Tag: nuclear power

Fusion Ignition Breakthrough: Energy Researchers Report Tokamak Experiments That Exceed Mysterious ‘Plasma Density Limit’

In a potential new milestone for fusion energy research, researchers in China report achieving a state once only theorized for fusion plasmas, enabling stable operation under conditions that significantly exceed normal limits.

The achievement was made during experiments with China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), which reportedly produced fusion plasmas in a “density-free regime,” overcoming a longstanding hurdle to nuclear fusion ignition.

The team’s findings were featured in a new study in Science Advances, offering a fresh perspective on tackling one of the most significant impediments to practical fusion energy.

The Plasma Density Limit

Amid growing concerns about access to clean, sustainable energy, nuclear fusion has long been seen as one of the most promising avenues for future energy sources.

Despite its promise, harnessing nuclear fusion is easier said than done, since it involves fusion reactions between deuterium and tritium that require heating plasmas to around 150 million kelvins—temperatures that still only represent a fraction of the intense conditions that occur naturally on the surface of the Sun.

Nonetheless, achieving such temperatures in conventional tokamaks—devices physicists use to conduct controlled fusion experiments with hot plasmas—is challenging because of the currently known upper limit on attainable plasma density. In essence, energy levels above this boundary typically lead to instabilities that not only affect plasma confinement but also cause disruptions that can damage tokamaks.

A Fusion Ignition Breakthrough

The recent work reported in Science Advances is significant because the EAST experiments now demonstrate that the plasma density limit, which has long constrained the operational capabilities of tokamaks, may finally have been overcome.

The research, co-led by Prof. Zhu Ping from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Associate Prof. Yan Ning of the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, details the achievement of high-density plasmas at EAST, potentially extending stable operating periods without causing plasma disruption.

At the heart of the Chinese team’s work is a novel concept known as plasma-wall self-organization (PWSO) theory, which offers a unique approach to overcoming the plasma density limit. This theoretical approach, first developed by French physicist Dominique Franck Escande and colleagues with the French National Center for Scientific Research and Aix-Marseille University, holds that the key to overcoming plasma density issues involves attaining harmonious conditions between the plasma within the tokomak and its metallic walls, where physical forces increasingly impact the plasmas and their confinement as temperatures increase.

Verification of PWSO Theory

Although PWSO theory was initially introduced in 2021, it has yet to see verification in practice until now. According to the Chinese research team, the recent EAST experiments have successfully demonstrated the concept by combining careful control of fuel pressure with increased temperature during the initial startup phase of tokamak operation. During this time, electron cyclotron resonance heating is initiated, and with optimal control between fuel pressure and heating, the resulting plasma-wall interactions become more manageable from the outset.

The EAST researchers report that employing this process helps reduce potentially harmful interactions between the heated plasmas and the tokamak wall, limit impurity accumulation during confinement, and reduce overall energy loss.

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DOJ Grants Antitrust Immunity To Nuclear Fuel Companies

The Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division recently authorized antitrust immunity to companies involved in the domestic nuclear fuel chain. 

Stemming from the set of nuclear industry Executive Orders (EOs) issued earlier this year on May 23rd, the Department of Energy (DoE) established the Nuclear Fuel Chain Defense Production Act (DPA) Consortium back in August to meet some of the goals directed by the EOs. The consortium has since been working “to develop plans of action to ensure that the nuclear fuel supply chain capacity for mining and milling, conversion, enrichment, deconversion, fabrication, recycling and reprocessing is available to enable the continued reliable operation of the nation’s reactors.”

After some initial hype following the consortium’s establishment, rumors kicked back up about the potential for the government building a Strategic Uranium Reserve (SUR). However, most of the interest in the consortium’s activities/goals fell off after the government shutdown delayed the first meetings of the new group.

Fast forward to last week when the DOJ completed the required justification for the US government to enter into agreements with companies involved in the nuclear fuel chain that would have otherwise been illegal under antitrust laws. The DOJ presented their findings on December 19th, stating “the purposes … of the DPA may not reasonably be achieved through a voluntary agreement having less anticompetitive effects or without any voluntary agreement. Given this finding, the proposed Voluntary Agreement may become effective”.

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‘Her legs turned blue’: Nuclear plant radiation led to 12-inch blood clot in teen’s hip and deadly complications after she played in nearby creek, lawsuit says

An Ohio teenager died from complications of a bone marrow transplant after developing a “rare” genetic condition caused by radiation from a nuclear plant she lived by, her mother says in a lawsuit. The teen was diagnosed with a 12-inch blood clot in her hip and blood clots in her lungs before she died.

