be placed in permanently shadowed areas and can generate power continuously, according to NASA.

The administration’s guidance, issued Tuesday, instructs the Departments of Energy and Defense, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and NASA to start taking steps toward safely deploying nuclear reactors in orbit as early as 2028 and launching them to the moon by 2030, in line with a December executive order from President Donald Trump.

“The time has come for America to get underway on nuclear power in space,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, a former SpaceX astronaut, wrote in a post sharing the news on the social media platform X

………………………………. By the next 60 days, it calls for a Department of Energy assessment on the readiness of the nuclear industry to produce “up to four space reactors within five years, including reactor design, delivery of long lead-time components, and fuel allocation or production, along with recommendations for addressing any gaps.”

And the guidance also instructs the OSTP to develop a roadmap that identifies obstacles to achieving these objectives within the next 90 days.

“DOW will, pending availability of funding, pursue deployment of a mission-enabling mid-power in-space reactor by 2031,” the guidance said.

…………………..But some experts say that recent goals for reactors are just not feasible within the allotted timeline – although not everyone agrees.

“The whole proposal is cock-eyed and runs against the sound management of a space program that is now being starved of money,” national security analyst, nuclear expert and author Joseph Cirincione told The Independent last August.

He believes a nuclear reactor on the moon could take up to 20 years to become a reality. https://www.independent.co.uk/space/us-nasa-space-nuclear-power-b2957498.html

April 18, 2026 Posted by | space travel, USA | Leave a comment

As Rocket Launches Increase, They May Be Polluting the Skies

“We’re actually slowing down the repairing of ozone hole with the space industry. Which is quite something.”

Undark, By Ramin Skibba, 04.06.2026

Research suggests that rocket exhaust and debris could be threatening the ozone layer, though uncertainties persist.

Rocket launches used to be a rare occurrence. But with access to space proliferating, partly thanks to an abundance of commercial space companies, global launches have risen exponentially: In the last five years, they’ve nearly tripled. According to an analysis by SpaceNews, in 2025 alone, humans shot about 320 rockets into space.

All those rockets produce a fair amount pollution, from the sooty plumes that catapult them into orbit and beyond to derelict satellites that burn up upon reentry. Regulators have been monitoring and restricting other air pollutants especially since the 1970s, including the exhaust from cars and jet engines. Many researchers believe such regulations are overdue for rocket engines — especially because nobody really knows exactly how much damage those pollutants cause. “It might be another 10 years until we found how large the influences on the atmosphere actually are,” said Leonard Schulz, a geophysicist at the University of Braunschweig – Institute of Technology in Northern Germany. By that time, he added, the pollution could accumulate to the point that, you cannot easily reverse it.

Though space pollution is still small compared to the aviation industry, rocket exhaust may be gradually depleting Earth’s protective ozone layer, which is still recovering from the impacts of pollution from a class of chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons. (CFCs, as they are known, were once commonly used as coolant in refrigerators and air conditioners, among other uses, and were regulated in the late 1980s.) But with limited data and industry transparency, many unknowns and uncertainties persist, including the impacts of next-generation rocket fuels.

Compared to other sources of pollution, the effects of sending rockets into space and from space debris that comes back down from orbit “has been negligible,” said Christopher Maloney, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado who works out of the Chemical Sciences Laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, with recent research on emissions from rockets and reentries. “But if you follow these trends, what is it going to look like?”

The boost in rocket launches is largely driven by the private sector, and in particular SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, which are used in part to loft Starlink satellites into orbit. There are now about 10,000 such satellites, which provide internet services to remote regions. Starlink is just one example of a large network of satellites, known as megaconstellations, the deployment of which accounted for some 40 percent of rocket pollution as of 2022. “The proportion of those emissions coming from megaconstellations is growing every year,” said Connor Barker, a research fellow at the University College London who focuses on atmospheric chemical modeling. In January, SpaceX filed an application at the Federal Communications Commission for a megaconstellation of 1 million satellites, which are reportedly intended for orbiting data centers.

Additional launches have come from Chinese rocket companies that deploy satellites and provide spaceflights to the Tiangong space station and other missions; companies like the United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin, and Rocket Lab; and various European countries and Russia.

To account for pollution from both launches and reentries, Barker developed an online emissions tracker, which has shown a rapid increase in the pollution since 2020 — in particular, for the pollutants black carbon, also known as soot, as well as carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Barker expects the pollutants to continue rising for years. “We’re actually slowing down the repairing of ozone hole with the space industry,” he said. “Which is quite something.”……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Spacecraft pollute not just on their way up, but also when they’re on their way down. All those satellites, rocket bodies, and random chunks of debris floating in orbit are mostly made of metals, and they have to go somewhere. “The biggest issue is, nobody has looked at this for quite a long time,” said Schulz, the German geophysicist, who recently published a paper about such “space waste.”

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….Ultimately, researchers say, launch operators need to think about not only their rocket fuel, but the materials used to make their spacecraft. Because humanity depends on the ozone layer, if some of it were to disappear, the implications are clear — and different than those of climate change. “The environmental impact is an attack on the thing that makes life on Earth possible, the ozone layer,” Bannister said. “It’s very immediate.”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://undark.org/2026/04/06/as-rocket-launches-increase-they-may-be-polluting-the-skies/?utm_source=Undark%3A+News+%26+Updates&utm_campaign=90003236de-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5cee408d66-185e4e09de-176033209

April 14, 2026 Posted by | space travel | Leave a comment

Mysterious Flashes in 1950s Skies Linked to Nuclear Tests and UAP Sightings: Study

Apr 10, 2026, Sci News, by Natali Anderson

A new statistical analysis of archival sky surveys from the early Cold War has found that mysterious, short-lived bursts of light in the night sky were more likely to appear around the time of above-ground nuclear weapons tests and to increase alongside reports of unexplained aerial phenomena (UAPs).

