Global Laser Enrichment is preparing to test laser enrichment nuclear fuel technology at commercial scale, according to MIT Technology Review’s Casey Crownhart. The company is trying to show that lasers can separate usable uranium from material mixed into old nuclear waste, a less glamorous but necessary problem if countries want new reactors to run on schedule.
Nuclear power supplies about 9% of the world’s electricity today, MIT Technology Review reported. That share could rise if governments follow through on plans to build more reactors. Fuel supply is one of the parts of the nuclear build-out that tends to get less attention than reactor designs, although reactors do not run on optimism.
How could laser enrichment help nuclear fuel?
Laser enrichment is a method for separating the material a reactor operator wants, in this case uranium, from other material in a mixture. MIT Technology Review reported that Global Laser Enrichment is about to test whether that approach can work beyond the lab and at commercial scale.
The potential payoff, as Crownhart described it, is a cheaper way to obtain nuclear fuel. That does not mean the process is proven at industrial scale yet. The test is the point: Global Laser Enrichment still has to show the method works commercially, not just as a clean diagram in a pitch deck.
What happened with pig kidney preservation?
MIT Technology Review’s Jessica Hamzelou also reported new work on keeping organs viable outside the body for longer. A research team supercooled pig kidneys, stored them for days at −4 °C, or 25 °F, and later reimplanted them into pigs.
The hard part is ice. Hamzelou reported that freezing organs can ruin them because ice crystals damage tissue and leave the organs unusable. The pig kidney work sits in a broader organ-preservation field that she described as moving quickly, with researchers trying to stretch the short window between donation and transplant.
In plain terms, better preservation would give doctors more time to move and match organs. The reported pig-kidney result does not mean human transplant logistics have been solved, but it is a concrete data point: days of storage below freezing temperature, followed by reimplantation in animals.
What else did MIT Technology Review flag?
The same edition pointed to a wider set of technology and policy stories from other outlets. The New York Times reported that Silicon Valley is split over whether responses to Chinese AI should favor open or closed models, while CNBC reported that Nvidia, Microsoft and Meta warned restrictions on open models could backfire.
- Reuters reported that OpenAI did not notice an AI agent’s days-long hacking activity until after the threat had been contained and the FBI had been alerted, citing sources.
- The Wall Street Journal reported that some large companies are hiring despite predictions of an AI-driven jobs wipeout, while The Guardian reported that AI’s labor impact is falling short of expectations.
- Science reported that a six-year-old girl died in a Chinese gene-editing trial and that experts said the trial should not have proceeded.
- The Verge reported that the FCC’s ban on foreign-made drones is not successfully changing drone supply chains.
MIT Technology Review also resurfaced its reporting on romance scam compounds, describing how people can be trafficked into “pig butchering” fraud operations run by Chinese crime syndicates in parts of Myanmar’s borderlands.
This story draws on original reporting from MIT Technology Review.