“Cheyenne Dunham, from birth until she was a teenager, regularly consumed food grown in a garden within close proximity to [the nuclear plant], including corn, tomatoes and beans,” lawyers for Cheyenne’s mother say in a 52-page legal complaint. “Cheyenne Dunham lived from age 4 or 5 until she was a teenager … in close proximity to [the nuclear plant]. At this home, Cheyenne Dunham played in a creek and ingested creek water.”

Cheyenne’s mother, Julia Dunham, is suing Centrus Energy in a wrongful death case for her 19-year-old daughter’s death in 2015. Julia became the administrator of Cheyenne’s estate in October and filed her complaint against Centrus Energy in late November. She says radiation from the company’s Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, referred to as PORTS, led to Cheyenne’s condition and health problems.

Officials shut down the plant in 2001 due to environmental concerns, including the proximity of a school just two miles away and numerous nearby homes.

On May 13, 2019, Zahn’s Corner Middle School in Piketon was “suddenly closed” after “enriched uranium” was detected inside the building, according to Julia Dunham’s complaint. Cheyenne was a student there for three years, from fourth through sixth grade.

“While at Zahn’s Corner, Cheyenne was exposed to radionuclides in excess of federal regulatory limits,” the complaint alleges. “She was also exposed to radionuclides in the Piketon community.”

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The AI Arms Race Is Cracking Open The Nuclear Fuel Cycle

  • The abstract “cloud” of artificial intelligence possesses a massive, structural demand for 24/7 “baseload” power that is equivalent to adding Germany’s entire power grid by 2026, a need intermittent renewables cannot meet.
  • Decades of underinvestment have resulted in a widening uranium supply deficit, with mined uranium expected to meet less than 75% of future reactor needs and an incentive price of $135/lb required to restart mothballed mines.
  • Big Tech hyperscalers are privatizing energy security by locking in clean baseload nuclear power via long-term agreements, effectively making the public grid’s “service” secondary to the “compute-ready” requirements of major platforms.

We are seeing a violent collision between two worlds: the high-speed, iterative world of artificial intelligence and the slow, grinding, capital-intensive world of nuclear physics. 

Data from a survey of over 600 global investors reveals that 63% now view AI electricity demand as a “structural” shift in nuclear planning. This isn’t a temporary spike or a speculative bubble. It is the physical footprint of every Large Language Model (LLM) query finally showing up on the global balance sheet.

For years, the energy narrative was dominated by “efficiency.” We were told that better chips would offset higher usage. That era is over. Generative AI doesn’t just use data; it incinerates energy to create it.

Why the “Efficiency” Narrative Failed

The “Reverse-Polish” reality of AI is that the more efficient we make the chips, the more chips we deploy, and the more complex the models become. This is Jevons Paradox playing out in real-time across the data centers of Northern Virginia and Singapore.

When you look at the energy density required for an AI hyperscale center, you aren’t looking at a traditional office building. You are looking at a facility that pulls as much power as a mid-sized city, but does so with a 99.999% uptime requirement.

Traditional demand models simply didn’t account for a single industry deciding to double its power footprint in less than five years. S&P Global Energy recently highlighted that data center electricity consumption could hit 2,200 terawatt-hours (TWh). 

Intermittent renewables…the darlings of the corporate ESG report…cannot provide the 24/7 “baseload” these machines require…

The hyperscalers have realized that if they want to dominate AI, they need to secure physical atoms before the other guy does.

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Russia to build nuclear plant on Moon to power rovers, labs during 336-hour long nights

Russia has unveiled its plans to build a nuclear power plant on the Moon within the next 10 years to support its lunar program and a Russian-Chinese research station for future deep-space missions.

The proposal, confirmed by the country’s state space agency Roscosmos, would provide a sustained energy source for surface infrastructure, including rovers, scientific equipment, as well as a planned joint lunar research base with China.

The announcement followed as the US, India, Japan as well as several European nations increased efforts to establish a permanent presence on Earth’s only natural satellite. The renewed interest was prompted by the 2009 discovery of water ice on the lunar surface.

Power generation remains a great challenge for sustained lunar operations due to the two-week-long nights that restrict solar power. However, a nuclear power plant could offer continuous power regardless of lighting conditions, temperature extremes, or dust accumulation.

Nuclear energy for space

For the 2036 project, Roscosmos revealed that it has signed a contract with the Lavochkin Association, a Russian aerospace firm with decades of experience in planetary spacecraft development.