“Transient star-like objects have been identified in sky surveys conducted prior to the launch of the first artificial satellite on October 4, 1957,” said Dr. Beatriz Villarroel of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) and Dr. Stephen Bruehl from the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

“These short-lived transients — lasting less than one exposure time of 50 min — have point spread functions and are absent in images taken shortly before the transients appear and in all images from subsequent surveys.”…………………………………….

“Above-ground nuclear weapons tests (US, Soviet, and British) were conducted on 124 days (4.6%) during the study period.”

“UAP reports were recorded in the UFOCAT database on 2,428 days during the study period (89.3%).”

The researchers found that the transients were about 45% more likely to occur on days within a one-day window of a nuclear test than on other days.

The effect was strongest the day after a test, when the likelihood of observing a transient rose by roughly 68%.

The study also reported a modest correlation between the number of transients and the number of UAP sightings recorded on the same date……………………………………………..

This study adds to the small peer-reviewed literature seeking to apply systematic scientific methods to the study of UAP-related data.”

“The ultimate importance of the associations reported in the current work for enhancing understanding of transients and UAP remains to be determined.”

A paper on the findings was published on October 20, 2025 in the journal Scientific Reports. https://www.sci.news/astronomy/cold-war-transients-14688.html

April 14, 2026 Posted by | space travel | Leave a comment

Creating bases on the Moon

April 07, 2026, Bruce Gagnon, https://space4peace.blogspot.com/2026/04/creating-bases-on-moon.html

Video on original

NASA outlines this $20 billion project to build bases on the moon. 

The speaker in the video mentions RTG’s – which are nuclear power sources for the base. The nuclear industry views space as a new market. Imagine the dirty nuclear fabrication process at DoE labs across the country and then a series of launches that could be a disaster for life on Earth if there are accidents on take off.

The US has had a plan for military base control of the moon since the 1950’s. 

The US (and some allies) are in a race to take control of the moon before China & Russia can get there. 

In this 1989 Congressional study ‘Military Space Forces’ they discuss the Earth-Moon gravity well and state that who ever covers the top of the well would be able to control access on and off the planet earth. This has relevance not only for deciding who can control the Earth below, but also who can mine the sky, etc.

Thus all of this is connected to current US mission to the moon. 

Moon has helium-3 and water which the competitors will want to control. So we now face a duplication of the current global war system on Earth moving into space.

Mars has magnesium, cobalt, uranium, etc and the nuclear-powered rovers driving around Mars are doing planetary mapping and soil ID operations.

Everyone says that a moon-based colony would be a launch pad for deeper space exploration and mining operations so again ‘control’ becomes a priority for those who have such ambitions.

I find it sad that we have competing space missions, goals, and priorities. 

I’d wish we’d go off into space when we were a more mature human race here on Earth rather than carrying the ‘bad seed of war, greed, and environmental degradation’ that we’ve sown into the depths of our Mother Earth. 

I’d rather we had a global informed debate about what kind of seed we should carry into space when we do go – and then go as united and clear thinking Earth people. Like envisioned in Star Trek.

Imagine the money for human development on Earth we’d  save if we went as one people rather than competing national blocs spending massive amounts of taxpayer funds.

This has been the work of the Global Network since our founding in 1992 – to help usher in such a needed global consciousness, debate and organizing. 

We also need a renewed effort to create international space law that bans weapons/war in space, regulates launches into the shrinking and contested parking spaces in Lower Earth Orbit (LEO), renewed treaties for the planetary bodies and determining just who can benefit from resource extraction in space. 

Let’s not create a new ‘Wild West Show’ in space.

April 11, 2026 Posted by | space travel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Nuclear fusion – triumph of hope over expectation.

 Letter Andrew Warren: The subhead for your editorial (The FT View, March
20) enthusing about the UK government’s latest £2.5bn commitment to
nuclear fusion research acknowledges it to be an “elusive power
source”. That is a decided understatement.

Back in 1967, the second
Wilson government produced an energy white paper. In it, regret was
expressed that, despite 20 years of government funding, nuclear fusion
research had yet to begin any moves towards producing any hard results.
Nonetheless confidence was expressed that a breakthrough, with important
commercial and policy implications, could be confidently anticipated by
1990.

Strangely enough, the next energy white paper (not published until
2003, by the Blair government) expressed very similar sentiments — but
with the “fulfilment date” for nuclear fusion brought forward by a
further 20-plus years. Here we are 23 years later. And now we have the
latest Labour government, announcing further billions in research funds
dished out towards delivering nuclear fusion, with results due perhaps some
time after 2040. Truly, a triumph of hope over expectation.

 FT 25th March 2026 https://www.ft.com/content/232c1ef5-9689-4911-8936-72af18e88165

April 9, 2026 Posted by | technology, UK | Leave a comment

Can Prospects for Nuclear War Get Any Worse? Sure, We Can Put AI in Charge

How quickly is the Pentagon moving toward handing the nuclear keys over to AI systems and Big Tech? No one really knows.

Tom Valovic, Apr 05, 2026, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/ai-increase-nuclear-risk

Can we possibly get away from AI’s ubiquitous presence in our lives? But as long as AI is now in our faces 24/7, it’s time to seriously start pushing back about its outsized and overwhelming influence. Troubling stories tumble out of the media daily. Employees in a major fast-food chain must now wear AI headsets that tell them how friendly they’re being to customers and coaching them on their work. (AI is now posing as our servant, but in the years ahead will the dynamic be reversed?)

And then there is the looming data center controversy, with Big Tech companies rapidly taking over huge swaths of land across the US to build massive and environmentally unfriendly data centers. Fortunately, this trend is now emerging as a campaign issue given early and cascading effects on electricity prices. In general, AI is having a tough year in the court of public opinion. Witness this cover story in a recent issue of Time magazine: “The People vs AI.” The article noted that “a growing cross section of the public—from MAGA loyalists to Democratic socialists, pastors to policymakers, nurses to filmmakers—agree on at least one thing: AI is moving too fast…. A 2025 Pew poll found… the public thinks AI will worsen our ability to think creatively, form meaningful relationships, and make difficult decisions.” Along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement-related pushback, a spontaneous wellspring of grassroots activism appears to be bubbling up against the AI juggernaut and the patently undemocratic backdoor power grab by technocrats and the companies behind them.

