⚛️Britain Launches Nuclear Pipeline

Britain just fired the starting gun on what might be the cleanest route to market for advanced nuclear I’ve seen so far. Making Great Britain great again.

This week the UK government launched a system to build a formal pipeline of advanced nuclear projects, with a clear route from proposal to deployment.

And not only next-gen reactors, but SMRs and microreactors as well.

The headline deals already raise eyebrows. X-Energy and Centrica are planning 12 Xe-100 reactors at Hartlepool, a project expected to support around 2,500 jobs. Xe-100 is a high temperature gas-cooled SMR that uses TRISO-X fuel and produces 80 MWe.

At the same time, Holtec, EDF, and Tritax are lining up Holtec’s SMR-300, the SMR-sized PWR capable of 300 MW, at the former Cottam coal site in Nottinghamshire, aiming to power data centers with clean baseload electricity.

Nuclear replacing coal and feeding AI infrastructure. That’s the energy transition in one sentence.

Meanwhile TerraPower is working with engineering giant KBR to explore deploying its Natrium reactor in the UK and beyond.

Those headline deals are already taking shape. Now the government is building the system around them. From March, developers can submit proposals to join the official pipeline, and if they pass technical and financial checks, they get an official stamp of approval.

The projects are still expected to be privately financed, but the state is offering a concierge style system to help navigate planning, licensing, fuel, and financing.

There’s also a path to revenue support once projects are operating, risk protections for extreme edge cases, and access to the National Wealth Fund to attract more capital.

The government is acting less like a regulator and more like a venture partner, while pitching nuclear as the backbone for heavy industry, AI data centers, and domestic job growth.

London also published a Statement on Civil Nuclear Fuel Use. It confirms the UK will continue to rely on uranium based fuels for its civil reactor fleet, and it sets expectations around energy security, safeguards, environmental protection, and used fuel and waste management.

And for uranium investors: this is how demand sneaks up on the market, one credible project at a time.

Another week, another country accelerating its nuclear deployment.

⚙️NRC Adapts for the Nuclear Buildout

I know it’s more fun to read about new reactor projects, governments reversing nuclear phaseouts, and how fast spectrum breeder reactors use high energy neutrons to convert U-238 into Pu-239 through neutron capture.

But sometimes the most important nuclear story is the boring one.

This week it’s about the regulator.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced a major internal reorganization to: “streamline decision making, consolidate functions, and align with national goals for more efficient licensing and deployment of safe, innovative nuclear technology“.

Their words, not mine.

The NRC will now structure itself around 3 core business lines:

• New reactors

• Operating reactors

• Nuclear materials and waste

Licensing and inspection teams will be integrated inside each line instead of living in separate silos.

One project, one team, one chain of accountability.

That’s the main point. Fewer handoffs, fewer seams, fewer chances for projects to get stuck in the bureaucratic in between.

NRC Chairman Ho Nieh called this one of the most consequential periods in the agency’s history, and he’s not exaggerating.

The U.S. is heading into a new reactor build cycle, including advanced designs that don’t fit neatly into 1970s regulatory boxes. The NRC is reshaping itself around that reality.

The changes align with new Executive Orders and the ADVANCE Act, all aimed at faster, more predictable regulation while keeping safety as the core mission.

The agency plans to roll out the new structure by September.

Another bottleneck gets removed, and the buildout gets a little more real.

♻️DOE Revives Cold War Sites for HALEU

The advanced reactor boom is real, but the fuel bottleneck is what decides the timeline.

And this week the Department of Energy made a move to fix it by turning Cold War infrastructure into the backbone of the advanced reactor era.

DOE announced it’s restarting uranium recovery operations at the H Canyon facility at Savannah River in South Carolina, while also leasing a long dormant nuclear facility at Hanford to fuel company General Matter.

These are legacy weapons sites getting a second life in civilian nuclear.

H Canyon is a monster of a building that’s been operating since 1955. It’s the only production scale, radiologically shielded chemical separations facility still running in the U.S., and it’s been recovering uranium and other materials from used fuel for decades.

Now it’s being pointed directly at HALEU.

High Assay Low Enriched Uranium is the fuel most advanced reactors are designed around, and it’s one of the biggest bottlenecks in the entire sector.

According to DOE, the used fuel inventory already sitting at Savannah River contains enough highly enriched uranium to produce up to 19 metric tons of HALEU.

That’s enough to fuel multiple early advanced reactor deployments without waiting years for brand new enrichment capacity.

At the same time, DOE signed a lease with General Matter to evaluate restarting the Fuels and Materials Examination Facility at Hanford in Washington.

The building was originally constructed for the fast breeder reactor program during the Cold War, fully built, fully equipped, and then… never used.

It’s been sitting idle for three decades.

Now it may come back online as part of the modern fuel cycle push, helping rebuild domestic nuclear fuel capability and reduce dependence on foreign supply.

Reactors only scale if fuel scales with them, and this is Washington putting steel and concrete behind that promise.

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🎬 The World’s Smallest Movie

You’ve seen stop motion. You’ve seen micro. Now meet atomic.

IBM literally moved individual atoms to make a film so small you need 100 million times magnification to watch it. Yes, this is real.

Watch this👇

✉️Radiation Sterilizes Your Mail

Welcome back to Atomic Alternatives, where we look at the weird, invisible, and surprisingly normal ways nuclear tech runs the modern world.

This week: your mail.

Yes, actual letters. Envelopes. Packages. The analog version of email.

Since the early 2000s, parts of the U.S. mail system have been routinely irradiated to kill biological threats.

After the 2001 anthrax attacks, the U.S. Postal Service began sending certain government and high risk mail through industrial irradiation, using controlled doses of radiation to neutralize bacteria and spores.

The machines use electron beam or X-ray irradiation, the same basic physics used in medical sterilization and food safety.

No radioactive residue, no glowing envelopes, just energy passing through the mail and scrambling the DNA of anything biological that shouldn’t be there.

It’s done at specialized irradiation facilities that process mail headed to federal agencies, military sites, and other sensitive locations. Millions of pieces of mail have gone through these systems over the past two decades.

It’s basically a nuclear powered disinfectant, and a good reminder that radiation is not some exotic sci-fi threat. It’s a tool used every day, keeping real world systems running.

😂Meme of The Week

That’s it for this time. Another week, another win for the atom.

This email will self-destruct in 10 seconds.

-Fredrik

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