Research & Applications

National laboratories from Canada and the United Kingdom have developed an action plan under an existing memorandum of understanding designed to boost collaboration across the areas of clean energy, medical isotopes, waste management, and decommissioning. Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL), Canada’s nuclear science and technology organization, and the National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL), the nuclear services technology provider owned and operated by the United Kingdom, announced the plan on March 4. The agreement will address shared challenges in relation to climate change, public health, and environmental stewardship.

The United States is pursuing the objective to land humans more than 100 million miles away on Mars, and nuclear power has the potential to be a key technology in getting to the Red Planet and providing power while there. Specifically, nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) is a promising approach that could enable astronauts to travel from Earth’s orbit to Mars and back in a fraction of the time, and with greater safety, than is available with other options.

The Department of Energy announced on March 4 that it will provide $30 million for new research on fusion energy. The funding will provide $17 million for research focused specifically on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) approaches for the prediction of key plasma phenomena, management of facility operations, and accelerated discovery through data science, among other topics. An additional $13 million under a separate funding opportunity will be devoted to fundamental fusion theory research, including computer modeling and simulation, focused on factors affecting the behavior of hot plasmas confined by magnetic fields in fusion reactors.