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Small modular reactors could be quicker and cheaper to build. Now, they’ve reached a major milestone. MIT Tech Review Casey Crownhart 8 Feb 2023 We were promised smaller nuclear reactors. Where are they? For over a decade, we’ve heard that small reactors could be a big part of nuclear power’s future. Because of their size, small modular reactors (SMRs) could solve some of the major challenges of traditional nuclear power, making plants quicker and cheaper to build and safer to operate. That future may have just gotten a little closer. In the past month, Oregon-based NuScale has reached several major milestones for its planned SMRs, most recently receiving a final approval from the US federal government for its reactor design. Other companies, including Kairos Power and GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, are also pursuing commercial SMRs, but NuScale’s reactor is the first to reach this stage, clearing one of the final regulatory hurdles before the company can build its reactors in the US. SMRs like NuScale’s planned reactors could provide power when and where it’s needed in easy-to-build, easy-to-manage plants. The technology could help curb climate change by replacing plants powered by fossil fuels, including coal. But even as SMRs promise to speed up construction timelines for nuclear power, the path to this point has been full of delays and cost hikes. And the road ahead for NuScale still stretches years into the future, revealing just how much streamlining there still is to go before this form of nuclear power could be built quickly and efficiently.

Going smaller......NuScale’s SMR generates electricity by a process similar to the one used in today’s nuclear plants: the reactor splits atoms in a pressurized core, giving off heat. That heat can be used to turn water into steam that powers a turbine, generating electricity. The biggest difference is the size of the reactors.In the past, nuclear plants have been gigantic undertakings—so-called megaprojects, costing billions of dollars. “If it’s over a billion dollars, the wheels tend to fall off on a project,” says Patrick White, a project manager at the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a nuclear-focused think tank. For example, construction is currently underway in Georgia to install two additional units at the existing Vogtle power plant. Each of the two planned units will have a capacity of over 1,000 megawatts, enough to power over a million homes. The reactors were supposed to start up in 2017. They still haven’t, and the project’s total cost has doubled, to over $30 billion, since construction began a decade ago. By contrast, NuScale plans to build reactor modules that have a capacity of less than 100 megawatts. When these modules are combined in power plants, they’ll add up to a few hundred megawatts, smaller than even a single unit in the Vogtle plant. SMR plants with a capacity of a few hundred megawatts would power several hundred thousand homes—similar to an average-size coal-fired power plant in the US. And while the Vogtle plant sits on a site that covers more than 3,000 acres, NuScale’s SMR project should require about 65 acres of land. Smaller nuclear power facilities could be easier to build and might help cut costs as companies standardize designs for reactors. “That’s the benefit—it becomes more of a routine, more of a cookie-cutter project,” says Jacopo Buongiorno, director of the Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems at MIT. These reactors might also be safer, since the systems needed to keep them cool, as well as those needed to shut them down in an emergency, could be simpler.

Untangling the red tape.....The problem with all these potential benefits is that so far, they’re still mostly potential. Demonstration projects have started up in some parts of the world, with China being the first to connect an SMR to the electrical grid in 2021. Last month, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy signed commercial contracts for a plant in Ontario, which could come online in the mid-2030s. NuScale, too, is pursuing projects in Romania and Poland. There are no SMRs running in the US yet, partly because of the lengthy regulatory process run by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), an independent federal agency. Nuclear is the only power source to have its own dedicated regulatory agency in the US. That extra oversight means no detail goes unnoticed, and it can take a while to get nuclear projects moving. “These are big, complicated projects,” says Kathryn Huff, assistant secretary in the office of nuclear energy at the US Department of Energy. The DOE helps fund SMR projects and support research, but it doesn’t oversee nuclear regulations.

NuScale started working toward regulatory approval in 2008 and submitted its official application to the NRC in 2016. In 2020, when it received a design approval for its reactor, the company said the regulatory process had cost half a billion dollars, and that it had provided about 2 million pages of supporting documents to the NRC. After more than two years of finalizing details and a vote by the agency, the NRC released its final ruling on NuScale’s reactor design last month. The final ruling goes into effect on February 21 and certifies a NuScale design for a reactor module that generates 50 MW of electricity.......read on https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/08/1067992/smaller-nuclear-reactors/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=20737314952&gbraid=0AAAAADgO_mjDPYf_-h7-LmJVM2xGk1wOi&gclid=CjwKCAjwntHPBhAaEiwA_Xp6Ru-Dx54ayglLsaVwE-BalIQdDj8Dne4d38GPOTGciBOLHkeqp8tPXBoC3CwQAvD_BwE

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University of Edinburgh researchers have used bacteria to turn plastic waste into a Parkinson's drug, advancing a new approach known as "bio-upcycling".The biotechnology researchers successfully synthesised the drug L-DOPA, also known as Levodopa, from the raw ingredient of post-consumer waste plastic, in a process they say is more sustainable than relying on pharmaceuticals' usual feedstock of fossil fuels. The process involved breaking down polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the plastic widely used in food and drink packaging, and feeding it to genetically engineered E. coli bacteria, which built it back up again with a different molecular structure. The researchers believe it is the first time a natural, biological process has been used to turn plastic waste into a medication for a neurological disease. The method constitutes a type of bio-upcycling – an emerging field that uses microbes and enzymes to convert waste into higher-value products.

