In November of 1951, a small group of engineers gathered at a private astronomical observatory on the shore of Lake Angelus, in Oakland County, Michigan. They had spent the previous year visiting nearly every nuclear facility in America that they could get into with an Atomic Energy Commission clearance — Argonne, Hanford, Oak Ridge — […]
For seventy years, the United States has been accumulating a problem. It was a problem it once had a plan to solve, but it gave up on that plan almost fifty years ago. During the Cold War, the US intentionally produced weapons-grade plutonium in quantities that were in excess of military needs — about a […]
The American Nuclear Society — the professional organization of nuclear engineers and scientists in the United States — published Position Statement #47 in January 2026. It is titled “Management of Surplus U.S. Nuclear Material.” It calls out uranium-233 specifically. And it says, in the clearest possible professional language, that what DOE is doing to our […]
Twenty years ago today, on the afternoon of Saturday, April 22, 2006, I started this blog and wrote the first post. I was thirty-one years old. I was working at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, as an aerospace engineer on nuclear-power concepts for deep-space missions. I was in my third year of […]
Elina Charatsidou is a Greek PhD student at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, where she researches accident-tolerant solid fuels for lead-cooled fast reactors — specifically uranium nitride and SIMFUEL pellets. Before her PhD she completed a master’s thesis internship at Westinghouse Electric, working on machine learning approaches to nuclear fuel fabrication. She […]
I just returned from two days in Reno, Nevada, where the Army Research Office’s DEVCOM ARO had convened a workshop at the University of Nevada titled “Closing the Gap: Research Priorities for U.S. REE Supply Chain Resilience.” Researchers from Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore, Colorado School of Mines, the University of Minnesota, and the National […]
There’s a genuinely exciting story coming out of Oak Ridge right now. Isotek Systems — the contractor operating at Building 3019 and Building 2026 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory — has extracted more than 17 grams of thorium-229 (Th-229) from the uranium-233 (U-233) inventory stored there. That represents a 1,700% increase in the world’s supply […]
Yesterday evening, at 8:25 PM Indian Standard Time, the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) at Kalpakkam in Tamil Nadu achieved first criticality — the initiation of a self-sustaining, controlled nuclear fission chain reaction. It is a milestone that has been a long time coming: more than two decades in the making, marked by repeated delays, […]
0:00 – Introduction: AI, energy needs & nuclear’s comeback 3:05 – China’s molten salt thorium reactor: what they built and why it matters 5:29 – How China’s TMSR copies and extends the 1960s Oak Ridge experiment 6:53 – China’s alloy breakthrough & why they’re now in the lead 8:00 – Why should we care about […]
A professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has posted a video on thorium reactors asking whether it’s “something everyone should go and embrace, or an interesting idea that doesn’t matter.” It’s a fair question, and he answers parts of it well. But his conclusion rests on an incomplete picture — both of the competitive […]