Chernobyl radiation shield'lost safety function' after drone strike, UN watchdog says A protective shield covering the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine can no longer provide its main containment function following a drone strike earlier this year, according to a UN watchdog. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors found that the massive structure, built over the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster, had lost its primary safety functions including the confinement capability. In February, Ukraine accused Russia of targeting the power plant - a claim the Kremlin denied. The IAEA said repairs were essential to prevent further degradation of the nuclear shelter. However environmental expert Jim Smith told the BBC: It is not something to panic about.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright announces support for restarting Three Mile Island's nuclear reactor to boost grid capacity and support AI data centers.

Valar Atomics Says It's the First Nuclear Startup to Achieve Criticality A Trump administration pilot program aims for three nuclear startups to reach a key milestone by July 4, 2026. Valar Atomics says it's the first to do so--but it had some help. The El Segundo, California-based startup, which last week announced it had secured a $130 million funding round with backing from Palmer Luckey and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, claims that it is the first nuclear startup to create a critical fission reaction. It's also, more specifically, the first company in a special Department of Energy pilot program aiming to get at least three startups to criticality by July 4 of next year to announce it had achieved this reaction. The pilot program, which was formed following an executive order president Donald Trump signed in May, has upended US regulation of nuclear startups, allowing companies to reach new milestones like criticality at a rapid pace.

US and UK sign major nuclear power deal: What does it include? British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and United States President Donald Trump have signed a multibillion-pound deal to expand nuclear power across both nations. Known as the Atlantic Partnership for Advanced Nuclear Energy, the agreement aims to speed up the construction of new reactors and provide reliable, low-carbon energy for high-demand sectors, including energy-intensive artificial intelligence data centres. Britain's largest energy supplier, Centrica, will pair up with the US firm X-energy to develop up to 12 advanced modular reactors in Hartlepool, a port town in northeast England, which could power 1.5 million homes and create up to 2,500 jobs. US nuclear technology company Holtec, France's state-backed energy giant EDF Energy, and United Kingdom real estate and investment firm Tritax will develop advanced data centres powered by small modular reactors (SMRs) in Nottinghamshire, East Midlands, valued at about 11 billion pounds ($15bn).

Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy explains how the agency's Artemis program aims to return Americans to the Moon on'Hannity.' Amid significant budget cuts, NASA is fast-tracking the development of nuclear reactors on the moon and next-generation space stations with one clear objective: beating U.S. adversaries in the new space race. Two new memos signed by interim NASA chief and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy outline a bold strategy to secure strategic ground on the moon. The centerpiece of this effort is a lunar nuclear reactor, a renewable and stable power source to support long-term exploration. "The goal is to power everything," a senior NASA official told Fox News Digital. "Our systems, habitats, rovers, robotic equipment, even future mining operations -- everything we want to do on the moon depends on this."

The site of the secret Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee has a new mission to help achieve an A.I. advantage over China. A new uranium enrichment facility in Oak Ridge will supply nuclear fuel to the reactors that power A.I. data centers. Over 80 years after scientists of the'Manhattan Project' harnessed the power of the atom to end World War II, the top-secret worksite has a new mission to help dominate AI before China does. The first phase of the United States' latest uranium enrichment facility opened in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in May. Uranium powers the nuclear reactors the AI data centers are turning to for reliable energy.

The recent developments in data-driven methods have paved the way to new methodologies to provide accurate state reconstruction of engineering systems; nuclear reactors represent particularly challenging applications for this task due to the complexity of the strongly coupled physics involved and the extremely harsh and hostile environments, especially for new technologies such as Generation-IV reactors. Data-driven techniques can combine different sources of information, including computational proxy models and local noisy measurements on the system, to robustly estimate the state. This work leverages the novel Shallow Recurrent Decoder architecture to infer the entire state vector (including neutron fluxes, precursors concentrations, temperature, pressure and velocity) of a reactor from three out-of-core time-series neutron flux measurements alone. In particular, this work extends the standard architecture to treat parametric time-series data, ensuring the possibility of investigating different accidental scenarios and showing the capabilities of this approach to provide an accurate state estimation in various operating conditions. This paper considers as a test case the Molten Salt Fast Reactor (MSFR), a Generation-IV reactor concept, characterised by strong coupling between the neutronics and the thermal hydraulics due to the liquid nature of the fuel. The promising results of this work are further strengthened by the possibility of quantifying the uncertainty associated with the state estimation, due to the considerably low training cost. The accurate reconstruction of every characteristic field in real-time makes this approach suitable for monitoring and control purposes in the framework of a reactor digital twin.

Reactor physics is the study of neutron properties, focusing on using models to examine the interactions between neutrons and materials in nuclear reactors. Artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant contributions to reactor physics, e.g., in operational simulations, safety design, real-time monitoring, core management and maintenance. This paper presents a comprehensive review of AI approaches in reactor physics, especially considering the category of Machine Learning (ML), with the aim of describing the application scenarios, frontier topics, unsolved challenges and future research directions. From equation solving and state parameter prediction to nuclear industry applications, this paper provides a step-by-step overview of ML methods applied to steady-state, transient and combustion problems. Most literature works achieve industry-demanded models by enhancing the efficiency of deterministic methods or correcting uncertainty methods, which leads to successful applications. However, research on ML methods in reactor physics is somewhat fragmented, and the ability to generalize models needs to be strengthened. Progress is still possible, especially in addressing theoretical challenges and enhancing industrial applications such as building surrogate models and digital twins.

A defunct nuclear power plant will be revived to power Donald Trump's new half-trillion-dollar project to make America the world's artificial intelligence powerhouse. The state-owned utility Santee Cooper -- the largest power provider in South Carolina -- said Wednesday that it is seeking buyers to complete construction on a partially-built project that was abandoned in 2017. The VC Summer Nuclear Power Station, which houses two unfinished nuclear reactors, was scrapped following years of lengthy, costly delays and bankruptcy by its contractor, according to a company statement. But now, the utility is hoping tech giants such as Amazon and Microsoft will be willing to finish the project, as they are seeking clean energy sources to fuel data centers for AI. 'We are seeing renewed interest in nuclear energy, fueled by advanced manufacturing investments, AI-driven data center demand, and the tech industry's zero-carbon targets,' said Santee Cooper President and CEO Jimmy Staton.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In the old ranchlands of South Texas, dormant uranium mines are coming back online. A collection of new ones hope to start production soon, extracting radioactive fuel from the region's shallow aquifers. These mines are the leading edge of what government and industry leaders in Texas hope will be a nuclear renaissance, as America's latent nuclear sector begins to stir again. Texas is currently developing a host of high-tech industries that require enormous amounts of electricity, from cryptocurrency mines and artificial intelligence to hydrogen production and seawater desalination.