Tootfinder

Familiar story: Cost estimate for the first 6 new #nuclear reactors in France up by 40% in three years. And that's 13 years before the first one would be completed (not accounting for delays).
Btw, that €73 billion is in Euros of 2020; better known as €85 billion now.

A return to nuclear power is at the heart of Japan’s energy policy
-- but, in the wake of the 2011 disaster,
residents’ fears about tsunamis, earthquakes and evacuation plans remain
Activity around the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant is reaching its peak:
workers remove earth to expand the width of a main road,
while lorries arrive at its heavily guarded entrance.
When all seven of its reactors are working, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa generates 8.2 gigawatt…

Holy sh*t, what timing. The National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA, is furloughing 1,400 people on a day that I broke the story that a foreign threat actor infiltrated the NNSA's Kansas City manufacturing plant.
This story broke after my exclusive on how foreign threat actors infiltrated the NNSA''s Kansas City plant went live.

Federal agency overseeing US nuclear stockpile will furlough most of its workforce starting Monday
The federal agency responsible for overseeing and modernizing the US nuclear stockpile will furlough the vast majority of its staff Monday as the government shutdown drags on, according to the Department of Energy.

The US DOE will provide Constellation with a $1B loan to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant; the output will be sold to Microsoft under a 20-year deal (Costas Paris/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/t…

Seeing the discussion, I’d like to clarify:
This post is not a statement on #nuclear energy. I was responding to the specific article that I shared, where @… reported that tech companies are “using AI to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants.”
My point is - cutting corners and trying to “speed up” the construction or operation of nuclear power plants can have CATASTROPHIC effects.
Chernobyl was a disaster of mismanagement, cost cutting, and insufficient safety procedures.
I do not trust AI, a technology that is notoriously probabilistic and inconsistent in outputs (and with famously high error rates) to be reliable and competent for a use case where the risks are this high.
I also do not support the mindset of wanting to “speed up” ANY regulatory processes and safety checks when it comes to constructing nuclear power infrastructure.
Licensing is not a “bottleneck” here. It’s a safety prerogative.
(Thanks @… for bringing this to my attention!)

Is anybody counting up the carbon footprint of AI? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller? https://merveilles.town/@lrhodes/115900810202010965

»Tech companies are betting big on nuclear energy to meet AIs massive power demands and they're using that AI to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants.«
What could possibly go wrong. Trust me, I'm an engineer. 🤦
Full story over at @…:

Power Companies Are Using AI To Build Nuclear Power Plants
Tech companies are betting big on nuclear energy to meet AIs massive power demands and they're using that AI to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants.

Considering that the US currently lacks the capability to safely land payloads on the moon, the timeline seems rather aggressive.
NASA, Department of Energy To Develop Lunar Surface Reactor By 2030 - Slashdot https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/

Ukraine nuclear energy sector official arrested over bribery scheme: https://benborges.xyz/2025/11/05/ukraine-nuclear-energy-sector-official.html

Power Companies Are Using AI To Build Nuclear Power Plants https://www.404media.co/power-companies-are-using-ai-to-build-nuclear-power-plants/

Meta signs nuclear energy deals to power Prometheus AI supercluster
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/09/meta-signs-nuclear-energy-deals-to-power-prometheus-ai-supercluster.html

The Economist: Geothermal energy’s massive leap forward
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JeTAeF3Ft6E
From video's description: "Could geothermal soon overtake nuclear power? Vijay Vaitheeswaran, our Global energy & climate innovation editor and winner of the Energy Write…

Now we see why Trump wants AI companies to thrive. There's every chance that AI companies are motivated and committed to "funding" this fusion company.
Just one more stop in the AI "investment circle jerk".
#corruption #nuclear #energy #fusion #business #finance

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
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 ene…

‘Atoms for Algorithms:’ The Trump Administration’s Top Nuclear Scientists Think AI Can Replace Humans in Power Plants
A presentation at the International Atomic Energy Agency unveiled Big Tech’s vision of an AI and nuclear fueled future.

Heute vor 23 Jahren: Am 17. November 2002 kam es in einer Kernbrennstoffanlage für #Uranoxid-Brennstoff in Hyderabad, Indien zu einer Explosion einer Thermosiphon-Verdampfereinheit. 100 Liter Lösung (100g Uran/Liter) wurden dabei im Gebäude freigesetzt.

