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Civil Nuclear

A CANDU reactor runs on unenriched natural uranium because it uses heavy water as its moderator, a form of water in which each hydrogen carries an extra neutron, making the molecule about 10 percent denser and letting Canada skip the entire enrichment industry the rest of the nuclear world was built around

{ "content": "A CANDU reactor pulls its fuel straight from a Saskatchewan mine, presses it into ceramic pellets, stacks the pellets into zirconium tubes, and burns them without ever sending a gra

By Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team · Jul 31, 2026

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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.

By Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team · Jul 30, 2026
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.

By Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team · Jul 29, 2026
Civil Nuclear

A single uranium-235 nucleus splitting releases about 200 million electron volts, roughly 50 million times the energy of burning one carbon atom, which is why a fuel assembly the size of a car can power a city for eighteen months

A single uranium-235 fission releases about 200 million electron volts — roughly 50 million times what burning one carbon atom yields. That ratio is why a car-sized fuel assembly can power a city for 18 months.

By Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team · Jul 29, 2026
Civil Nuclear

In 1954, a small water-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor at Obninsk outside Moscow fed five megawatts of electricity into the Soviet grid, becoming the first nuclear power station to supply a conventional transmission network, and it operated for nearly 48 years

{"content":"On the morning of June 27, 1954, a squat brick building on the edge of a birch forest about 100 kilometres southwest of Moscow began pushing five megawatts of electricity into the Sovie

By Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team · Jul 29, 2026

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Tracking the future of nuclear energy.

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