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Energy

A reactor built from 664 two-inch uranium cubes hung on wires in heavy water under a German castle was Heisenberg’s last shot at a chain reaction, and two of the surviving cubes now show it needed about twice the uranium and heavy water it held, more of both than Nazi Germany had

By Luis Reyes—Nov 10, 2026
Energy

A 66-foot-deep gravel pit in Finland just started taking in about 100 million gallons of tap water, and once a nine-acre lid goes on top, it’s meant to hold enough summer heat at up to 194°F to cover as much as nearly a quarter of the town’s yearly heat demand

By Luis Reyes—Nov 10, 2026
Energy

A 375,000-pound turbine now spins inside a Tennessee dam in place of one that ran for more than 80 years, and a federal watchdog just found that 196 of the 240 welds on the ring guiding water out of it failed on a job where some welders weren’t qualified

By Luis Reyes—Nov 10, 2026
Energy

280 solar panels on trackers 15 to 16 feet up over a Spanish olive grove are built to tilt whenever the trees need shade, one rig for machines that shake each tree and one for harvesters that straddle the rows, and lying flat on a July test day they left the leaves underneath greener

By Luis Reyes—Nov 10, 2026
Energy

A reactor coolant pump at a 759-megawatt South Carolina nuclear plant had its insulation burn past the 15-minute mark that forces an emergency declaration, and the site’s fire brigade put it out with a fire extinguisher 27 minutes after the first alarm, with output already at zero

By Luis Reyes—Nov 10, 2026
Energy

A plant built to pull 99.9% of the radioactivity out of nuclear tank waste is getting its ground cleared beside a Washington tank farm, where old utilities are being torn out and moved, and once it’s running, Hanford can pretreat 3.6 million gallons a year, three times what it handles now

By Luis Reyes—Nov 9, 2026
Energy

Boulders weighing up to 4,400 pounds just went over the side of an activist ship onto the seabed off England’s east coast, and they’re spread across about 45 square miles of a protected porpoise habitat to keep out the heavy nets bottom trawlers drag across the sea floor

By Luis Reyes—Nov 9, 2026
Energy

A 13-ton steel box was just craned into place at a British fusion machine, and once two more particle beam injectors go inside, the beam power heating its plasma doubles from 4.4 to 8.8 megawatts and its temperature is expected to climb from 54 million to 108 million degrees

By Luis Reyes—Nov 9, 2026
Energy

A downtown Ontario dam is getting stone packed beneath its concrete spillway and extensive grouting in an emergency repair to carry it through spring thaw flows, while the mill pond behind it stays low for two to three months and the permanent fix waits for a bigger rebuild

By Luis Reyes—Nov 9, 2026
Energy

A drum crusher is replacing the reciprocating saw workers used on nuclear waste drums inside a three-room enclosure in Tennessee, where a conveyor and a soil mixer came out and new cameras and ventilation went in so it can take large waste boxes from Oak Ridge demolition jobs

By Luis Reyes—Nov 9, 2026
Energy

A 135-foot concrete dam in Tennessee that’s more than a century old has wooden boards on top of its spillway built to break away in a flood, and after one roared through, its lake is being lowered about 5 feet so new boards can go in

By Luis Reyes—Nov 8, 2026
Energy

A 154,000-pound rotor came from Austria by way of Rotterdam, took a 200-mile detour behind a police escort and rolled through an access tunnel into a power station built inside a Scottish mountain, where two half-century-old generating units are being rebuilt to add 40 megawatts

By Luis Reyes—Nov 8, 2026
Energy

A pair of 5½-inch 3D-printed tungsten tiles took 74 plasma blasts at the bottom of a San Diego fusion machine and came out intact, even after a misaligned tile next to them melted along its edge and sprayed molten metal across one of the pair

By Luis Reyes—Nov 8, 2026
Energy

A 950-megawatt dam on the Columbia River is getting 38 anchors drilled down through its spillway into bedrock and stretched tight, clamping together two layers of concrete that separated inside it and bringing the whole structure up to modern earthquake standards

By Luis Reyes—Nov 8, 2026
Energy

Uranium-233 canisters stored for decades in the world’s oldest operating nuclear building are being cut apart inside a glovebox because some exceed the processing plant’s limits, and the cleanup got through 62 of them in a year against a goal of 50

By Luis Reyes—Nov 8, 2026
Energy

An 11,000-volt ship connector packed into its own container just passed factory tests with outside inspectors watching, and it’s built to reel in a high-voltage cable from an offshore wind turbine, lock it in and let a service vessel charge its batteries without heading back to port

By Luis Reyes—Nov 7, 2026
Energy

A 1,310-foot concrete dam in the Australian outback lets floodwater pour straight over 720 feet of its arches, and the biggest flood it’s ever taken ran more than 15 feet deep across the top

