In 1974, Indian scientists detonated a plutonium device in the Rajasthan desert under the code name Smiling Buddha, using material bred in a Canadian-supplied research reactor called CIRUS that had been sold on the written condition it be used only for peaceful purposes

How a Canadian research reactor meant for peaceful science became the linchpin of India's secret nuclear weapons program.

By Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team · Aug 8, 2026

Latest

All articles →

Energy Tech

A single gram of tritium costs roughly 30,000 US dollars and glows faintly blue in the dark, and fusion reactors like ITER will need to breed their own supply from lithium blankets because the entire global stockpile sits at about 25 kilograms

Tritium — the rare hydrogen isotope fusion reactors need — costs about $30,000 per gram, glows faintly blue as it decays, and exists globally in quantities of just 25 kilograms. Fusion machines like ITER will have to breed their own from lithium blankets to make the numbers work.

By Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team · Aug 10, 2026

Wood Pile

How did a volcanic island near the Arctic Circle, stripped of most of its birch woodland over a thousand years, begin growing forest again across badly eroded ground?

Iceland lost nearly all its birch forest within three centuries of Norse settlement. A century of soil conservation, imported Alaskan conifers acting as nurse trees, and a warming climate is now rebuilding woodland on volcanic sand that agronomists once wrote off as dead.

By Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team · Aug 7, 2026

Space Scopes

How does a spacecraft launched in 1977 keep transmitting from beyond the heliosphere on less electrical power than a single hallway bulb, and why does its signal now take more than 22 hours to reach Earth?

Voyager 1 still transmits from 15.8 billion miles away on the power of a hallway bulb — here is exactly how its plutonium generators, 69-kilobyte computers, and 22-hour signal delay actually work.

By Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team · Aug 5, 2026

Civil Nuclear

How did a honeycomb coal briquette help a war-damaged country regrow mountains stripped for firewood decades before nuclear power transformed its grid?

South Korea recovered from post-war deforestation to roughly 63 percent forest cover by planting 11 billion trees between 1973 and 1987 — but the real mechanism was a nationwide switch from firewood to coal briquettes that let the hillsides regrow.

By Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team · Jul 31, 2026

Civil Nuclear

How does a two-thousand-year-old harbour concrete, poured by engineers of a Mediterranean empire, keep growing stronger in seawater while modern Portland cement crumbles in the same conditions within decades?

The Romans cracked a durability code that modern engineering has spent two centuries trying to rediscover, hidden inside minerals that never stopped crystallizing.

By Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team · Jul 31, 2026

What’s up in

Civil Nuclear

Civil nuclear energy, reactor technology, regulation, safety, fuel cycles, and the policies, projects, and research shaping the future of nuclear power.

Civil Nuclear

In 1954, a small water-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor at Obninsk outside Moscow fed five megawatts of electricity into the Soviet grid, becoming the first nuclear power station to supply a conventional transmission network, and it operated for nearly 48 years

By Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team

Civil Nuclear

What happened when biologists released fourteen wolves into a 2.2-million-acre national park after a seventy-year absence, and why are ecologists still arguing about whether the rivers really changed course because of it?

By Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team

Civil Nuclear

A single uranium fuel pellet the size of a fingertip holds roughly the energy of one tonne of coal, 149 gallons of oil, or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas, and a typical reactor core contains about 10 million of them stacked into 12-foot zirconium rods.

By Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team

Civil Nuclear

In 1946, physicist Louis Slotin was demonstrating a criticality experiment at Los Alamos when the screwdriver holding two beryllium hemispheres apart slipped, the plutonium core flashed blue, and Slotin shielded his colleagues with his body knowing he had just absorbed a fatal dose

By Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team

About Nuclear Power Daily

Tracking the future of nuclear energy.

Nuclear Power Daily is an independent publication covering civil nuclear energy, reactor technology, regulation, safety, fuel cycles, and the policies and projects shaping nuclear power. The site pairs a deep archive with current reporting on the research, companies, policy shifts, safety debates, and technical breakthroughs shaping the future of nuclear energy. We employ modern AI technologies to support our editorial workflows; every published piece is editorially directed and reviewed.

More about us →

In 1974, Indian scientists detonated a plutonium device in the Rajasthan desert under the code name Smiling Buddha, using material bred in a Canadian-supplied research reactor called CIRUS that had been sold on the written condition it be used only for peaceful purposes

A single gram of tritium costs roughly 30,000 US dollars and glows faintly blue in the dark, and fusion reactors like ITER will need to breed their own supply from lithium blankets because the entire global stockpile sits at about 25 kilograms

How did a volcanic island near the Arctic Circle, stripped of most of its birch woodland over a thousand years, begin growing forest again across badly eroded ground?

How does a spacecraft launched in 1977 keep transmitting from beyond the heliosphere on less electrical power than a single hallway bulb, and why does its signal now take more than 22 hours to reach Earth?

How did a honeycomb coal briquette help a war-damaged country regrow mountains stripped for firewood decades before nuclear power transformed its grid?

How does a two-thousand-year-old harbour concrete, poured by engineers of a Mediterranean empire, keep growing stronger in seawater while modern Portland cement crumbles in the same conditions within decades?

In 1954, a small water-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor at Obninsk outside Moscow fed five megawatts of electricity into the Soviet grid, becoming the first nuclear power station to supply a conventional transmission network, and it operated for nearly 48 years

What happened when biologists released fourteen wolves into a 2.2-million-acre national park after a seventy-year absence, and why are ecologists still arguing about whether the rivers really changed course because of it?

A single uranium fuel pellet the size of a fingertip holds roughly the energy of one tonne of coal, 149 gallons of oil, or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas, and a typical reactor core contains about 10 million of them stacked into 12-foot zirconium rods.

In 1946, physicist Louis Slotin was demonstrating a criticality experiment at Los Alamos when the screwdriver holding two beryllium hemispheres apart slipped, the plutonium core flashed blue, and Slotin shielded his colleagues with his body knowing he had just absorbed a fatal dose

About Nuclear Power Daily

The Nuclear Power Daily Newsletter