Tracking the future of nuclear energy.
Civil Nuclear

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

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Wood Pile

How did a Central American country smaller than West Virginia go from one of the worst deforestation rates on Earth to doubling its forest cover in a single generation, and what did it pay landowners to make it happen?

Costa Rica's forest cover collapsed to 21 percent by 1987, then rebounded to about 59 percent by the early 2020s. A 1996 forestry law and a 1997 payment program funded largely by a fuel-tax slice — administered by FONAFIFO — paid landowners to keep trees standing.

By Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team · Aug 13, 2026
Froth And Bubble

People who keep every birthday card, ticket stub, and handwritten note aren't sentimental hoarders — they're often trying to prove to themselves that the years actually happened and weren't just something they survived on autopilot

The drawer full of birthday cards and ticket stubs isn't clutter. Research on memory and nostalgia suggests it's a deliberate act of self-preservation against a mind that edits the past without permission.

By Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team · Aug 10, 2026
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

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Civil Nuclear

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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.

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