One of the greatest concerns in the public sphere is AI’s rapid incorporation into present and future military campaigns. This is actively being encouraged by the Trump administration’s decision to give AI companies free reign to develop their products with minimal regulation and oversight. This is an existential train wreck waiting to happen, and it came into striking focus in the monthslong dispute between AI company Anthropic and the Pentagon. Although it was already using the Claude platform, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was unhappy with the company’s refusal to use it to remove human decision-making from military operations and support accelerated mass surveillance of US citizens.

Anthropic’s move was that rarity in Big Tech circles, a strong and principled ethical stand against an administration that doesn’t seem to know what that is. Happy warrior Hegseth then branded the company as a “supply chain risk,” effectively banning further use by the Pentagon and punishing the company’s overall viability in the non-defense marketplace as well. Ever the opportunist, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, then jumped in to offer his AI platform to do what Anthropic wouldn’t. The matter is now in the courts.

Handing AI the “Nuclear Football”

Using AI to create what are called autonomous systems represents a quantum leap in the rapidly advancing business of modern weaponry. Paradoxically, weapons technology is being simultaneously downsized through the use of drones and smaller and sophisticated high-tech devices (such as mine sniffers) and upsized with the use of the AI systems designed to manage and control them.

This raises the very troubling picture of wars being conducted without much human oversight. It’s probably one reason even high- profile AI influencers and Big Tech CEOs have admitted (sometimes a little too casually) that the technology could destroy humanity given the right set of circumstances. While autonomous systems can apply to stand-alone weapons such as killer robots, the most worrying concern relates to the Pentagon’s desire to build and deploy command-and-control systems that remove military officers from the split-second decisions that need to be made in warfare. And yes, that includes nuclear weapons.

If AI is truly as superintelligent (and sentient) as its Big Tech proponents claim it is, then these systems should also be smart enough to refuse to participate in any projects that could degrade or destroy life on the planet.

How quickly is the Pentagon moving toward handing the nuclear keys over to AI systems and Big Tech? No one really knows. When questioned by a reporter on the matter, one senior official in the Trump administration weakly demurred, “The administration supports the need to maintain human control over nuclear weapons.”

AI experts and strategic thinkers say that a big driver of this process is that America’s top nuclear adversaries—Russia and China—are already using AI in their command-and-control systems. These developments are happening at lightning speed and are being further propelled by Epic Fury, the first AI-fueled war in US history. And let’s not be too laudatory about Anthropic. Its Claude system has been integrated with Palantir’s Maven to identify military targets. The Pentagon is still investigating whether Maven played any part in the horrific event when a US Tomahawk missile struck a girls’ elementary school killing more than 165.

Sleepwalking Into Armageddon?

What madness is this? By what shallow calculus can a handful of powerful individuals or shadowy organizations decide or even risk the fate of humanity? How do we put all of this dangerous thinking at the highest levels of our government into some kind of perspective that correlates with common sense and basic human decency? In our trajectory toward what some have called techno-feudalism, we have this apparent plunge into barbarity coupled with a powerful array of tools to accelerate it. When nuclear activist Helen Caldicott warned that Western civilization is “sleepwalking into Armageddon,” it was perhaps this particular kind of blindness that she had in mind. And the brilliant socio-biologist E.O. Wilson’s profound observation also springs to mind: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous.”

The rush to deploy AI as large-scale weaponry with every bit as much destructive potential as our existing nuclear arsenal is a tip off to the deeper motivations behind its development. In the meantime, some obvious questions need to be asked. Why aren’t government and academic institutions eager to apply these advanced AI tools to the many intractable problems that characterize world polycrisis such as global climate change or better distribution of scarce resources including food and water? Where are the urgent calls from those who serve in Congress to do so? Or why don’t we see headlines like “Harvard Inaugurates $100 Million AI Project to Address Climate Change”?

It seems pretty clear that AI justifications coming from the both the administration and Congress (not to mention that the establishment commentariat that serves them) invariably gravitate to enhancing corporate productivity or military use. And it’s equally clear that AI will also serve as yet another powerful mechanism of wealth transfer to the 1% and either knowingly or unknowingly act as a chaos agent in an increasingly unstable multipolar geopolitical world. If AI is truly as superintelligent (and sentient) as its Big Tech proponents claim it is, then these systems should also be smart enough to refuse to participate in any projects that could degrade or destroy life on the planet. I don’t see any evidence of this. Sadly, it looks like we may have to once again learn the hard way that information, knowledge, and wisdom all are very different things. And that while knowledge can be appropriated by powerful computers, wisdom will never be.

April 8, 2026 Posted by | technology, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Data centers are creating ‘heat islands’ on land around them – warming them by up to 16 degrees, researchers warn

Researchers found that roughly 340 million people now live within 6.2 miles of a data center.
 Independent 31st March 2026

The rapid global expansion of data centers used to power artificial intelligence is creating “data heat islands” that significantly warm the surrounding environment, according to new research.

The study, led by researchers at the University of Cambridge, suggests that these vast AI data centers can increase local 

land surface temperatures by an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2C), with some extreme cases recording rises of up to 16.4 degrees Fahrenheit (9.1C).

This localized warming effect is estimated to affect more than 340 million people worldwide.

As the tech industry races to build “hyperscale” facilities — some spanning over a million square feet — to meet the computing demands of AI, researchers are warning of a lack of oversight regarding their environmental footprint.

There are still big gaps in our understanding of the impacts of data centers, even as they boom in number, Andrea Marinoni, associate professor at the University of Cambridge and an author of the study, told CNN.

Unlike previous research focused on carbon emissions or water usage, the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, examined the physical heat released by 

server cooling systems and computation.

Researchers analyzed 20 years of satellite data from NASA sensors, mapping it against more than 6,000 data centers located away from dense urban areas to isolate the facilities’ effect from other factors such as residential heating or heavy manufacturing.