Bio-upcycling has particularly focused on plastic waste due to the finite nature of the material's crude oil feedstock and the insufficiencies in its recycling, which have seen plastic pollution become a major environmental and public health issue. With bio-upcycling, microorganisms are engineered with special enzymes that enable them to sever the super-strong links between molecules in plastic – similar to what happens naturally with the ideonella sakaiensis bacterium, found in 2001 outside of a recycling plant in Japan – or to synthesise new links once it is broken down......read on https://www.dezeen.com/2026/03/16/plastic-bottles-recycled-into-parkinsons-drug-using-bacteria/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Dezeen&utm_content=Daily%20Dezeen+CID_48cc608f19dc6813f7cf96c1254cfcb7&utm_source=Dezeen%20Mail&utm_term=Plastic%20bottles%20recycled%20into%20Parkinsons%20drug%20using%20bacteria

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New Study Charts How Earth’s Global Temperature Has Drastically Changed Over the Past 485 Million Years, Driven by Carbon Dioxide,News Release September 19, 2024A new study co-led by the Smithsonian and the University of Arizona offers the most detailed glimpse yet of how Earth’s surface temperature has changed over the past 485 million years. In a paper published today, Smithsonian Sept. 19, in the journal Science, a team of researchers, including paleobiologists Scott Wing and Brian Huber from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, produce a curve of global mean surface temperature (GMST) across deep time—the Earth’s ancient past stretching over many millions of years. The new curve reveals that Earth’s temperature has varied more than previously thought over much of the Phanerozoic Eon, the past 540 million years of geologic time when life has diversified, populated land and endured multiple mass extinctions. The curve also confirms that Earth’s temperature is strongly correlated to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The team created the temperature curve utilizing an approach called data assimilation. This allowed the researchers to combine data from the geologic record and climate models to create a more cohesive understanding of ancient climates. “This method was originally developed for weather forecasting,” said Emily Judd, the lead author of the new paper and a former postdoctoral researcher at the National Museum of Natural History and the University of Arizona. “Instead of using it to forecast future weather, here we’re using it to hindcast ancient climates.”

Refining how Earth’s temperature has fluctuated over deep time provides crucial context for understanding modern climate change. “If you’re studying the past couple of million years, you won’t find anything that looks like what we expect in 2100 or 2500,” said Wing, the museum’s curator of paleobotany whose research focuses on the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, a period of rapid global warming 55 million years ago. “You need to go back even further to periods when the Earth was really warm, because that’s the only way we’re going to get a better understanding of how the climate might change in the future.” The new curve reveals that temperature varied more greatly during the Phanerozoic than previously thought. Over the eon, the GMST spanned between 52 and 97 degrees Fahrenheit (11–36 degrees Celsius). Periods of extreme heat were most often linked to elevated levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“This research illustrates clearly that carbon dioxide is the dominant control on global temperatures across geological time,” said Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of the new paper. “When CO2 is low, the temperature is cold; when CO2 is high, the temperature is warm.”The findings also reveal that the Earth’s current GMST of 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius) is cooler than Earth has been over much of the Phanerozoic. But greenhouse gas emissions caused by anthropogenic climate change are currently warming the planet at a much faster rate than even the fastest warming events of the Phanerozoic. The speed of warming puts species and ecosystems around the world at risk and is causing a rapid rise in sea level. Some other episodes of rapid climate change during the Phanerozoic have sparked mass extinctions.

“Humans, and the species we share the planet with, are adapted to a cold climate,” Tierney said. “Rapidly putting us all into a warmer climate is a dangerous thing to do.” The new paper is part of an ongoing research effort that began in 2018, when Wing, Huber and other Smithsonian researchers were helping develop the museum’s “David H. Koch Hall of Fossils— Deep Time.” The new hall aimed to put the museum’s fossils in context by highlighting how Earth’s climate has changed over the past half-a-billion years. For example, several specimens—including fossilized palm fronds found in Alaska—attest to a period in Earth’s past when global temperatures were much warmer than today.......read on https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/new-study-charts-how-earths-global-temperature-has-drastically-changed-over-past

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AI ‘carries risks’ but will help tackle global heating, says UN’s climate chief. Simon Stiell insists it is vital governments regulate the technology to blunt its dangerous edges. Guardian Fiona Harvey 22 Sept 2025 Harnessing artificial intelligence will help the world to tackle the climate crisis, but governments must step in to regulate the technology, the UN’s climate chief has said.