By Luis Reyes—Nov 7, 2026
Energy

A 3-by-3-foot underwater flap has been swinging with the waves off a Hawaii pier for months, pumping hydraulic fluid until the pressure is high enough to spin a generator, and researchers are streaming every reading from it live to anyone who wants to watch

By Luis Reyes—Nov 7, 2026
Energy

An 80-kilowatt wave-power buoy built in three sections small enough to travel by road is headed for the dock in Bilbao, where it’ll be put back together and towed out into the Bay of Biscay, and it won’t feed the grid until its three swappable generator modules go in next spring

By Luis Reyes—Nov 7, 2026
Energy

120 see-through solar panels just went up over an Australian sheep feedlot to power automatic feeders that ran on diesel generators, and gaps between the cells let 10 percent of the light through so sheep resting in their shade still get some winter warmth

By Luis Reyes—Nov 7, 2026
Energy

A 1,168-megawatt power plant in a cavern under a Massachusetts mountain has run for more than eight years on year-to-year federal permits after its license ran out, still pumping the Connecticut River about 800 feet uphill to store power for New England, and it has just been sold

By Luis Reyes—Nov 7, 2026
Energy

A 44-ton machine that can work almost 65 feet up just finished factory tests in Germany and will lift a remote-controlled demolition robot inside a retired nuclear plant, where eight steam separators weighing up to 330 tons each have to be cut apart

By Luis Reyes—Nov 7, 2026
Energy

The underground cutoff wall for a Florida reservoir built to hold more than 78 billion gallons is now 50 percent complete, with eight of its 15.84 miles finished, the job 34 days ahead of schedule, and three draglines digging the basin

By Luis Reyes—Nov 7, 2026
Energy

A 463-foot concrete dam on Oregon’s North Santiam River will drop Detroit Reservoir to elevation 1,425 feet in late November, hold it there about two weeks, and start a multi-year step-down so young salmon and steelhead can find a safer way past the dam

By Luis Reyes—Nov 6, 2026
Energy

A 177-degree underground water supply already runs through more than 20 miles of pipe under Boise to heat over 6 million square feet in the largest municipal geothermal system in the US, and it’s now headed for more than 300 affordable homes, something officials say no other American city has tried

By Luis Reyes—Nov 6, 2026
Energy

A 51-foot-wide boring machine is about halfway through a 0.9-mile dive under Sydney Harbour, and when it and its twin break into the 75-foot caverns waiting on the far shore next year, their cutterheads will be cut loose, pushed aside and sealed into the rock for good

By Luis Reyes—Nov 6, 2026
Energy

A 988-megawatt reactor in Arkansas was at 100 percent power when a lightning strike near the station knocked out every reactor coolant pump at 8:38 a.m., the protection system scrammed the core on its own, and operators held it in hot standby with no radiological release

By Luis Reyes—Nov 6, 2026
Energy

A 650-ton beam and two gantry cranes just hoisted a generator rotor out of a 72-year-old Columbia River dam to make room for the first of 14 new turbines, and the last one isn’t due for another 11 years

By Luis Reyes—Nov 5, 2026
Energy

5,220 solar panels raised 10.5 feet over 4.4 acres of organic blueberries in western Switzerland kept the field producing four weeks longer than open ground through this summer’s heat, and they sit high enough for the farmer’s machines to work underneath them

By Luis Reyes—Nov 5, 2026
Energy

A 4,500-acre stretch of Ohio River bottomland that a Kentucky utility bought for a coal plant it never built is lined up for six of the reactors running at Georgia’s Vogtle plant, 6.6 gigawatts, more than any nuclear plant in America makes today

By Luis Reyes—Nov 5, 2026
Energy

A 308-foot dam in Arizona just let out about 60,000 cubic feet of water a second, the most its operator believes it has sent downstream in 33 years, and the Salt River through Phoenix, a dry bed most of the year, is expected to keep running for days if not weeks

By Luis Reyes—Nov 5, 2026
Energy

A 566-foot concrete dam that keeps the Mississippi from changing course lost its 67-foot wing wall to a flood that dug up to 55 feet under it, was cut from a 35-foot drop to 22, and Army engineers have now pumped its bays dry to weigh the ground below for voids

By Luis Reyes—Nov 5, 2026
Energy

An 800-megawatt reactor on the Missouri River was starting back up after a refueling outage, still at just 9 percent power, when operators shut it down by hand at 4:54 in the morning because the only feedwater pump it had running started to shake harder than it should

By Luis Reyes—Nov 4, 2026
Energy

A 36-inch release valve had already been opened ahead of the storm at a century-old concrete arch dam outside Prescott, Arizona, and water still poured over the top on Sunday, when runoff at two to three times normal sent more than 4,000 cubic feet per second into the lake

