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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.
Why can draining one hectare of tropical peat swamp release more carbon over decades than one forest fire, and why did one Southeast Asian nation build thousands of dams inside its own canals?
In 1994, a park ranger abseiling into a gorge northwest of Sydney found trees with bubbling-chocolate bark and fern-like leaves — living survivors of a lineage traced through Cretaceous fossils
In December 1942, beneath the abandoned squash court under Chicago's Stagg Field, Enrico Fermi's team pulled the cadmium control rods from a stack of graphite bricks and uranium slugs and watched the world's first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction hold steady for 28 minutes before Fermi ordered the emergency rod called zip dropped back in and the pile went silent
What happened when engineers built a single eight-mile dam across a dying inland sea, cutting off the shrinking northern lobe from the salt flats below, and why did the fish come back within a decade?
In 1955, the town of Arco, Idaho drew every watt of its electricity for about an hour from an experimental fast breeder called BORAX-III sitting out on the desert flats, becoming the first community on Earth to light its streetlamps entirely with atoms splitting a few miles away.
The Oklo uranium deposit in Gabon ran as a natural nuclear reactor roughly 1.7 billion years ago, cycling on and off in three-hour pulses for hundreds of thousands of years before the first cells with a nucleus even existed on Earth.
A single cumulus cloud weighs roughly 500 tonnes, about the mass of 100 elephants, and it floats because the warm air holding those water droplets is still less dense than the cooler, heavier air pressing up beneath it.
Scripps scientists want to add a tenth planetary boundary to the list — and the one they're proposing is already breaking, quietly, in every ocean, lake, and river on Earth
Zelensky warns situation 'critical' as nuclear plant off grid for a week
Zelensky alleges Russian plot on nuclear plants in defiant UN address