Back in 2011, the world held its breath after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan suffered a failure of its cooling systems, in the wake of the country getting hit by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami. The worry was not unfounded: the resulting meltdown — which spread highly radioactive material in multiple directions […]
Google signed a deal to power data centers with nuclear micro-reactors from Kairos — but the 2030 timeline is very optimistic
Google announced today that it has signed a deal with nuclear startup Kairos Power to build seven small reactors to supply electricity to its data centers. The agreement promises to add around 500 megawatts of carbon-free electricity at a time when energy demand for data centers and AI is surging. The new power plants are […]
How Big Tech embraced nuclear power
Microsoft made waves last week when it announced a deal with Constellation Energy to restart a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island to meet its surging data center power needs, bucking the power source’s seemingly terminal decline. In the last decade, seven nuclear reactors have been decommissioned in the U.S., while only two new ones […]
Disinformation may ‘go nuclear’ rather than ‘go viral,’ researchers say
We say something “goes viral” because we tend to think of rumors and disinformation spreading the way that an infection spreads. But these days it may be more accurate to say something “goes nuclear,” according to a new paper that models disinfo as a form of fission reaction. As common wisdom had it even before […]
Proxima Fusion raises $21M to build on its ‘stellarator’ approach to nuclear fusion
Venture capitalists’ appetite for fusion startups has been up and down in the last few years. For instance, the Fusion Industry Association found that while nuclear fusion companies had attracted over $ 6 billion in investment in 2023, $ 1.4 billion more than in 2022, the 27% growth proved slower than in ’22, as investors […]