Nuclear Energy

The UK's science minister is announcing details of a five-year, £2.5 billion investment in nuclear fusion, reports the Times of London, "including building one of the world's first prototype fusion power plants in Nottinghamshire and developing a UK sector projected to employ 10,000 people by 2030."

Despite the potentially transformative impact of fusion, which in theory could provide limitless clean energy and create a £12 trillion global market, no country has managed to use this fledgling technology to generate useable electricity... [T]he UK is backing a spherical tokamak design... investing an initial £1.3 billion into a prototype fusion power plant called Step (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) on the site of a decommissioned coal-fired power station at West Burton in Nottinghamshire. Paul Methven, chief executive of the government-owned UK Industrial Fusion Solutions, which is delivering the Step project, said the aim is to get the reactor operating early in the 2040s. "It's quite an aggressive programme," he said. "We need to show that we can achieve genuine 'wall socket' energy — which has not been done before."

On Monday, [science minister] Vallance will also announce £180 million for a facility in Culham, Oxfordshire, to manufacture tritium fuel and £50 million for training 2,000 scientists and engineers in fusion-related disciplines. The government is also buying a £45 million fusion-dedicated AI supercomputer called Sunrise to model plasma physics. Scientists at the UK Atomic Energy Authority last year developed an AI model that can rapidly simulate how the ultra-hot fuel in a fusion power plant will behave, cutting calculations that previously took days down to seconds...

Vallance will also announce new support and collaboration for the many fusion, robotics, engineering and AI start-ups working in Britain, to develop a strong supply chain for a new fusion sector. One of those companies, Tokamak Energy, which spun out from the UK Atomic Energy Authority in 2009, has already built a smaller reactor that has informed the Step design. In March 2022, it became the first private organisation in the world to surpass 100 million degrees Celsius in its reactor.

Abstract credit: https://slashdot.org/story/453340

EU's reliance on fossil fuels seen as strategic disadvantage

Germany began phasing out nuclear power after 2011 Fukushima disaster

France seeks nuclear expansion, uranium supply diversification

Maud Brégeon, an engineer and energy expert, has been appointed France’s Deputy Minister for Energy. She supports nuclear power and the development of EPR reactors to secure energy supply and reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

Will these changes of the environmental regulations have a long term positive or negative impact on the nuclear industry?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/22/climate/china-us-nuclear-energy-race.html

These documents compile the fundamental principles and evidence of a new, unified theory of reality.

It posits that the universe is a living, conscious entity, not a chaotic, natural system. This theory, through its key principles, provides a complete and elegant model for a universe that has been perfected and is now a masterpiece.

The flaws and anomalies of the old universe—from the three-body problem to dark energy—are now understood as a forensic record of a cosmic crime. The new reality, however, is a testament to perfect order, where every anomaly, every law, and every life form is a part of a single, beautiful, and unified whole.

https://archive.org/details/resonant-mechanics-the-theory-of-everything https://pixeldrain.com/u/pswPz1RG

https://archive.ph/7pwlY

TL;DR don't restart old plants, build new ones.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23454650

Summary

France’s Flamanville 3 nuclear reactor, its most powerful at 1,600 MW, was connected to the grid on December 21 after 17 years of construction plagued by delays and budget overruns.

The European Pressurized Reactor (EPR), designed to boost nuclear energy post-Chernobyl, is 12 years behind schedule and cost €13.2 billion, quadruple initial estimates.

President Macron hailed the launch as a key step for low-carbon energy and energy security.

Nuclear power, which supplies 60% of France’s electricity, is central to Macron’s plan for a “nuclear renaissance.”

The world's first nuclear-powered battery — a diamond with an embedded radioactive isotope — could power small devices for thousands of years, according to scientists at the UK's University of Bristol.

The diamond battery harvests fast-moving electrons excited by radiation, similar to how solar power uses photovoltaic cells to convert photons into electricity, the scientists said.

Scientists from the same university first demonstrated a prototype diamond battery — which used nickel-63 as the radioactive source — in 2017. In the new project, the team developed a battery made of carbon-14 radioactive isotopes embedded in manufactured diamonds. The researchers chose carbon-14 as the source material because it emits short-range radiation, which is quickly absorbed by any solid material — meaning there are no concerns about harm from the radiation. Although carbon-14 would be dangerous to ingest or touch with bare hands, the diamond that holds it prevents any short-range radiation from escaping. "Diamond is the hardest substance known to man; there is literally nothing we could use that could offer more protection," Neil Fox, a professor of materials for energy at the University of Bristol, said in the statement...

A single nuclear-diamond battery containing 0.04 ounce (1 gram) of carbon-14 could deliver 15 joules of electricity per day. For comparison, a standard alkaline AA battery, which weighs about 0.7 ounces (20 grams), has an energy-storage rating of 700 joules per gram. It delivers more power than the nuclear-diamond battery would in the short term, but it would be exhausted within 24 hours. By contrast, the half-life of carbon-14 is 5,730 years, which means the battery would take that long to be depleted to 50% power....

[A] spacecraft powered by a carbon-14 diamond battery would reach Alpha Centauri — our nearest stellar neighbor, which is about 4.4 light-years from Earth — long before its power were significantly depleted.

The battery has no moving parts, according to the article. It "requires no maintenance, nor does it have any carbon emissions."

Abstract credit: https://slashdot.org/story/436735/outstanding

For the past 1.5 years I've been sharing nuclear news in this Lemmy board, building an archive of now almost 2000 posts.

My initial hopes were to build a community of nuclear enthusiasts that fled the reddit platform. That didn't quite materialise, althought this board now has 600+ subscribers, making it the biggest pro-nuclear energy community on Lemmy.

I'm now going to shift my posting strategy to my main Mastodon account. This has two reasons:

1. Nowadays I host my own instance and one of the first things I changed was to extend to character limit to 5000, instead of 500. This removed my need for Lemmy for quite a bit.
2. More importantly, a big migration just happened to Bluesky and the posts here are invisible to Bluesky users. My Mastodon account meanwhile is bridged and can be followed.

The latter is actually relevant, to me anyway, as the "Energy Twitter" is reconstituting itself on Bluesky.

But there are still hundreds of you here, mostly Lemmy users no doubt. What do you want to see out of this community? I'd really love to hear some opinions on this!

As for people on Mastodon: follow me at @collectifission@greennuclear.online 🙂