Even though the space agency did not explicitly describe the facility as a nuclear reactor, it confirmed the initiative involves Rosatom, the nation’s state nuclear corporation, as well as the Kurchatov Institute, Russia’s leading nuclear research center.

According to Roscosmos, the lunar power plant would support a broad range of activities tied to Russia’s lunar program. These include powering robotic rovers, an observatory and maintaining the infrastructure of the planned International Lunar Research Station.

“The project is an important step towards the creation of a permanently functioning scientific lunar station and the transition from one-time missions to a long-term lunar exploration programme,” Roscosmos said.

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China Successfully Operates World’s First Thorium Molten Salt Reactor

An experimental Chinese nuclear plant reportedly just crossed a historic threshold, successfully operating the world’s first thorium-based molten salt reactor (TMSR). The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics has broken a major scientific barrier by successfully converting thorium to uranium in a historic first.

The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reports that the breakthrough, which took place at an experimental reactor out in the Gobi Desert, is “poised to reshape the future of clean sustainable nuclear energy.” 

The process works by using a “precise sequence of nuclear reactions” in which naturally occurring thorium-232 absorbs a neutron, becoming thorium-233. Through a decay process, that isotope breaks down into protactinium-233 and then finally into uranium-233, a potent form of nuclear fuel that can sustain chain reactions for nuclear fission.

While this breakthrough was just publicized this month by a report by Science and Technology Daily, the TMSR has apparently been operational for years. Li Qingnuan, Communist Party secretary and deputy director at the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, told the outlet that “since achieving first criticality on October 11, 2023, the thorium molten salt reactor has been steadily generating heat through nuclear fission”.

If the reports are true, this breakthrough would signal an incredible leap forward in a nuclear technology race that China is already winning handily. Although the United States is still the world’s biggest producer of nuclear energy, that status won’t last much longer. In the same time period that the United States built the overdue and over-budget Plant Vogtle, China built 13 reactors of similar scale, and has 33 more on the way. Beijing is also making major forays into the nuclear sectors of emerging economies, with particularly concerted efforts in Africa.

“The Chinese are moving very, very fast,” Mark Hibbs, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and expert on the Chinese nuclear sector, told the New York Times. “They are very keen to show the world that their program is unstoppable.”

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The Trump Administration’s Top Nuclear Scientists Think AI Can Replace Humans in Power Plants

During a presentation at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence on December 3, a US Department of Energy scientist laid out a grand vision of the future where nuclear energy powers artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence shapes nuclear energy in “a virtuous cycle of peaceful nuclear deployment.”

“The goal is simple: to double the productivity and impact of American science and engineering within a decade,” Rian Bahran, DOE Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Reactors, said.

His presentation and others during the symposium, held in Vienna, Austria, described a world where nuclear powered AI designs, builds, and even runs the nuclear power plants they’ll need to sustain them. But experts find these claims, made by one of the top nuclear scientists working for the Trump administration, to be concerning and potentially dangerous. 

Tech companies are using artificial intelligence to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants in the United States. But few know the lengths to which the Trump administration is paving the way and the part it’s playing in deregulating a highly regulated industry to ensure that AI data centers have the energy they need to shape the future of America and the world.

At the IAEA, scientists, nuclear energy experts, and lobbyists discussed what that future might look like. To say the nuclear people are bullish on AI is an understatement. “I call this not just a partnership but a structural alliance. Atoms for algorithms. Artificial intelligence is not just powered by nuclear energy. It’s also improving it because this is a two way street,” IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in his opening remarks.

In his talk, Bahran explained that the DOE has partnered with private industry to invest $1 trillion to “build what will be an integrated platform that connects the world’s best supercomputers, AI systems, quantum systems, advanced scientific instruments, the singular scientific data sets at the National Laboratories—including the expertise of 40,000 scientists and engineers—in one platform.”

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Energy Department loans $1B to help finance the restart of nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island

The U.S. Department of Energy said Tuesday that it will loan $1 billion to help finance the restart of the nuclear power plant on Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island that is under contract to supply power to data centers for tech giant Microsoft.

The loan is in line with the priorities of President Donald Trump’s administration, including bolstering nuclear power and artificial intelligence.

For Constellation Energy, which owns Three Mile Island’s lone functioning nuclear power reactor, the federal loan will lower its financing cost to get the mothballed plant up and running again. The 835-megawatt reactor can power the equivalent of approximately 800,000 homes, the Department of Energy said.

The reactor had been out of operation for five years when Constellation Energy announced last year that it would spend $1.6 billion to restart it under a 20-year agreement with Microsoft to buy the power for its data centers.

