Tracking the future of nuclear energy.
Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team
Editorial Team

Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team

Editorial Team

The Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team produces Nuclear Power Daily's coverage of nuclear energy. We report on reactors and small modular reactors, the fuel cycle, waste and safety, policy, and fusion research. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, source verification, drafting, technical review, and editing, rather than a single writer's work. Nuclear Power Daily takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.

Dispensary

When Howard Carter’s team opened Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, the inventory included alabaster jars of dark residue that legend turned into still-edible honey, sealed around 1323 BCE and never actually identified by any chemist who tested it — a Yale team now suspects opium

The famous story of edible honey from Tutankhamun's tomb is mostly folklore — but the chemistry that makes honey nearly immortal is real, and a 2025 Yale study suggests the actual residues in Tut's alabaster jars may have been something far stranger: opium.

Sep 9, 2026
Aerospace

In November 1957, Soviet sources told the world that the dog Laika had survived several days aboard Sputnik 2, but at a 2002 space congress in Houston, scientist Dimitri Malashenkov revealed she had actually died within hours of launch when the cabin overheated

For forty-five years the Soviet Union told the world Laika had survived days aboard Sputnik 2. In October 2002, at the World Space Congress in Houston, scientist Dimitri Malashenkov finally released the telemetry that showed she had died within hours of launch when the cabin overheated past 40 degrees Celsius.

Sep 8, 2026
Physics News

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to two scientists who had figured out how to reprogram a bacterial defence system against viruses into a pair of molecular scissors that can cut the DNA of any living organism with programmable precision

In October 2020, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna became the first all-female team to share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, honored for turning a bacterial defense against viruses into CRISPR-Cas9 — programmable molecular scissors that can cut the DNA of any organism on Earth.

Sep 1, 2026
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.

Aug 13, 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.

Aug 10, 2026
Civil Nuclear

In December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann found barium in a uranium sample and wrote a bewildered letter to Lise Meitner, who worked out the physics on a snowy walk in Sweden and gave the process a name borrowed from biology: fission

In December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann found barium in a neutron-bombarded uranium sample and couldn't explain it. Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch worked out the physics on a snowy walk in Sweden — and borrowed a word from cell biology to name what they'd found.

Aug 3, 2026