By Luis Reyes—Nov 4, 2026
Energy

A 710-foot concrete dam on the Colorado River still had detonation cord sitting in several boreholes along the restricted road leading up to it, a bomb squad traced it back to the dam’s own construction, and the feds now have to decide whether to pull it out or set it off

By Luis Reyes—Nov 4, 2026
Energy

A 402-foot earth dam in New Mexico kept letting out just 250 cubic feet per second while up to 52,000 poured in, and its lake rose almost 43 feet in 13 days, catching 470,000 acre-feet as the towns below it flooded from rivers it doesn’t control

By Luis Reyes—Nov 4, 2026
Energy

A 512-megawatt reactor in the Czech Republic was unhooked from the grid one turbine at a time, at 12:42 and 2:06 in the morning, just six weeks after a two-month refueling outage, and it’s being cooled down so a small leaking valve found on a routine check can be fixed

By Luis Reyes—Nov 3, 2026
Energy

A 100-foot earthen dam holding back a nearly 4,000-acre Michigan lake is one of 13 hydro plants up to 120 years old headed for a private buyer, and if state regulators kill the sale, the utility that owns them could tear them out and let the lakes drain

By Luis Reyes—Nov 3, 2026
Energy

A 900-megawatt reactor on a French estuary shut itself down as crews readied one of its backup diesel generators for a routine test, 53 days after the same kind of check tripped it, and stayed off the grid for 92 hours with a sister unit already down for maintenance

By Luis Reyes—Nov 2, 2026
Energy

A 400-ton generator at a South Dakota dam was taken apart for the first time in 70 years, its 275-ton rotor lifted out by two cranes working as one, and the first new turbine runner just rolled into the powerhouse to take each unit up to 52 megawatts

By Luis Reyes—Nov 2, 2026
Energy

29,000 gallons of radioactive liquid that heats itself was pumped out of British tanks built in the 1950s a lawnmower tank at a time, 10.6 gallons a cycle for 2,250 cycles, through valves nobody had opened in 20 years, and the job finished in months against a plan of more than a year

By Luis Reyes—Nov 1, 2026
Energy

A California hillside water battery is designed to hold 5 million gallons in its upper tank that only firefighters can touch and 80 megawatt-hours in roofed tanks instead of a dam, and the drill rig started boring the same day the utility cut power to 3,601 customers

By Luis Reyes—Nov 1, 2026
Energy

Used control rod drives from an 842-megawatt reactor on Lake Ontario rode a truck about 750 miles to a shop in North Carolina, every reading on the package and the trailer passed, and the one spot over the limit was the driver’s cab, 2.2 millirem an hour against 2

By Luis Reyes—Nov 1, 2026
Energy

A 2.5-mile fish net goes into Lake Michigan every spring to help keep fish out of six reversible turbines that pump water 363 feet uphill, and divers pressure-wash mussels off its 62 panels all summer before the whole barrier comes ashore for winter

By Luis Reyes—Nov 1, 2026
Energy

A 375-foot-wide concrete tank in South Carolina wrapped in 289 miles of wire has been topped off with nuclear-waste grout after eight years of pumping, as the plant feeding it ran 24 hours straight for the first time and sent 112,000 gallons in a single day

By Luis Reyes—Oct 31, 2026
Energy

A 131-foot concrete dam, the only one in California rated unsatisfactory, will have its spillway cut 35 feet lower because its concrete is too deteriorated to repair, and until then a 36-inch pipe is what it relies on to drain the lake in a heavy storm

By Luis Reyes—Oct 31, 2026
Energy

A 46-foot steel trash screen went together 59 feet under an Australian lake in eight panels, bolted in by divers who could see about 20 inches ahead, and when its thick paint left the frame bowed an inch, they loosened the bolts and winched it straight underwater

By Luis Reyes—Oct 31, 2026
Energy

6,300 see-through solar panels now stand over 5.2 acres of apple trees on a German lakeshore to shield them from hail, and a third of their power runs 1,640 feet down a cable to a packing house that sorts and chills fruit, all of it built without a subsidy

By Luis Reyes—Oct 31, 2026
Energy

An 11,200-foot geothermal well drilled straight down into the Utah desert in under 11 days hit rock above 555 degrees, 155 degrees hotter than the rock feeding its driller’s new power plant one county south, and an outside review put the field at several gigawatts

By Luis Reyes—Oct 31, 2026
Energy

A 171-ton turbine rotor and two casings of 57 and 87 tons are riding a river towboat up from the Gulf Coast to a 1,160-megawatt Tennessee reactor sitting dark after a 470-day run, 315 tons in all, and the plant had more than 9,000 of the outage’s 11,400 jobs checked off before the barge arrived

By Luis Reyes—Oct 30, 2026
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