They found that the warming effect is not confined to the immediate vicinity of the buildings. Significant temperature increases were detected up to 6.2 miles away from the sites. The scale of this warming is similar to the “urban heat island” effect seen in large cities.

The study identified consistent warming trends across the globe, including in Spain’s Aragón province, where a surge of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2C) stood out as an anomaly compared to neighboring regions.

A similar effect was seen in Mexico’s Bajío region, which has experienced unexplained temperature increases of approximately 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2C) over the last two decades as data center construction intensified.

In Brazil, researchers recorded even higher surface temperature rises of 5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.8C) across the states of Ceará and Piauí. The warming, centered around dedicated AI service centers in Teresina, was noted as particularly unusual for the region’s climate.

The findings come at a time when data centers are projected to become one of the most power-hungry sectors of the global economy. Within five years, the study warns, the electricity needed for data processing will likely “exceed the amount budgeted for manufacturing” worldwide.

Deborah Andrews, emeritus professor of design for sustainability at London South Bank University, told CNN that while concerns over data centers are growing, this research is the first to focus specifically on produced heat.

“The ‘rush for AI-gold’ appears to be overriding good practice and systemic thinking,” she said, “and is developing far more rapidly than any broader, more sustainable systems.”……………………………………………… https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/ai-data-center-heat-islands-usage-climate-b2949418.html

April 8, 2026 Posted by | technology | Leave a comment

Bypass the Strait of Hormuz with nuclear explosives? The US studied that in Panama and Colombia in the 1960s

The Conversation, Christine Keiner, Chair of the Department of Science, Technology, and Society, Rochester Institute of Technology, April 2, 2026

With the world struggling to get oil supplies moving from the Middle East, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich raised eyebrows with a social media post highlighting a radical idea: Use nuclear bombs to cut a new channel along a route that would avoid Iranian threats in the Strait of Hormuz.

Gingrich’s March 15, 2026, post linked to an article that labeled itself as satire. Gingrich has not clarified whether his endorsement was serious. But he is old enough to remember when ideas like this were not only taken seriously but actually pursued by the U.S. and Soviet governments.

As I discuss in my book, “Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal,” the U.S. version of this project ended in 1977. At the time, Gingrich was launching his political career after working as a history and environmental studies professor.

Improving global trade and geopolitical influence

The idea for a new canal to move oil from the Middle East had emerged two decades earlier, in the context of another Middle East conflict, the Suez crisis. In 1956, Egypt seized the Suez Canal from British and French control. The canal’s prolonged closure caused the price of oil, tea and other commodities to spike for European consumers, who depended on the shipping shortcut for goods from Asia.

But what if nuclear energy could be harnessed to cut an alternative canal through “friendly territory”? That was the question asked by Edward Teller, the principal architect of the hydrogen bomb, and his fellow physicists at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore, California.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration had already begun promoting atomic energy to generate electricity and to power submarines. After the Suez crisis, the U.S. government expanded plans to harness “atoms for peace.”

Project Plowshare advocates, led by Teller, sought to use what they called “peaceful nuclear explosions” to reduce the costs of large-scale earthmoving projects and to promote national security. They envisioned a world in which nuclear explosives could help extract natural gas from underground reservoirs and build new canals, harbors and mountainside roads, with minimal radioactive effects.

To kick-start the program, Teller wanted to create an instant harbor by burying, and then detonating, five thermonuclear bombs in an Indigenous village in coastal northwestern Alaska. The plan, known as Project Chariot, generated intense debate, as well as a pioneering environmental study of Arctic food webs……………………………………………………………………….

Nuclear explosions appeared to make a new sea-level canal financially feasible. The greatest impetus for the so-called Panatomic Canal occurred in January 1964, when violent anti-U.S. protests erupted in Panama. President Lyndon B. Johnson responded to the crisis by agreeing to negotiate new political agreements with Panama.

Johnson appointed the Atlantic-Pacific Interoceanic Canal Study Commission to determine the best site to use nuclear explosions to blast a seaway between the two oceans. Funded by a $17.5 million congressional appropriation – the equivalent of around $185 million today – the five civilian commissioners focused on two routes: one in eastern Panama and the other in western Colombia………………………………………………………………..

To avoid the radioactivity and ground shocks, planners estimated that approximately 30,000 people, half of them Indigenous, would have to be evacuated and resettled. The canal commission considered this a formidable but not impossible obstacle, writing in its final report, “The problems of public acceptance of nuclear canal excavation probably could be solved through diplomacy, public education, and compensating payments.”

A not-so-hot idea, in retrospect

As explored in my book, marine and evolutionary biologists of the late 1960s sought to study the project’s less obvious environmental effects. Among other potential catastrophes, scientists warned that a sea-level canal could unleash “mutual invasions of Atlantic and Pacific organisms” by joining the oceans on either side of the isthmus for the first time in 3 million years.

Plans for the nuclear waterway ended by the early 1970s, not over concerns about marine invasive species but rather due to other complex issues. These included the difficulties of testing nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes without violating the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 and the huge budget deficits caused by the Vietnam War……………………………………………………….

Today, given widespread awareness of the severe environmental and health effects of radioactive fallout, it is hard to envision a time when using nuclear bombs to build canals seemed reasonable. Even before Gingrich’s post sparked ridicule, press accounts described Project Plowshare using words like “wacky,” “insane” and “crazy.”

However, as societies struggle with disruptive new technologies such as generative AI and cryptocurrency, it is worth remembering that many ideas that ended up discredited once seemed not only sensible but inevitable.

As historians of science and technology point out, technological and scientific developments cannot be separated from their cultural contexts. Moreover, the technologies that become part of people’s daily lives often do so not because they are inherently superior, but because powerful interests champion them.

It makes me wonder: Which of the high-tech trends being promoted by influencers today will amuse, shock and horrify our descendants? https://theconversation.com/bypass-the-strait-of-hormuz-with-nuclear-explosives-the-us-studied-that-in-panama-and-colombia-in-the-1960s-278851

April 7, 2026 Posted by | MIDDLE EAST, technology | Leave a comment

The US has declared ‘space superiority’ over Iran. What does that mean?

