Tootfinder

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.

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

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

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

Trajectory-Dependent Electronic Energy Losses in Ion Range Simulations
Glen P. Kiely, Bruno Semi\~ao, Evgeniia Ponomareva, Rafael Nu\~nez-Palacio, Unna Arpiainen, Andrea E. Sand
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08422

Trajectory-Dependent Electronic Energy Losses in Ion Range Simulations
The energy losses of energetic ions in materials depend on both nuclear and electronic interactions. In channeling geometries, the stopping effect of these interactions can be highly reduced, resulting in deeper ion penetration. Comprehensive, trajectory-dependent models for ion-material interactions are therefore crucial for the accurate prediction of ion range profiles. We present the implementation of a recent electron density-dependent energy-loss model in the efficient molecular dynamics-b…

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

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?

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

Charge state regulation of nuclear excitation by electron capture in $^{229}$Th ions
Yang-Yang Xu, Qiong Xiao, Jun-Hao Cheng, Wen-Yu Zhang, Tong-Pu Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08212

Charge state regulation of nuclear excitation by electron capture in $^{229}$Th ions
Nuclear excitation by electron capture (NEEC) in $^{229}$Th holds significant potential for precise nuclear state manipulation. In this study, we thoroughly investigate NEEC in $^{229}\text{Th}^{q+}$ ions by integrating quantum numbers ($n, l, j$) effects and analyzing key parameters (e.g., resonance energy $E_r$, cross section $σ$, resonance strength $S$, and NEEC transition width $Γ_{\text{NEEC}}$) influences across charge state from $q=1^+$ to $90^+$. Especially, we focus on the charge-sta…

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.

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 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…

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.

‘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/

"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.

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…

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.

»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.

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…

🚀 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.
🧵 👇

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!)

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…

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.

Gamow shell model calculations for the Thomas-Ehrman shift in new isotopes 21Al
K. H. Li, N. Chen, J. G. Li, H. H. Li, M. R. Xie, C. W. Ma, W. Zuo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07701

Gamow shell model calculations for the Thomas-Ehrman shift in new isotopes 21Al
Proton-rich nuclei beyond the proton drip line exhibit unique phenomena, such as the Thomas-Ehrman shift (TES), providing valuable insights into nuclear stability and isospin symmetry breaking. The discovery of the lightest new isotope, 21Al, situated beyond the proton drip line, was recently reported in the experiment. In this study, we employ the Gamow shell model (GSM) to explore the TES in mirror pairs 21Al/21O, focusing on how this phenomenon affects the energy levels of these nuclei. Our …

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

Jet Energy-Energy Correlator in Cold QCD Matter
Yu Fu, Berndt M\"uller, Chathuranga Sirimanna
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08927 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

Jet Energy-Energy Correlator in Cold QCD Matter
We present a study of medium-induced modifications to the energy-energy correlator (EEC) for jets in cold nuclear matter. For electron-nucleus collisions, at leading order in the QCD coupling and in the jet-medium interaction, we derive an analytic expression for the EEC modification as a function of the opening angle and show that the modification is strongest at large angles within the jet cone. The dependence on jet energy, the transport properties of cold nuclear matter, and the in-medium p…

"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 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.

JWST and Keck Observations of the Off-Nuclear TDE AT 2024tvd: A Massive Nuclear Star Cluster and Minor-Merger Origin for its Black Hole
Kishore C. Patra, Ryan J. Foley, Nicholas Earl, Kyle W. Davis, Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, V. Ashley Villar, Sebastian Gomez, K. Decker French, Kirsty Taggart, Prasiddha Arunachalam, Phillip Macias, Ravjit Kaur, Samaporn Tinyanont
htt…

JWST and Keck Observations of the Off-Nuclear TDE AT 2024tvd: A Massive Nuclear Star Cluster and Minor-Merger Origin for its Black Hole
We present JWST/NIRSpec and NIRCam observations of the first optically selected off-nuclear tidal disruption event (TDE), AT 2024tvd, along with Keck/KCWI integral field unit spectroscopy. The spectra show broad H and He emission lines that are characteristic of a TDE. Stellar kinematics show smooth host-galaxy morphology and ordered bulge rotation, with no evidence of disturbances in velocity, dispersion, age or metallicity space. We construct the first quasi-simultaneous spectral-energy distr…

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…

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

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…

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.

> Fueled by depression, the man meant to back up his collection and create a base for training AI to make better “robot pornography” but he uploaded it to the government computer by accident.
https://infosec.exchange/@josephcox/115372769635804774

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

I read this sentence in an article of about powering ships:
"This breakthrough is seen as China’s “trump card” in fourth-generation nuclear energy ..."
This use of the word trump will have to be replaced, because I am sure that I am not the only one who is triggered by that word.

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.

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.

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

The mass of $^{101}$Sn and Bayesian extrapolations to the proton drip line
Christian M. Ireland, Georg Bollen, Scott E. Campbell, Xiangcheng Chen, Hannah Erington, Nadeesha D. Gamage, Kyle Godbey, Alicen M. Houff, Christopher Izzo, Bailey Knight, Sudhanva Lalit, Erich Leistenschneider, E. Marilena Lykiardopoulou, Franziska M. Maier, Witold Nazarewicz, Rodney Orford, William S. Porter, Caleb Quick, Ante Ravlic, Matthew Redshaw, Paul-Gerhard Reinhard, Ryan Ringle, Stefan Schwarz, Chandan…

The mass of $^{101}$Sn and Bayesian extrapolations to the proton drip line
The favorable energy configurations of nuclei at magic numbers of ${N}$ neutrons and ${Z}$ protons are fundamental for understanding the evolution of nuclear structure. The ${Z=50}$ (tin) isotopic chain is a frontier for such studies, with particular interest in nuclear binding at and around the doubly-magic \textsuperscript{100}Sn isotope. Precise mass measurements of neutron-deficient isotopes provide necessary anchor points for mass models to test extrapolations near the proton drip line, wh…

The Trump administration is planning to furlough the vast majority of the civilian staff at a key agency that helps manage the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
The National Nuclear Security Administration, which falls under the Energy Department,
will exhaust its available funding on Saturday,
according to the notice NNSA sent to lawmakers.
As a result, approximately 1,400 employees will be furloughed,
the notice states, while about 375 will remain on the job…

Indirect method for nuclear reactions and the role of the self energy
Gregory Potel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09140 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09140

Indirect method for nuclear reactions and the role of the self energy
When a nuclear species (e.g., a nucleon or a deuteron nucleus) propagating freely is made to collide with a target nucleus, its trajectory is modified by exchanging variable amounts of energy, mass, linear and angular momentum with the target, according to its interaction with the nuclear medium. By addressing this perturbation away from the free path, one hopes to learn something about the nature of the medium through which our probe propagates. This is the essence of the experimental use of n…

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

Discovery of suppressed charged-particle production in ultrarelativistic oxygen-oxygen collisions
CMS Collaboration
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09864 https://

Discovery of suppressed charged-particle production in ultrarelativistic oxygen-oxygen collisions
A hot and dense state of nuclear matter, known as the quark-gluon plasma, is created in collisions of ultrarelativistic heavy nuclei. Highly energetic quarks and gluons, collectively referred to as partons, lose energy as they travel through this matter, leading to suppressed production of particles with large transverse momenta ($p_\mathrm{T}$). Conversely, high-$p_\mathrm{T}$ particle suppression has not been seen in proton-lead collisions, raising questions regarding the minimum system size …