On Wednesday, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it had granted its first construction authorization in nearly a decade. The approval allows work to start at a site in Kemmerer, Wyoming, by a company called TerraPower. Best known for having Bill Gates among its financial backers, the company is attempting to build a radically different reactor that is sodium-cooled and integrates energy storage into its architecture.

That authorization doesn’t guarantee the reactor will be licensed to operate, but it marks an important milestone for the company.

TerraPower’s design, dubbed Natrium and developed in collaboration with GE Hitachi, includes several innovative aspects. The most prominent is the use of liquid sodium for cooling and heat transfer. Using sodium keeps the primary coolant in liquid form, avoiding many of the issues associated with the high-pressure steam systems of water-cooled reactors. However, sodium is highly reactive with air and water, which introduces safety risks. Natrium is also a fast-neutron reactor, potentially enabling it to consume certain isotopes that would otherwise contribute to radioactive waste in more conventional reactor types.

The reactor is relatively small compared with most current nuclear stations (about 245 megawatts versus roughly one gigawatt) and incorporates energy storage. Instead of using the sodium’s heat to generate steam, the facility will load that heat into a salt-based thermal storage medium that can be dispatched to produce electricity immediately or held for later use. That capability allows the plant to operate alongside variable renewable generation, which might otherwise undercut it on price. The storage system also permits temporary output increases up to around 500 MW.

Based on recent remarks by Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of US Space Command, we shouldn’t expect anything of that sort in whatever the government might publish in response to Trump’s forthcoming order.

Gen. Stephen Whiting, the commander of US Space Command.

Photo credit:
US Air Force/Eric Dietrich

“I can say, personally, I was very intrigued by the president’s announcement,” Whiting told reporters last week at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium in Colorado. “I look forward to seeing whatever data is released. As a space operator with 36 years’ experience who has spent substantial time with space-domain awareness sensors and tracking objects in space, I’ve only observed manmade items, so I’m not aware of anything extraterrestrial apart from comets and similar occurrences.

“I’m very interested in the subject,” he continued. “And if anything is disclosed, I’ll be interested as an American citizen.”

Space Command’s responsibilities include an area of responsibility (AOR) that stretches from the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere out to the Moon and beyond. One of its duties is to track, monitor, and catalog objects in space. Whiting indicated that everything he’s observed in orbit can be attributed to either human-made or natural causes.

“We would follow any presidential instruction to review our records, but I think the term of art now is UAP, and the A stands for aerial, so these refer to objects below the Kármán line (100 kilometers), within the atmosphere,” Whiting said. “I’ve seen some of the same videos and radar data many of you have, and my expectation is that the relevant services and combatant commands will hand that data over. I’m very interested in the topic, but I have no personal experience with those phenomena.”

NASA has repaired the fault that forced the Artemis II rocket off its launch pad last month, but officials say it will be a few weeks before the vehicle can be returned to the launch position at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The 322-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket might have been able to fly as soon as this week after passing a critical fueling test on February 21. During that test, NASA loaded the Space Launch System with cryogenic propellants without major issues, apparently resolving a persistent hydrogen leak that had held up the mission in early February.

However, a separate issue arose one day after the successful fueling demonstration. Ground crews were unable to get helium into the rocket’s upper stage. Unlike the connections to the core stage, which can be serviced on the pad, the umbilical lines feeding the upper stage higher on the rocket are accessible only inside Kennedy’s cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB).

Mission managers promptly decided to roll the rocket back to the assembly building for troubleshooting. The vehicle returned to the VAB on February 25, and within a week engineers identified the cause of the helium flow problem. Inspections showed that a seal in the quick disconnect — the passage through which helium moves from ground systems into the rocket — was blocking the flow, according to NASA.

Fixing the seal

“The team removed the quick disconnect, reassembled the system, and began validating the repairs to the upper stage by running a reduced flow rate of helium through the mechanism to ensure the issue was resolved,” NASA said in an update posted Tuesday. “Engineers are assessing what allowed the seal to become dislodged to prevent the issue from recurring.”

In a release, Accenture’s CEO and chair Julie Sweet stated:

Acquiring Ookla will enable us to help clients across both commercial and government sectors scale AI securely and create the trusted data foundations required to provide reliable, seamless connectivity that generates value.

Accenture’s current public-sector clients include the US Air Force, the US Social Security Administration, and, recently, the US Department of State.

Speedtest and Downdetector are widely used by people who want to quickly check their internet speed and the operational status of online services, respectively. Downdetector is frequently cited in media coverage about the availability of websites, apps, banks, and other services.

Under Ziff Davis, both products also have business-to-business (B2B) uses. Through Speedtest, for example, Ookla collects, aggregates, and analyzes data for “billions of mobile network samples daily, which measure radio signal levels, network coverage, and availability, and [quality of experience] metrics for a number of connected experiences, such as streaming video, video conferencing, gaming, web browsing, and CDN and cloud provider performance,” Ookla says. Speedtest currently lists telecommunications operators, regulatory and trade bodies, analysts, journalists, and nonprofits among its B2B customers.

Downdetector Explorer, in turn, is a monitoring tool designed to help businesses detect outages. Its customers include streaming platforms, banks, social networks, and communication service providers.

If Accenture’s acquisition goes through, the consulting firm will similarly rely on Speedtest and Downdetector data to advise clients, and individual users would fall under any new privacy policy and other changes Accenture may introduce.

An Accenture spokesperson told Ars Technica that Accenture plans to operate the Ookla “business as it operates today.”