Iran’s nascent space program was destroyed. It’s still using other nations’ space intel.

April 2, 2026, Thomas Novelly, https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2026/04/us-has-declared-space-superiority-over-iran-what-does-mean/412605/?oref=defense_one_breaking_nl&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Defense%20One%20Breaking%20News:%20April%202%2C%202026:%20%26quot%3BNew%20from…%26quot%3B&utm_content=Final&utm_term=newsletter_d1_alert

The U.S. military declared space superiority over Iran this week, but defense experts question what that means given the country’s inchoate military space program and heavy reliance on space-based intelligence from other nations.

Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, said Tuesday that the U.S. had established control of the space domain during Operation Epic Fury. It was nearly a month after CENTCOM had announced “Iran’s equivalent of Space Command” was destroyed, which harmed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ ability to coordinate retaliatory strikes.

“Our Space Force has given us the ultimate high ground, delivering space superiority, which has been a critical enabler to this fight,” Cooper said in a Tuesday video.


It’s not clear if the country is still actively jamming or spoofing U.S. assets, and it’s highly unlikely that the U.S. Space Force has physically destroyed the country’s handful of satellites. Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins, a CENTCOM spokesperson, said he could not discuss details about space operations “due to classification.” Given Iran’s rudimentary space capabilities, defense experts question what has changed to prompt the military to declare space superiority.

“It isn’t stopping them from using space assets,” Victoria Samson, the Secure World Foundation’s chief director of space security and stability, said of the U.S. declaring space superiority.  “There’s just a lot of question marks … In regards to how they use space as a national security enabler, I don’t know that they’ve really stopped it, because they weren’t using it other than for imagery analysis.” 

Iran is reportedly relying on China and Russia’s intelligence and commercial space-based imagery to target U.S. assets throughout the region. A U.S. official told Defense One that Iran’s use of another country’s space-based data doesn’t mean the service lacks control of the space domain.

“Just because the Iranians are receiving space-based intelligence doesn’t negate that we have space superiority,” the official said.

Since 2005, the country has launched a total of 26 satellites, only 13 of which were still operational, according to the American Enterprise Institute’s space data navigator tool. Three of those are registered to the IRGC. The U.S., by comparison, has upwards of 500 operational military and intelligence satellites. 

Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s top uniformed officer, acknowledged “it wasn’t really a fair fight,” but said destroying Iran’s space capabilities gave the military an upper hand in communications and air operations within CENTCOM. 

“You have space superiority if you can use space the way you want, and the adversary cannot use space the way they want, and I think those are the conditions that we’ve met in this particular instance,” Saltzman said during a Mitchell Institute event Wednesday.

The term “space superiority” was first publicized in a 1980s Air Force manual. A 2004 service document likened the idea to air superiority and said the two are “crucial first steps in any military operation.” Last year, the Space Force published a warfighting doctrine that said the service’s “formative purpose” is to achieve space superiority.  

“Space superiority is the degree of control that allows forces to operate at a time and place of their choosing without prohibitive interference from space or counterspace threats, while also denying the same to an adversary,” the Space Force’s doctrine reads.

Some defense experts see the recent declaration of space superiority as a way for the service to highlight its warfighting rebrand in recent years. 

“It’s a weird thing to say. I think it’s more a matter of floating the ‘Space Force as a warfighting’ thing,” Samson said.

Kari Bingen, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and director of the Aerospace Security Project, said it’s not surprising to see the Space Force becoming more integrated into operations, given adversaries’ desire to target command, control, communications, and intelligence capabilities.

“Between Venezuela and Operation Epic Fury, these have been opportunities for the Space Force to better integrate space effects into a joint military campaign,” Bingen said. “We’ve long treated space as this special and different capability set. The physics are different, but to make it truly useful to the joint force, it needs to be fully integrated into planning and operations.” 

Saltzman said guardians had been forward deployed to support Operation Epic Fury and continue to launch space effects in combat zones “despite being under attack from an adversary.” He also said some guardians are supporting the operation stateside out of Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina and CENTCOM headquarters in Florida.

“I won’t go into a lot of the operational details, as you might imagine, but you don’t have to think too hard to understand what it is the Guardians are bringing to the fight,” Saltzman said. “All of the missions that we always do—missile warning, satellite communications. The links are vital. Over-the-horizon communications is as important now as it ever has been. We create disruption for an adversary.”

April 7, 2026 Posted by | Iran, space travel, USA | Leave a comment

Fusion power unlikely to become competitive

Nature Energy 1 April(2026) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-026-02022-9

While nuclear fusion power is often hailed as a future source of abundant, clean energy, current dominant fusion designs, magnetic and laser inertial, are unlikely to become competitive due to their expected low experience rates. Accordingly, policymakers should not rely on, or fund, fusion power as a core pillar of future clean energy systems unless designs with different characteristics are developed.

Messages for policy

  • Current cost reduction assumptions for nuclear fusion power plant technologies are overly optimistic.
  • Current designs for fusion power will likely have low experience rates and high capital costs, preventing it from competing with alternative clean energy technologies, even in the long term.
  • Given the low likelihood of fusion power reaching cost-competitiveness with competing technologies, policymakers should re-evaluate public funding in this area.
  • Public research and development agencies should assess alternative fusion power concepts and direct funding to those with more promising technological characteristics that can result in high experience rates.

  • If assessing the relevance of nuclear fusion power in a future energy system, policymakers should ensure that energy system models use empirically and theoretically backed experience rates of 2–8%.

based on Tang, L., Noll, B., Panda, A. & Schmidt, T.S. Nat. Energy https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-026-02023-8 (2026)

The policy problem

Governments are committing substantial public funding to nuclear fusion power as a potential source of safe, dispatchable low-carbon electricity to support power-sector decarbonization. These investments should be based on the certainty that fusion power plants (FPPs) may affordably serve an important role in future power systems. However, due to the technology’s nascency and lack of empirical cost data, current assumptions about future cost reductions are weakly substantiated. With inaccurate cost projections overestimating FPPs’ role in future power systems, this distorts investment priorities and funding allocations. Providing empirically grounded cost trajectories for fusion power is therefore key to ensuring that scarce public resources are directed towards technologies most likely to deliver affordable, reliable, timely, and clean electricity.

