US federal agency setting national energy policy, overseeing nuclear security, and funding scientific research including fusion and reactor programs.
University of Pittsburgh researchers tested a fiber-optic sensor for signals above 100 kHz on a mock spent-fuel canister at Idaho National Laboratory. The sounds came from pencil-lead breaks, so detection of real cracks is still untested.
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DOE approved added cost-shared funding to speed the Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment toward criticality as early as 2027. That date is a developer target, and it would give designers their first measured data on a design they have so far only modeled.
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Constellation plans to spend more than $4.3 billion to add nearly 1 GW at 11 reactors, MIT Technology Review reported. Per kilowatt that costs more than new solar with storage or gas, and Google and Meta signed long-term purchase deals.
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DOE and the American Bureau of Shipping signed an Oct. 13 memorandum to study nuclear-powered ships and floating power plants. ABS says it has already published rules for floating nuclear plants, so the paper adds a federal channel to work that predates it.
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DOE awarded $159 million to 12 Phase II Genesis Mission projects, bringing the Phase II total to 14. The awards go to project teams, and the report does not say what any cloud provider will be paid.
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Benjamin Santer's team argues more than 30 years of fingerprint research make the human-warming case stronger than in 2009. Their Earth's Future review answers a July 2025 Department of Energy report that questioned the science behind the EPA's Endangerment Finding.
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IEA members agreed Oct. 7 to speed up the 400 million-barrel oil release and put diesel first, with public stocks near 1.1 billion barrels. Those stocks were above 1.2 billion in March, a fall of about 100 million, a quarter of the pledge.
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Epic Systems has drilled roughly 6,100 wells to bank its data center's summer waste heat underground and pull it back out in winter. The two-decade system in Verona, Wisconsin, heats and cools about 40 buildings off a 3.5-megawatt data center.
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DOE will invest more than $500 million and Biohub $500 million over five years in open cell data for AI models, under a pact with NIH. Biohub puts the whole effort at $1.8 billion, a total that counts NIH-coordinated datasets built with earlier federal money.
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ORNL researchers say their AI worked more than 25 hours without a human operator to assemble a 37-molecule artificial graphene lattice. The result puts software in charge of the physical moves inside an experiment, at a pace of about 1.5 molecules an hour.
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Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory calculations suggest heating plasma before raising its density could reach fusion ignition with far less energy. The Physical Review Letters paper keeps the Lawson criterion's endpoint and ranks the routes toward it by energy cost.
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The Pentagon is committing about $350 million to quantum computing aimed at military logistics, advanced materials and next-generation weapons. For vendors, the related money with a stated purpose so far pays to build quantum hardware.
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Nvidia committed $1 billion over five years to US science research tied to the Trump administration's Genesis Mission. It has not published how the money splits, so labs and cloud buyers cannot yet tell who gets compute or when.
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President Trump's administration put up to $215 million behind a fault-tolerant quantum computing contest in a science package of more than $6 billion. Nearly all of it pays out only after a team has a working error-corrected machine, so startups still fund the build privately.
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National Compute plans to pledge $100 million in compute credits to the Genesis Mission at Thursday's White House event, Business Insider reported. Researchers cannot schedule work against the credits until the providers, eligibility rules and start date are disclosed.
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NASA and the Energy Department signed one memorandum covering space nuclear work from fuel production to launch, ahead of a 2028 reactor flight. It takes effect Nov. 1, and a December 2025 executive order already calls for a launch-ready lunar reactor by 2030.
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Meta, Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs put $300 million into Biohub's $1.8 billion Virtual Biology Initiative and get the data before the public does. Startups that sell proprietary cell data will now be priced against a free dataset that their best-funded rivals see first.
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Brent rose to $101.80 on Wednesday after a Gulf storm curtailed 185,120 barrels a day of US offshore crude and Houthi strikes damaged two Saudi airports. That loss is small beside Middle East shut-ins, so the bigger fourth-quarter cost risk runs through Gulf refineries into diesel.
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DOE has selected Deployable Energy's Unity microreactor for a full-power test at Idaho National Laboratory's DOME facility in 2027. It is the first Unity test aimed at the questions an off-grid buyer asks about delivery and removal, though it stops short of a license.
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South Korea's first agreed US investment project is a $23.3 billion gas-fired power plant in Encinal, Texas. Japan's March batch has the same tilt, putting allied money into US generation next to data-center clusters that are short of power.
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