While nuclear reactors have been generating power around the world for over 70 years, the current moment is one of potentially radical transformation for the technology.
As electricity demand rises around the world for everything from electric vehicles to data centers, there’s renewed interest in building new nuclear capacity, as well as extending the lifetime of existing plants and even reopening facilities that have been shut down.
Efforts are also growing to rethink reactor designs, and 2025 marks a major test for so-called advanced reactors as they begin to move from ideas on paper into the construction phase. Here’s what to expect next for the industry.
—Casey Crownhart
This piece is part of MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series, looking across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.
Mark Zuckerberg and the power of the media
On Tuesday last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta is done with fact checking in the US, that it will roll back “restrictions” on speech, and is going to start showing people more tailored political content in their feeds. While the end of fact checking has gotten most of the attention, the changes to its hateful speech policy are also notable.
Zuckerberg—whose previous self-acknowledged mistakes include the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, and helping to fuel a genocide in Myanmar—presented Facebook’s history of fact-checking and content moderation as something he was pressured into doing by the government and media. The reality, of course, is that these were his decisions. He famously calls the shots, and always has. Read the full story.