The findings

We find that the two dominant nuclear FPP designs, magnetic and laser inertial, are inherently large in unit size, extremely complex in design, and require moderate to high customization. Existing technologies with similar characteristics have historically had experience rates (ERs) of 2–8%. We also find that cost estimates for first-of-a-kind FPP vary widely from US$1,400 to $43,000 per kW. Using the interquartile range of these cost estimates and projecting the future cost using our empirically grounded ER of 5%, our results indicate that fusion power is likely to remain uncompetitive relative to other low-carbon electricity supply technologies (see Fig. 1). This casts considerable doubt on the future role of fusion power in a net-zero energy system and whether current investment levels from both the public and private sectors are justified.

The study

We conducted semi-structured interviews with 28 nuclear fusion experts from the public and private sectors, covering both magnetic and laser inertial fusion approaches. Interviewees were guided through a structured survey to assess three technology-inherent characteristics of future FPPs: unit size, design complexity, and the need for customization. Drawing on existing academic evidence, these characteristics were matched to experience rates observed historically in technologies with similar characteristics. Since ERs of existing technologies are derived from empirical cost data, this approach is well-suited to estimating future cost reductions for FPPs, an early-stage technology with no historical data. During the interviews, cost estimates for future first-of-a-kind FPPs were also elicited to supplement those from the literature and to estimate the cost reduction trajectories for fusion power technologies.

Further reading……………………………………………………………………………………………

April 5, 2026 Posted by | technology | Leave a comment

Atlanta robot security dogs now giving commands to Americans

Steve Watson, Modernity, Wed, 01 Apr 2026

Slippery slope to automated enforcement as machines take over city patrols amid rising crime

In the latest escalation of tech-driven “security” in American cities, Atlanta has unleashed robot security dogs that are actively issuing verbal commands to citizens on the streets.

A new video exposes how these mechanical enforcers operate with zero discretion: one woman greets the device warmly, complies instantly, and still gets reported to police.

These four-legged units, deployed by companies such as Undaunted Robotics across Atlanta apartment complexes, parking lots, and construction sites, patrol 24/7 with cameras, lights, sirens, and speakers.

Remote human operators monitor live feeds and speak through the robots to issue warnings or alert authorities. 

Proponents claim they deter theft and break-ins where traditional guards fall short, with the founder noting they provide a cheaper alternative to on-site security while feeding real-time video to responders.

Yet the viral clip reveals the cold reality on the ground. A compliant citizen offering a friendly greeting triggers the same automated response as a suspected threat. 

No nuance. No human judgment in the moment. Just a machine escalating straight to law enforcement.

This rollout comes as private security firms position the robots as partners for local police departments in Atlanta and DeKalb County, with plans to expand statewide. 

Early deployments in areas like Castleberry Hill have drawn praise from some residents tired of unchecked property crime, but the hands-off approach raises red flags about accountability when silicon decides who gets flagged…………………………… ……………………….https://modernity.news/2026/04/01/watch-atlanta-robot-security-dogs-now-giving-commands-to-americans/

April 3, 2026 Posted by | technology, USA | Leave a comment

Does SMR Stand for Spending Money Recklessly?

March 23, 2026, Susan O’Donnell, M.V. Ramana, https://www.theenergymix.com/does-smr-stand-for-spending-money-recklessly/

What did Canadians get for the $4.5 billion in public funding spent on small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) activities? Our new report assessing SMR development in Canada found the results underwhelming, to say the least.

Published in 2018, A Call to Action: A Canadian Roadmap for Small Modular Reactors recommended that the federal government fund SMRs and undertake other support measures. The report’s first “expected result” was that “one or more SMR demonstration [projects would be] constructed and in operation by 2026.” Our report in this milestone year covers not only this expected result, but also what the federal government has provided in funding for SMRs in Canada.

For many years, the “Micro Modular Reactor” (MMR) proposed for the Chalk River nuclear site in Ontario was to be this first demonstration. Back in 2019, the project proponents applied to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) to prepare the site for construction.

Fast forward to 2024: instead of the reactor built and being prepared to go into service, CNSC announced it had “paused all work” on the MMR project. Later that year, the company leading the project, Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States, leaving unpaid debts of more than $16 million. That total included $641,307 to the CNSC and lesser amounts to dozens of Canadian small businesses.

In 2018, the New Brunswick government lured two start-up SMR companies into the province from the U.S. and the United Kingdom—ARC and Moltex—giving each $5 million and help to apply for funding from federal taxpayers. The SMR strategy called for two “advanced” reactor designs, which were not cooled with water, to be built at NB Power’s Point Lepreau nuclear site. Both designs have serious problems that have been documented extensively (for example, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) .

Over the next five years, the federal government handed over more than $97 million to develop the two SMR designs in New Brunswick, and the provincial government added more than $31 million to the project. Yet in late 2025, New Brunswick’s Energy Minister said the government would no longer wait for the ARC and Moltex designs because the province could not take on the risk of first-of-a-kind reactors. The millions of dollars in subsidies are essentially a write-off, funding highly paid positions at these companies at the public expense.

Of the 10 SMR designs in Canada since 2018, only one is in development. Most of the public subsidy money for SMRs—$4.025 billion—has been spent developing this reactor design, the BWRX-300, to be built at the Darlington nuclear site on Lake Ontario. As of early 2026, workers are digging a deep shaft for the reactor vessel. Sometime this summer, we can expect to see concrete being poured into the ground.

Four billion dollars is a lot of money, but nowhere near enough to pay for the four BWRX-300 reactors planned for the site. Even the first BWRX-300 reactor is expected to cost more—$6.1 billion—and the whole project will run at least $20.9 billion. It final bill could come in far higher, since the vast majority of nuclear power projects have historically overrun initial cost estimates.

