nuclear energy

Italy's parliament has approved a law paving the way for the country's return to nuclear energy, decades after Italians voted to abandon it following the Chernobyl disaster. The move would allow new nuclear plants as part of Italy's energy strategy, and it has revived debate over safety, costs, and the country's energy future.

President Trump said the United States will "win this war very soon" and that oil prices should fall sharply once the conflict ends. He framed the key objective as preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The remarks come amid ongoing fighting and continued attention to energy markets, with analysts watching how quickly oil prices might react to any resolution.

Iran has put forward a seven-day plan that would see the Strait of Hormuz reopened and nuclear talks resume within a week. The proposal, reported by Al Jazeera, links the strategic waterway's status to a rapid return to diplomacy. Observers are watching whether the plan gains traction with the other parties amid ongoing tensions in the region.

China and the United States have reached an understanding on Iran, agreeing that the Strait of Hormuz should remain open to traffic and that Tehran must not acquire nuclear weapons. The reported alignment is notable given the two powers' usual friction over Middle East policy, and it signals shared interest in keeping Gulf oil shipments flowing and preventing nuclear proliferation.

Italy has approved a law allowing the country to produce nuclear energy again, nearly four decades after a referendum banned it following the 1987 vote. The move restarts nuclear power in one of the few European countries to have abandoned it, as governments across Europe reconsider atomic energy to secure supplies and cut emissions.

Politico reports on a nuclear power startup taking a page from SpaceX: moving fast, iterating on hardware, and pursuing rapid test cycles in an industry long defined by slow regulation and massive upfront costs. The piece highlights how Silicon Valley-style engineering culture is being imported into nuclear energy as demand for clean, always-on power surges.

Thales, Bull and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) are reportedly collaborating on quantum computing software aimed at military applications for the French armed forces. The partnership links a major defence electronics group, a computing firm and France's nuclear research body around developing quantum software for defence use.

The US Navy's W93/Mk7 nuclear warhead program has moved into a new development phase. The W93 is intended as a future replacement warhead for the Navy's submarine-launched ballistic missile arsenal. The milestone signals continued progress in the Pentagon and Department of Energy's long-term effort to modernize the US nuclear weapons stockpile, a costly and politically sensitive undertaking.

Politico examines whether the fast-moving, test-heavy development approach that made SpaceX successful could be applied to the nuclear power industry. The question taps into ongoing debate about how to accelerate new reactor technologies and cut costs in a sector long criticised for slow timelines and regulatory bottlenecks, as governments push to expand nuclear capacity for energy security and climate goals.

Scientists are highlighting a proposal to use particle accelerators to transmute long-lived radioactive waste from nuclear energy, potentially reducing its hazardous lifespan from around 100,000 years to just a few centuries. The idea, known as accelerator-driven transmutation, is being discussed as a way to ease one of nuclear power's biggest drawbacks: the need to store spent fuel safely for many millennia.

The first commercial nuclear-powered satellite has been launched aboard a SpaceX mission, according to the American Nuclear Society's Nuclear Newswire. The milestone marks the first time a nuclear-powered spacecraft has flown on a commercial basis, combining private spaceflight with nuclear energy technology in orbit. Details about the satellite's operator, reactor design and mission goals remain limited in the available reporting.

The Albuquerque Journal takes readers inside Sandia National Laboratories' Z machine in New Mexico, the world's most powerful pulsed-power facility. Originally built to study materials under nuclear weapons conditions, the device is now central to research on fusion energy, exploring how the same physics that powers warheads could one day deliver clean, abundant power.

French technology group Thales, computer maker Bull and the Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) are working together on software for quantum computers intended for use by the French armed forces. The collaboration links France's leading defence electronics firm, its flagship computing company and its national nuclear research body around military applications of quantum technology.

Poland's National Centre for Nuclear Research (NCBJ) is leading a study of neutrino scattering at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The work examines how neutrinos, particles that rarely interact with matter, behave at the highest energies ever produced, a field opened by the LHC's forward physics experiments. Researchers say the measurements could sharpen understanding of the weak force and proton structure.