“Scientists and engineers near the English city of Oxford have set a nuclear fusion energy record, they announced Thursday, bringing the clean, futuristic power source another step closer to reality.
Using the Joint European Torus (JET) — a huge, donut-shaped machine known as a tokamak — the scientists sustained a record 69 megajoules of fusion energy for five seconds, using just 0.2 milligrams of fuel. That’s enough to power roughly 12,000 households for the same amount of time.”
From CNN.
“The Trump administration is considering several executive orders aimed at speeding up the construction of nuclear power plants to help meet rising electricity demand, according to drafts reviewed by The New York Times.
The draft orders say the United States has fallen behind China in expanding nuclear power and call for a ‘wholesale revision’ of federal safety regulations to make it easier to build new plants. They envision the Department of Defense taking a prominent role in ordering reactors and installing them on military bases.
They would also set a goal of quadrupling the size of the nation’s fleet of nuclear power plants, from nearly 100 gigawatts of electric capacity today to 400 gigawatts by 2050. One gigawatt is enough to power nearly 1 million homes.”
From New York Times.
“Distributed energy refers to a range of technologies that generate electricity at or near the place of use…
Latin America and the Caribbean has seen a huge expansion of distributed energy, driven mostly by Brazil, Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Chile and Colombia. The region went from just one gigawatt installed capacity of distributed systems in 2017 to 31.8 GW by 2023, the year with the latest available data, according to energy consultancy Onred. Virtually all of these installations use solar panels.”
From Dialogue Earth.
“Ontario officials have given final approval to construct a GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy small modular reactor (SMR) that the company predicts will be the first SMR operating in the ‘Western world.’
Early site preparation is complete and construction will start soon, GE Vernova said. The reactor is expected to be online by 2030.
State of play: The planned reactors will help meet what provincial officials expect to be a 75% rise in Ontario’s power demand by 2050, Lecce said.”
From Axios.
“Pakistan, home to more than 240 million people, is experiencing one of the most rapid solar revolutions on the planet, even as it grapples with poverty and economic instability.
The country has become a huge new market for solar as super-cheap Chinese solar panels flood in. It imported 17 gigawatts of solar panels in 2024, more than double the previous year, making it the world’s third-biggest importer, according to data from the climate think tank Ember.
Pakistan’s story is unique, said Mustafa Amjad, program director at Renewables First, an energy think tank based in Islamabad. Solar has been adopted at mass scale in countries including Vietnam and South Africa, ‘but none have had the speed and scale that Pakistan has had,’ he told CNN.
There’s one particular aspect fascinating experts: The solar boom is a grassroots revolution and almost none of it is in the form of big solar farms. ‘There is no policy push that is driving this; this is essentially people-led and market driven,’ Amjad said.”
From CNN.