The high costs for the SMR compare poorly with other options for electricity generation. For example, estimates by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) show that each unit of electrical energy from SMRs would be far more expensive that a corresponding unit from solar and wind power plants, even when the cost of storage technologies and other means of accounting for renewable energy’s variability are included.

CSIRO has been undertaking an annual cost estimate in collaboration with the Australian Energy Market Operator and its reports involve extensive consultation with various stakeholders. The research agency’s analysis is informing an active debate under way in Australia to determine if the country should embark on nuclear energy. There is no corresponding effort at rigorously computing the costs of different kinds of generating energy from different technologies by any official research agencies in Canada.

Overall, the report’s analysis found little interest in SMRs among banks and other sources of private capital. When measured in terms of their ability to generate power, SMRs are more expensive than big reactors. Given the high costs, the report suggests that exporting significant quantities of SMRs from Canada is only a slim possibility.

Susan O’Donnell and M.V. Ramana are authors of the report on SMRs in Canada. O’Donnell is Adjunct Research Professor and lead investigator of the CEDAR project at St. Thomas University in Fredericton. Ramana is Professor; Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security; and Director pro tem of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

March 29, 2026 Posted by | business and costs, Canada, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors | Leave a comment

Inside the Dirty, Dystopian World of AI Data Centers

The race to power AI is already remaking the physical world

The Atlanic By Matteo Wong, Photographs by Landon Speers, April 2026

s we drove through southwest Memphis, KeShaun Pearson told me to keep my window down—our destination was best tasted, not viewed. Along the way, we passed an abandoned coal plant to our right, then an active power plant to our left, equipped with enormous natural-gas turbines. Pearson, who directs the nonprofit Memphis Community Against Pollution, was bringing me to his hometown’s latest industrial megaproject.

Already, the air smelled of soot, gasoline, and asphalt. Then I felt a tickle sliding up my nostrils and down into my throat, like I was getting a cold. 

This is Colossus: a data center that Musk’s artificial-intelligence company, xAI, is using as a training ground for Grok, one of the world’s most advanced generative-AI models. Training these models takes a staggering amount of energy; if run at full strength for a year, Colossus would use as much electricity as 200,000 American homes. When fully operational, Musk has written on X, this facility and two other xAI data centers nearby will require nearly two gigawatts of power. Annually, those facilities could consume roughly twice as much electricity as the city of Seattle.

To get Colossus up and running fast, xAI built its own power plant, setting up as many as 35 natural-gas turbines—railcar-size engines that can be major sources of smog—according to imagery obtained by the Southern Environmental Law Center. Pearson coughed as we drove by the facility. The scratch in my throat worsened, and I rolled up my window.  As we approached, I heard the rumble of cranes and trucks, and then from behind a patch of trees emerged a forest of electrical towers. Finally, I saw it—a white-walled hangar, bigger than a dozen football fields, where Elon Musk intends to build a god.

To get Colossus up and running fast, xAI built its own power plant, setting up as many as 35 natural-gas turbines—railcar-size engines that can be major sources of smog—according to imagery obtained by the Southern Environmental Law Center. Pearson coughed as we drove by the facility. The scratch in my throat worsened, and I rolled up my window.

xAI’s rivals are all building similarly large data centers to develop their most powerful generative-AI models; a metropolis’s worth of electricity will surge through facilities that occupy a few city blocks. These companies have primarily made their chatbots “smarter” not by writing niftier code but by making them bigger: ramming more data through more powerful computer chips that use more electricity. OpenAI has announced plans for facilities requiring more than 30 gigawatts of power in total—more than the largest recorded demand for all of New England. Since ChatGPT’s launch, in November 2022, the capital expenditures of Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google have exceeded $600 billion, and much of that spending has gone toward data centers—more, even after adjusting for inflation, than the government spent to build the entire interstate-highway system. “These are the largest single points of consumption of electricity in history,” Jesse Jenkins, a climate modeler at Princeton, told me……………………………………………………………………….(Subscribers only) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/ai-data-centers-energy-demands/686064/

March 26, 2026 Posted by | ENERGY, technology | Leave a comment

Next-gen nuclear has a chicken-and-egg problem

A new report suggests that advanced reactor companies face a difficult path to success — and that the U.S. would be better off narrowing in on fewer designs.

By Alexander C. Kaufman, 20 March 2026, https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/nuclear/scaling-construction-supply-chain-challenges

Nuclear energy developers have historically operated by a simple principle: Go big.

Reactors cost a lot of money to build, so the logic has been that it’s easier to recoup that investment if the project produces more electricity. Of late, a new generation of companies has made waves by bucking that conventional wisdom and instead aiming to build smaller reactors that can be made cheaper through bulk orders and mass production.

But with few advanced reactors built to date, that argument remains theoretical — and a new report shared exclusively with Canary Media suggests the path to proving it out is harder than many in the industry acknowledge.

It’s a chicken-and-egg situation. Next-gen nuclear startups must establish supplies of rare and legally sensitive types of fuel while also competing for a small pool of skilled workers and a limited output of valves, pumps, heat exchangers, and other equipment. Manufacturers are hesitant to ramp up production without a clear signal that advanced reactors will pan out. Investors, in turn, are leery of reactors meant for mass production that rely on unprepared supply chains.

That’s the core takeaway from the new analysis by the Nuclear Scaling Initiative, a campaign by the nonprofits Clean Air Task Force, the EFI Foundation, and the Nuclear Threat Initiative. The Nuclear Scaling Initiative launched in 2024 and aims to promote fleet-scale construction of reactors in a bid to start bringing at least 50 gigawatts of atomic power capacity online worldwide every year at some point in the 2030s.

The study, conducted by the nuclear consultancy Solestiss, highlights two paths it says are promising for the industry: either sticking to proven designs or simplifying supply chains to tap into the traditional nuclear business’ existing materials and know-how.

It comes as the Trump administration pumps billions of dollars into advanced reactors while also courting developers of more conventional large-scale reactors — and amid a high-stakes debate over which approach is best.