Constellation Energy renamed the functioning unit the Crane Clean Energy Center as it works to restore equipment including the turbine, generator, main power transformer and cooling and control systems. It hopes to bring the plant back online in 2027.

The loan is being issued under an existing $250 billion energy infrastructure program initially authorized by Congress in 2022. Neither the department nor Constellation released terms of the loan.

The plant, on an island in the Susquehanna River just outside Harrisburg, was the site of the nation’s worst commercial nuclear power accident, in 1979. The accident destroyed one reactor, Unit 2, and left the plant with one functioning reactor, Unit 1.

In 2019, Constellation Energy’s then-parent company Exelon shut down the functioning reactor, saying it was losing money and Pennsylvania lawmakers had refused to subsidize it to keep it running.

The plan to restart the reactor comes amid something of a renaissance for nuclear power, as policymakers are increasingly looking to it to shore up the nation’s power supply, help avoid the worst effects of climate change and meet rising power demand driven by data centers.

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Trump Admin To Lend “Hundreds Of Billions” To Build Nuclear Power Plants

While the market is finally starting to grapple with the most unpleasant question of who will plug the funding gap needed to build out all the data centers required to make the AI dream a reality, a gap which Morgan Stanley recently calculated would be as large as $2.9 trillion in capex funding needs, of which at least $1 trillion will come in the form of debt (and mostly private debt)…

… there is another, just as critical question: who will fund the energy buildout that powers these data centers? 

Recall, last December Morgan Stanley calculated that the US would need at least 36GW in new power to be brought online by 2028 to energize all the (yet to be built) data centers, a number which one year later is surely far higher. 

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The largest project in the history of humanity is about to enter a key phase the final assembly of the reactor core led by an american giant

The world’s largest and most ambitious fusion energy project has reached a turning point as Westinghouse Electric Company begins assembling the heart of ITER’s fusion reactor in Cadarache, southern France. The international effort, designed to replicate the energy of the sun, could one day provide humanity with an endless supply of clean, sustainable power.

Westinghouse leads final assembly of ITER’s tokamak core

In August 2025, the ITER fusion project entered one of its most technically demanding phases — the final assembly of the reactor’s tokamak core. Westinghouse, a global leader in nuclear technology, secured a €168 million contract to oversee the installation and welding of nine giant steel sectors that will form the tokamak’s vacuum vessel, the central chamber where fusion will occur.

This donut-shaped vessel must be perfectly circular and hermetically sealed, as it will contain plasma heated to over 150 million degrees Celsius—hotter than the core of the sun. Each sector, weighing about 400 tons, requires millimeter-level precision to ensure the system’s stability and safety during operation.

Westinghouse’s experience spans over a decade of work with Ansaldo Nucleare and Walter Tosto through the AMW consortium, which produced five of the nine reactor sectors. Their expertise ensures precision in both construction and integration, as the vessel must endure enormous magnetic and thermal stresses.

As former ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot once said, “Assembling this is like putting together a three-dimensional puzzle on an industrial scale.” Every weld, joint, and component must perform flawlessly to contain a process capable of replicating stellar reactions on Earth.

Global collaboration of unprecedented scale

ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) represents one of the greatest examples of scientific collaboration in history. Bringing together 35 nations—including the European Union, the United States, China, Japan, Russia, India, and South Korea—the project unites over half the world’s population and 85% of global GDP toward a common goal: sustainable energy.

Each participating country contributes precision-built components manufactured across four continents, shipped to France for assembly. This global supply chain transforms ITER into a model for future international cooperation in large-scale science and technology projects.

The result is more than just a reactor—it’s a demonstration of how humanity can coordinate resources and knowledge to solve planetary challenges, setting a precedent for future global energy innovations.

Technical ambitions and timeline challenges

ITER’s goal is to produce 500 megawatts of fusion power from just 50 megawatts of input—a tenfold return that would confirm the commercial viability of nuclear fusion. Achieving this would redefine global energy systems and represent a technological breakthrough comparable to the invention of electricity itself.

However, progress hasn’t come without challenges. Since construction began in 2010, ITER’s timeline has been extended multiple times due to technical complexity, supply chain coordination, and the unprecedented scale of the project. Originally scheduled for first plasma by 2018, the target now stands at 2035 for the first deuterium-tritium fusion experiments.

This delay underscores fusion’s enduring difficulty: creating and maintaining the extreme conditions necessary for sustained reaction. As the saying goes in the industry, “Fusion is always 30 years away”—a reminder of both the ambition and patience required for such pioneering work.

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