WTF. From Matt Gault for @… :
https://www.404media.co/nuclear-rian-bahran-iaea-international-symposium-on-art…

‘Atoms for Algorithms:’ The Trump Administration’s Top Nuclear Scientists Think AI Can Replace Humans in Power Plants
A presentation at the International Atomic Energy Agency unveiled Big Tech’s vision of an AI and nuclear fueled future.

The battery is often the first thing to fail with electronic medical implants, so... https://spectrum.ieee.org/nuclear-battery-revival IEEE Spectrum: The unlikely revival of nuclear batteries.

Nuclear Batteries: Energy Storage for Decades
Nuclear batteries that last decades are being developed to power drones, sensors, remote devices and medical implants. Energy storage at its extreme.

Nuclear power has no special virtues that could possibly justify overpaying for energy like this. Instead of asking—as so many do—how to make nuclear cheaper and faster after decades of real-world proof that it’s nigh-impossible to do (outside of China), we should be asking—as virtually no one does—why anyone even wants to build them.
My best guess:

[Episode #237] – Why Nuclear? | The Energy Transition Show
What are the specific industrial sectors and processes that produce greenhouse gas emissions, and how can we decarbonize them?

Russia targeted substations powering nuclear plants during large-scale overnight energy attacks, Sybiha says: https://benborges.xyz/2025/11/08/russia-targeted-substations-powering-nuclear.html

"Due to [nuclear's] cost and complexity, it will not provide cheap or low-emission electricity in timeframe or scale that matters as climate change continues to broil an indifferent civilization."
The New Nuclear Fever, Debunked - resilience
https://www.resilience.org/stori…

The New Nuclear Fever, Debunked
An honest and imperfect response to the climate crisis would require a political, behavioural, economic and moral transition that would systematically reduce our energy and material consumption at an unprecedented pace. But that’s not an action any modern politician seems to be able to contemplate, let alone discuss.

Bloomberg News: «There is still a very real gap in the current value, or stock, of all the investments that the US and China have out in the world. At the end of 2024, the total value of US companies' long-term physical investments overseas was some $6.8 trillion», 5 more than China.
https://archive.is/WR8NN…

When the UK's new nuclear power plant Hinkley Point C starts to produce power in 2030, its guaranteed 'strike price' will have risen to ~150 £/MWh (170 €/MWh). Average wholesale electricity prices will probably be around half of that, so that's a 50% subsidy.
At an annual production of 25 million MWh (3.2 GW in baseload), I'd say that's £1.9 billion per year in subsidies.

🗜️ A Review of the Research and Development of Brayton Cycle Technology in Nuclear Power Applications with a Focus on Compressor Technology
#energy

NextEra Energy and Google sign a 25-year power supply deal, which includes restarting the 615MW Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa, shut down in 2020 (Vallari Srivastava/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nexter…

Thermal one-loop self-energy correction for hydrogen-like systems: relativistic approach
M. Reiter, D. Solovyev, A. Bobylev, D. Glazov, T. Zalialiutdinov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06828 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06828 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.06828
arXiv:2512.06828v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Within a fully relativistic framework, the one-loop self-energy correction for a bound electron is derived and extended to incorporate the effects of external thermal radiation. In a series of previous works, it was shown that in quantum electrodynamics at finite temperature (QED), the description of effects caused by blackbody radiation can be reduced to using the thermal part of the photon propagator. As a consequence of the non-relativistic approximation in the calculation of the thermal one-loop self-energy correction, well-known quantum-mechanical (QM) phenomena emerge at successive orders: the Stark effect arises at leading order in $\alpha Z$, the Zeeman effect appears in the next-to-leading non-relativistic correction, accompanied by diamagnetic contributions and their relativistic refinements, among other perturbative corrections. The fully relativistic approach used in this work for calculating the SE contribution allows for accurate calculations of the thermal shift of atomic levels, in which all these effects are automatically taken into account. The hydrogen atom serves as the basis for testing a fully relativistic approach to such calculations. Additionally, an analysis is presented of the behavior of the thermal shift caused by the thermal one-loop correction to the self-energy of a bound electron for hydrogen-like ions with an arbitrary nuclear charge $Z$. The significance of these calculations lies in their relevance to contemporary high-precision experiments, where thermal radiation constitutes one of the major contributions to the overall uncertainty budget.
toXiv_bot_toot