Earlier this month, the Bill Gates-backed TerraPower won the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s approval to begin construction on the country’s first commercial plant with sodium-cooled fast reactors in Wyoming. In December, the decommissioner-turned-developer Holtec International won a $400 million Department of Energy grant to build its first 300-megawatt small modular reactors in Michigan, using a pressurized-water-cooled design. The DOE awarded another $400 million grant to help American-Japanese joint venture GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy build its first 300-megawatt SMR in Tennessee, based on a traditional boiling water design.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, is trying to get developers to commit to building more AP1000s — the flagship large-scale reactor from Westinghouse Electric Co. The only two nuclear reactors designed and constructed in the U.S. this century used the Westinghouse design. (A third came online in 2016 but first started construction in 1973.)

The variety of designs racing to become the nation’s fourth new reactor in decades calls into question the feasibility of rapidly scaling up production of any one model.

“We can do any one of these first projects all at once. But can we sustain a build-out of TerraPower, GE, Westinghouse, and Holtec? All the ones that are just moving forward right now? The answer to that is not yet,” said Dillon Allen, president of the advisory services division at Solestiss, who started his career working on nuclear propulsion in the U.S. Navy before moving into the utility business. ​“Once you’re building four to eight AP1000s and a handful of SMRs of other sizes, you start to run into smaller component bottlenecks.”

Those bottlenecks would worsen if microreactor companies succeed in their objective of securing dozens and dozens of orders for their designs.

“While small reactors have been tried before, mass-manufactured small reactors have not,” Aalo Atomics CEO Matt Loszak, whose 10-megawatt reactors also use liquid sodium as a coolant, wrote in a post on X this week. ​“Small is more expensive than large, if you only make one reactor. But if you make 1000s per year, small could be cheaper than large. This is what Aalo is setting out to prove.”

One major obstacle to this plan is transportation. To build something and send it without prior testing is no problem, since a reactor that hasn’t been fired up and irradiated ​“is just a big hunk of metal,” Allen said. But once it’s irradiated, it’s subject to different considerations.

National laboratory researchers have started to discuss a framework for a U.S.-wide transportation network with established logistics and safety standards, the report notes, but no such rules have yet materialized.

The biggest barrier for next-gen nuclear, however, is likely to be the fuel supply. Some small reactor companies have been proactive here. Aalo, for example, has opted for the most commonly used reactor fuel on the planet, low-enriched uranium, so it can tap into the existing global supply chain.

But most advanced nuclear startups are banking on what’s known as fourth-generation reactors. These designs rely on coolants other than water and mostly aim to use one of two types of fuel: high-assay low-enriched uranium, commonly known as HALEU (pronounced HAY–loo), or tristructural isotropic fuel, for which HALEU is typically an input. Tristructural isotropic fuel is also known as TRISO.

HALEU, which firms like TerraPower and microreactor developer Oklo plan to use, is only really produced at a commercial scale by Russian and Chinese state-owned companies. Efforts to bring new centrifuges online in America are slow-going. Meanwhile, the TRISO fuel that startups such as Valar Atomics or Radiant need requires not only securing HALEU but also separating that enriched uranium into ceramic-coated pellets the size of poppy seeds. Manufacturers admit that TRISO may never cost less than low-enriched uranium.

The complications don’t stop there. Because HALEU is up to four times more enriched than traditional reactor fuel, it comes with stricter regulations. On the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s security-clearance scale of category one, which allows for handling normal reactor fuel, to three, which includes military-grade enrichment levels, facilities with HALEU need to be rated at a category two. No such facilities exist in the U.S. today, though the commission just issued its debut permit for one last month.

As for traditional fuel, the existing supply of low-enriched uranium falls short of what would be required to meet the U.S. goal of quadrupling the nation’s nuclear capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050.

“The supply chain is pretty well suited to support a fleet of 100 operating reactors,” Allen said, referring to the 94 commercial reactors in service in the U.S. ​“But then you can have 150, then 180, and pretty soon 200 after that. If you double that demand on the LEU supply, it’s not just the enrichment” that’s a limiting factor.

It’s also, he said, the production of raw uranium and the facilities to carry out conversion, where purified uranium ore is turned into a gas, and deconversion, where it’s solidified once again.

Expanding these upstream operations may be challenging, but it isn’t impossible. In fact, Allen said he came away from writing the report with the impression that supply chains are more capable of scaling up than he previously thought. But his team’s work demonstrates the steep obstacles faced by the entire industry — not only advanced reactor firms — as it attempts to bolt into action following decades of anemic construction in America.

The biggest impression the research left on Allen, he said, is that the AP1000 has a good shot at becoming the next reactor built in the U.S. Its costs are more predictable — and thus easier to finance — thanks to the lessons learned during construction of the two units that came online at Southern Co.’s Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in central Georgia in 2023 and 2024.

“I’m more bullish on the AP1000 than I was when I started this effort,” he said. ​“I’m broadly bullish on the supply chain.”

The DOE is considering alternatives to the AP1000 to satisfy President Donald Trump’s order to facilitate construction on at least 10 large-scale reactors by the end of the decade. In response to the news that the administration held talks with its rivals, Westinghouse said the AP1000 is​“the only construction-ready, gigawatt-scale, advanced modular reactor that is fully licensed and operating in the U.S.”

The U.S. ultimately should focus on designs it can scale up rather than spreading its efforts in many different directions, said Stephen Comello, the executive director of the Nuclear Scaling Initiative. At that point, nuclear power will become cheap enough to be ​“boring.”

“Once you start accumulating that knowledge from repetition, nuclear construction becomes boring — just like natural gas combined-cycle plants, just like all other complex megaprojects and energy infrastructure that’s out there,” he said.

There’s little doubt that the AP1000 has a well-established supply chain and data showing it runs well, he said.

The question is, ​“Can you do it in a repeatable, cost-effective way? That’s where the risk lies with the AP1000,” Comello said. ​“It runs, the technology is great. But we have to prove to investors that we can overcome the execution risk. But here’s the thing: All reactors share execution risk to some extent. Others have a technology risk because they are still not proven at scale.” 

March 25, 2026 Posted by | Small Modular Nuclear Reactors | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »