NEWS RELEASES

U.S. nuclear energy faces fuel supply chain vulnerabilities, with tight uranium supplies, geopolitical risks, and rising costs threatening both existing reactors costs and advanced reactor development.

The uranium conversion stage represents a major bottleneck, with only five large-scale facilities worldwide, shrinking stockpiles, and companies hesitant to expand capacity without long-term contracts that buyers are reluctant to sign at current high prices.

Next-generation reactors will require significantly more mined uranium per ton of fuel, potentially tightening supplies for the existing nuclear fleet, which is already facing high fuel costs.

Researchers built an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) that converts low-energy light into higher-energy versions without high-energy input or special materials.

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s strategic partnerships with private fusion companies and public research institutions around the world are accelerating the timeline for commercial fusion energy.

Scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a new system that allows researchers to observe how plants “breathe” in real time under controlled environmental conditions. The tool, called Stomata In-Sight, integrates live confocal microscopy with leaf gas exchange measurements and precise environmental controls, enabling researchers to directly link microscopic stomatal movements with carbon dioxide uptake and water loss.

Stomata — tiny pores on leaf surfaces — play a critical role in plant growth and water use, but until now, scientists have had to choose between observing their structure or measuring their function. Stomata In-Sight overcomes this limitation, providing a dynamic view of how plants respond to changes in light, temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide.

The system could accelerate efforts to develop crops that use water more efficiently, an increasingly urgent need as drought and climate stress intensify. The research was published in Plant Physiology and was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and philanthropic funding.

An international team has obtained the first-ever experimental evidence of electrical behavior that mimics a Josephson junction with two superconductors even though only one was present.

A research team at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) is the first ever to observe a beta-delayed neutron emission from fluorine-25, a rare, unstable nuclide. Using the FRIB Decay Station Initiator (FDSi), the team found contradictions in prior experimental findings. The results led to a new line of inquiry into how particles in exotic, unstable isotopes remain bound under extreme conditions. Led by Robert Grzywacz, professor of physics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), the team included Jack Peltier, undergraduate student at UTK, Zhengyu Xu, postdoctoral researcher at UTK, Sean Liddick, professor of chemistry at FRIB and interim chairperson of MSU’s Department of Chemistry, and Rebeka Lubna, scientist at FRIB. The team published its results (“The evidence of N = 16 shell closure and β-delayed neutron emission from ²⁵F”) in Physics Letters B.

Brown University engineers showed that applying a temperature gradient across a solid-state electrolyte blocks destructive dendrite growth, offering a practical solution to a major barrier in battery technology.