Focused Energy and the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) have established a $6.9 million partnership agreement to collaborate on fundamental challenges in inertial fusion energy.

Microsoft and Nvidia have formed an “AI for nuclear” partnership intended to streamline the permitting, design, and operations of nuclear power plant facilities, and highlighted the collaboration at CERAWeek 2026 in Houston earlier this week.

Microsoft said in an announcement that the collaboration will build a “connected, AI-powered foundation” of AI tools that energy developers will be able to use to make work “repeatable, traceable, secure, and predictable,” all the while reducing work timelines and maintaining safety.

The nomination period for the 2026 Nuclear News 40 Under 40 list is now open. The list aims to highlight people in the nuclear community who are making significant, early-career achievements. All nominations must be submitted online by 11:59 p.m. (CDT) on May 1, 2026.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has launched a new coordinated research project (CRP) aimed at creating a database of polymer-radiation interactions in the next five years with the long-term goal of using the database to enable machine learning–based predictive models.

Radiation-induced modifications are widely applicable across a range of fields including healthcare, agriculture, and environmental applications, and exposure to radiation is a major factor when considering materials used at nuclear power plants.

The University of Missouri Research Reactor (MURR) has commenced production of gadolinium-153, a radioisotope used in medical imaging applications, as announced by the Department of Energy’s Office of Isotope R&D Production (IRP) and the university earlier this week. That makes MURR the only domestic supplier of Gd-153 and one of two suppliers in the world.

Waste disposal technology company Deep Isolation Nuclear has claimed that results of a study it conducted with reactor developer Oklo demonstrate that deep borehole disposal could be an option for disposing of high-level radioactive waste generated from the recycling of advanced reactor fuel.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has finalized its new regulatory framework for advanced reactors that officials believe will accelerate, simplify, and reduce burdens in the new reactor licensing process.

The final rule arrives more than a year ahead of an end-of-2027 deadline set in the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act (NEIMA), the 2019 law that formally directed the NRC to develop a new, technology-inclusive regulatory approach. The resulting rule—10 CFR Part 53, “Risk-Informed, Technology-Inclusive Regulatory Framework for Advanced Reactors”—is commonly referred to as Part 53.

Yesterday NASA announced a series of initiatives, including plans to launch a nuclear electric propulsion spacecraft to Mars in December 2028 and a three-phase plan to establish a lunar base incorporating nuclear-driven heat and power.

Coinciding with the March 19 White House meeting between President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae, the Department of Commerce announced three new energy deals as part of a Japan-U.S. Strategic Investment initiative. Two of the deals involve the construction of natural gas generation facilities. The third, with an estimated value of as much as $40 billion, involves the construction of GE Vernova Hitachi (GVH) BWRX-300 small modular reactors in Tennessee and Alabama.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has said that more than half of all thefts of nuclear and other radioactive material reported to the agency’s Incident and Trafficking Database (ITDB) since 1993 occurred during authorized transport, with the share rising to nearly 70 percent in the past decade. The ITDB covers incidents involving nuclear material, radioisotopes, and radioactively contaminated material.

During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.

In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has released a notice of intent to conduct a scoping process and prepare an environmental impact statement to evaluate Fermi America’s plan to construct and operate four AP1000 reactors at its Project Matador Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus in Texas.

While that announcement may seem routine, the process envisioned is not. As part of the company’s combined license (COL) application with the NRC, it has agreed to participate in an accelerated environmental review pilot program under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Under this pilot, the applicant(s) develop a draft EIS under NRC supervision.

Developers in Sweden have announced advancements for two reactor projects. Lead-cooled small modular reactor developer Blykalla is proceeding with the permitting process for its proposed SMR park in Norrsundet in the Gävle Municipality after conducting initial assessments to confirm that the site is suitable.

Meanwhile, SMR developer Kärnfull Next has submitted the first application under Sweden’s new Act on Government Approval of Nuclear Facilities, for a proposed SMR campus in the Valdemarsvik Municipality.

Beginning April 1, the U.K.’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) and its subsidiary Nuclear Restoration Services (NRS) will take over the closed Hunterston B nuclear power plant for decommissioning. Located in North Ayrshire, Scotland, Hunterston B was shut down in 2022 after 46 years of service and is one of seven advanced gas-cooled reactor stations owned and operated by EDF Energy in the United Kingdom.

The U.K. government has announced a series of initiatives to progress fusion to commercialization, laid out in a fusion strategy policy paper published March 16. A New Energy Revolution: The UK’s Plan for Delivering Fusion Energy begins to describe how the government’s £2.5 billion (about $3.4 billion) investment in fusion research and development over five years will be allocated.

A new report commissioned by the Nuclear Scaling Initiative, conducted by energy consultant Solestiss, and funded by the Bezos Earth Fund identifies and recommends solutions to overcome current bottlenecks in the supply chain for advanced reactors.

Broadly speaking, the report recommends the repeated deployment of Gen III+ reactor designs to rebuild the foundation of domestic manufacturing, workforce, and qualification capacity.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s adjudicatory hearings have not received any significant reforms since 2004. In fact, according to NRC staff, these Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) hearings have only undergone major reform three times in the board’s history.

That would change under a proposed rule that was issued earlier this month. At a March 19 virtual meeting, NRC staff provided more details on the proposed changes.

Ian Buck, Nvidia’s vice president of hyperscale and HPC computing (left), and Darío Gil, DOE Under Secretary for Science and Genesis Mission lead, at the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference. (Photo: Nvidia)

Department of Energy Under Secretary for Science and Genesis Mission lead Darío Gil participated in a session at the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference on March 17 that coincided with the announcement of the DOE’s $293 million Genesis Mission request for applications, which invites interdisciplinary teams to submit ideas for projects addressing over 20 of Genesis’s stated national challenges, several of which focus on accelerating nuclear research and nuclear energy output.

“We seek breakthrough ideas and novel collaborations leveraging the scientific prowess of our national laboratories, the private sector, universities, and science philanthropies,” said Gil.  

Recent years have seen growing global interest in nuclear energy and rising confidence in the sector. For the first time since the early 2000s, there is renewed optimism about the industry’s future. This change is driven by several major factors: geopolitical developments that highlight the need for secure energy supplies, a stronger focus on resilient energy systems, national commitments to decarbonization, and rising demand for clean and reliable electricity.