🚀 AI's Energy Crisis?
#AI is exploding, but scaling compute with more data & power is too slow and costly—data centers are building nuclear plants! We need smarter ways to turn energy into intelligence.
🧠 Nature-Inspired Innovation At #Extropic rethinks hardware: Probabilistic computers using thermodynamic principles for massive efficiency. Core: "Pits" (probabilistic bits) that flicker between states for sampling probabilities.
🧵 👇

The hyperscalers' plans for powering their AI datacentres are mostly nuclear, including investing in small modular reactors.
I'm all for that, as long as they don't externalise all the negatives to governments and leave them (us) holding the bag of deadly waste when the bubble bursts.
That sounds too negative. I am genuinely pro-nuclear energy and look forward to the research, just, I don't trust billionaires.
"LINX125: AI Mega Data Centers – Power From…

‘Atoms for Algorithms:’ The Trump Administration’s Top Nuclear Scientists Think AI Can Replace Humans in Power Plants https://www.404media.co/nuclear-rian-bahran-iaea-international-symposium-on-artificial-intelligence/

⚓ Research on Integrated Modularization of Supercritical Carbon Dioxide System for Aircraft Carrier Nuclear Power
#energy

A look at Fermi, a startup co-founded by ex-US Energy Secretary Rick Perry that aims to build one of the world's largest datacenter campuses in Texas by 2038 (Jennifer Hiller/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/bus…

"Unless the Starmer government is plotting to reopen the fight with residents of Orkney, who already beat back efforts in the mid-1970s to mine uranium there, there is nothing “homegrown” about nuclear energy."
The “Golden Age of Nuclear” is all a veneer | Beyond Nuclear International
https://…

The “Golden Age of Nuclear” is all a veneer
A promise sheet from corporations is empty rhetoric and worse

A protective shield at the Chornobyl nuclear plant in war-torn Ukraine,
built to contain radioactive material from the 1986 disaster,
can no longer perform its main safety function
due to drone damage,
the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Friday,
a strike Ukraine has attributed to Russia.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said an inspection last week of the steel confinement structure completed in 2019
found the drone impact in February, three year…

A new Trump administration program is sidestepping the regulatory system that's overseen the nuclear industry for half a century.
The program will fast-track construction of new and untested reactor designs built by private firms,
with an explicit goal of having at least three nuclear test reactors up and running by the United States' 250th birthday, July 4, 2026.
If that goal is met, it will be without the direct oversight of America's primary nuclear regulat…

Trump's rush to build nuclear reactors across the U.S. raises safety worries
A new program at the Department of Energy is pushing the development of nearly a dozen new reactor designs at breakneck speed.

Kyiv names new board members of state nuclear energy company in wake of corruption scandal: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/31/kyiv-names-new-board-members.html

Iran on Thursday said it was ending the agreement it signed in September
allowing the International Atomic Energy Agency to resume inspections there,
after a resolution passed earlier in the day by the agency’s board
demanding “precise information” about Tehran’s enriched uranium and nuclear sites “without delay.”

A statement by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that countries that voted for the resolution
— backed by France, Britain, Germany and the …

Iran cancels new nuclear inspections it agreed to after bombing campaign
The termination of the agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency follows U.S.- and European-led charges that access has been denied.

In one of his wildest moves to date, Trump is now offering companies access to plutonium from America’s arsenal of cold war nuclear missiles.
On Tuesday, the US Department of Energy (DOE) launched an application for interested parties to apply for access to a maximum of 19 metric tonnes
— a little under 42,000 pounds
— of weapons-grade plutonium, which has long been a key resource undergirding the US nuclear arsenal.
One of the companies anticipated to receive shipmen…

Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman
The White House is providing plutonium to Sam Altman's Oklo, one of four US companies chosen to test experimental reactor designs.

Amazon-backed nuclear reactor developer X-energy raised $700M led by Jane Street, taking its total funding to $1.4B, to build 150 SMRs in the US and the UK (Jamie Smyth/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/59d9b7d5-e34b-4131-b80f-815208a2d4cc