American nuclear is in 25-year-old Isaiah Taylor’s blood: his great-grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project. In 2023, Taylor, who dropped out of high school to work in tech, started his own nuclear company, Valar Atomics. It’s currently developing a small test reactor, named after Taylor’s great-grandfather. But the company says …
Read More »Europe’s Devastating Power Outage in Photos
Grounded subways, canceled flights, stores, hospitals, and offices completely in the dark: This is the situation following the vast blackout that hit Spain, Portugal, and some regions of southern France. The power grid was sent down around noon local time on Monday, simultaneously blocking all public services in major Spanish …
Read More »The Agonizing Task of Turning Europe’s Power Back On
At 12:30 pm local time on Monday, the power went out. Across Spain and Portugal trains, planes, and traffic lights abruptly stopped working. Reports emerged of people being stuck in lifts, and Google Maps live data showed traffic jams in big cities, including Madrid and Barcelona, as they became gridlocked. …
Read More »Grid-Scale Battery Storage Is Quietly Revolutionizing the Energy System
Grid batteries have a halo effect for other power generators too. Most thermal power plants—coal, gas, nuclear—prefer to run at a steady pace. Ramping up and down to match demand takes time and costs money, but with batteries soaking up some of the variability, thermal power plants can stay closer …
Read More »Finland Could Be the First Country in the World to Bury Nuclear Waste Permanently
Together with his colleagues, Jinshan Pan, a professor of corrosion science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, published a study in January 2023 devoted to the risk of sulfides in groundwater corroding the copper used for spent nuclear fuel containers. “More work is needed to define […] the …
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