D-shaped magnets form part of a tokamak that is being built for a nuclear-fusion pilot project. Credit: Commonwealth Fusion Systems About a dozen technicians, in hard hats and protective clothing, move around a large, double-height room. Some are checking pipes coming up through the floor into a raised, circular platform. Others work on instruments installed
Just as new data centers face growing backlash from neighboring communities, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is about to make it harder for people to weigh in on any pollution those centers create. The EPA plans to toss out a federal rule requiring public notice and an opportunity to comment when certain industrial sites
Most spacecraft use solar panels to power their equipment — but missions to places such as the shadowed craters of the Moon or the deep Solar System can’t rely on energy from the Sun. Could nuclear fuel, with its high energy density, be a promising alternative? In this film, Nature explores the work of a
Inside a nondescript warehouse in an industrial park in Oakville, Canada, sits a squat forklift truck that requires no driver. When activated by its remote operator, the vehicle trundles to a stack of huge clay blocks, each weighing 8,000 kilograms, and carries them into a narrow rock tunnel. Another custom-built machine then fills the spaces
Light emitted by a microplasma could be used to monitor a molten-salt nuclear reactor.Credit: ORNL New insight into an old material Because it can tolerate high temperatures and neutron damage, the carbon material graphite is used in several ways in nuclear reactors. It has a role in structural components and in fuel coatings, and it
The Iran war exposed just how much the world relied on a narrow 20-mile-wide waterway. Soon after the U.S. launched strikes on Iran, the latter threatened to strike ships trying to traverse the Strait of Hormuz, the channel for much of the Middle East’s oil and gas exports. The threat of shortages pushed countries across