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Civil Nuclear

How did an island of fewer than 2,000 people place 317,500 square kilometres of ocean under management and ask sponsors to fund protection one square kilometre at a time?

A Pacific microstate banned most commercial logging on its own land and paid for the enforcement through forest carbon credits — here is how the accounting, the customary land tenure, and the $100-per-tonne math actually work.

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Civil Nuclear

In 1977, engineers at the Shippingport reactor in Pennsylvania started up a thorium-fuelled core that produced slightly more fissile uranium-233 than it consumed over five years of operation, quietly proving that a light-water reactor could breed its own fuel without a single sodium-cooled fast reactor in sight

In 1977, a modified core slid into the Shippingport Atomic Power Station on the Ohio River in Pennsylvania and quietly began doing something that most nuclear engineers of the era assumed only a sodium-cooled fast reactor could pull off.

Civil Nuclear

In 1961, a routine restart at the SL-1 reactor in Idaho ended when an operator withdrew the central control rod about 20 inches by hand, triggering a steam explosion that lifted the entire 26,000-pound vessel off the floor in about four milliseconds and killed all three men on duty

On January 3, 1961, three young servicemen restarting a small Army reactor in the Idaho desert died in about four milliseconds when a single control rod came up 20 inches instead of four. SL-1 remains the only fatal reactor accident in U.S. history — and no one has ever fully explained why the rod moved that far.

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Civil Nuclear

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

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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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