AI is being used to make energy systems more efficient, and to develop tools to reduce carbon from industrial processes. The UN is also using AI as an aid to climate diplomacy. But concerns over the vast and increasing energy requirements of large data centers must prompt governments to act, said Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change. “AI is not a ready-made solution, and it carries risks. But it can also be a gamechanger. So we now need to blunt its dangerous edges, sharpen its catalytic ones, and put it astutely to work,” he said. “If you run a major AI platform, power it with renewables, and innovate to drive energy efficiency.”

He added: “Done properly, AI releases human capacity, not replaces it. Most important is its power to drive real-world outcomes: managing microgrids, mapping climate risk, guiding resilient planning.” Stiell gave an upbeat assessment of the state of global climate action, saying the world was “aligning with the Paris agreement”, with renewable energy booming, and governments set to produce fresh commitments on cutting carbon.Speaking on Monday on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York, where world leaders have gathered amid stark geopolitical tensions, conflict and economic strains, he made a robust defence of climate diplomacy, in the face of outright hostility from Donald Trump’s White House. “If we look past the noise, the facts show a world aligning with the Paris agreement,” he said. “Investment in renewables h as increased tenfold in 10 years. The clean energy transition is booming across almost all major economies, and hit $2tn last year alone.”China has led the global clean energy boom, but others – including the EU, India, African nations and Latin America – are also seeing widespread uptake of clean options......read on https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/22/ai-carries-risks-but-will-help-tackle-global-heating-says-uns-climate-chief

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This asteroid is spilling secrets about the origin of life on Earth. Nat.Geo.via Yahoo News Elise Cutts Jan 5,2026 On October 20, 2020, a robot carefully scooped up 121.6 grams of the most expensive dirt in the solar system. That robot, a NASA spacecraft called OSIRIS-REx, had spent two years en route to its rendezvous with the near-earth asteroid Bennu and two more observing it. Its 1.16-billion-dollar mission: Recover a sample from Bennu’s strange surface of loosely-bound space pebbles and return it to Earth. It succeeded, and on September 24, 2023, OSIRIS-REx dropped its carefully-packed sample capsule through Earth's atmosphere and into the waiting arms of eager scientists. Bennu and a handful of special asteroids like it are ancient objects, leftovers from the very earliest moments of planet formation in our solar system. The sample OSIRIS-REx returned contains minerals that formed in water and a dazzling diversity of organic compounds, which contain carbon.On our planet, organics are the stuff of life. But they’re the stuff of space, too—astronomers and planetary scientists are finding organics practically everywhere they look, from cold clouds of interstellar dust to icy moons to asteroids like Bennu. Sample return has revealed that Bennu sports a practical zoo of organics, including amino acids and other simple molecules that link together in life to form complex biological machinery. And just last month, scientists discovered sugars in Bennu that play vital roles in biology. Some scientists think these clues are a hint that the raw materials of life on Earth may have fallen from the heavens.OSIRIS-REx isn't the only asteroid sample return mission. It comes on the heels of a Japanese effort, Hayabusa2, which returned 5.4 grams of rock from another ancient asteroid called Ryugu in 2020. By retrieving pristine specimens from these cosmic time capsules, scientists are revealing new details about the history of our own planet—and about where and how life might have emerged in the solar system.

Cosmic time capsules......Some of our best clues about the earliest days of the solar system come from meteorites, or space rocks that fell to Earth. Less than five percent of meteorites belong to a special class called carbonaceous chondrites, which are practically as old as the solar system itself. They contain water bound up in rock and diverse organic molecules, from amino acids to simple components of DNA. Carbonaceous chondrites are like a snapshot of the chemical processes in the early solar system that set the stage for the origin of life. “That is why we have used chondritic meteorites as a key to understand solar system formation and planet formation,” says cosmochemist Shogo Tachibana of the University of Tokyo, who led sample analysis for the Hayabusa2 mission. “But meteorites are always subject to terrestrial contamination.” Before they end up in labs, meteorites endure a blazing fall through Earth’s atmosphere and often sit around on the surface for years to millennia. They’re exposed to the elements and our chemically reactive, oxygen-rich air. And Earth is wet and full of life, so contamination is a big problem—especially for scientists looking for hints of ancient water or organic molecules.

Sample return eliminates the contamination problem. It’s also our best way to check the telescope methods scientists use to study the millions of solar system asteroids we’ll never visit with spacecraft. Reassuringly, the samples returned from Bennu and Ryugu look a lot like the most primitive carbonaceous chondrites. But they’ve also revealed plenty of surprises that show the importance of ground truths.......read on https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/asteroid-spilling-secrets-origin-life-120109627.html?utm_source=pushly&ncid=pushly

Small Modular Reactors could be Quicker and Cheaper to build. Now, they’ve Reached a Major Milestone.

University of Edinburgh researchers have used Bacteria to turn Plastic Waste into a Parkinson's Drug

New Study Charts How Earth’s Global Temperature Has Drastically Changed Over the Past 485 Million Years, Driven by Carbon Dioxide

AI ‘carries Risks’ but will Help Tackle Global Heating, says UN’s climate chief.

This Asteroid is Spilling Secrets about the Origin of Life on Earth.

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