Tech
New research effort could boost nuclear fuel performance
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have begun a series of experiments that could result in more energy for the grid by increasing nuclear fuel efficiency. The tests are made possible by the special delivery of 11 “high burnup” rods that were irradiated for research purposes.
The rods will be punctured, cut, mechanically stressed and closely examined—all part of testing to learn how the metal alloys fared inside the extreme environment of a nuclear reactor for six years, where temperatures can soar to hundreds of degrees Celsius.
The larger aim: to understand how advanced fuels developed by Global Nuclear Fuel react to “higher burnup” conditions. Those conditions partly entail keeping the fuels inside a reactor for longer than is typical, with the goal of extracting more energy out of the fuel than is done today.
“To draw more energy from these materials and increase plant power is like putting new generating capacity on the grid without having to build any new infrastructure,” said Mark Nutt, director of PNNL’s nuclear energy market sector. “That’s a useful thing for both fuel vendors and a nation that seeks to realize a fuller nuclear potential.”
The series of experiments underway at PNNL will reveal important information about how the research rods reacted to the conditions, and may even inform how future fuels are designed. High burnup fuels stand to boost the performance of the country’s nuclear power fleet by making more efficient use of existing fuel materials, making reactors more resistant to nuclear incidents and perhaps even lowering the cost of electricity.
“This is a significant milestone for our Accident Tolerant Fuel program,” said Frank Goldner, the Accident Tolerant Fuel federal program manager in the Office of Nuclear Energy. “The development of this fuel could further support the Trump Administration’s executive order to facilitate 5 gigawatts of power uprates at existing power plants by 2030 and high burnup fuels could be a big part of that.”
Delivered safe and sound
When the rods first arrived at the PNNL-Richland campus, many of the scientists watching the delivery wore expressions of anticipation. The shipping process was well-regulated, requiring complex logistical coordination between agencies over a span of 14 months. As an unloading crew meticulously transferred the 60,000-pound stainless-steel rod-carrying cask into the Radiochemical Processing Laboratory (RPL), a team of technicians, radiation chemists, material scientists and nuclear engineers was at the ready. Testing was to begin right away.
Almost like forensic analysis, signatures of past exposure imbued throughout the materials will answer important questions for curious scientists. Did the outer casing, called “cladding,” perform as expected under high burnup conditions? Researchers will search for changes in the material through “tensile testing” techniques. They’ll also use a digital image correlation method to paint the cladding with thousands of dots, then trace the movement of those dots as the cladding is pulled apart with great mechanical force to gather significantly more data.
In one test, researchers used remotely operated manipulators inside a heavily shielded hot cell to puncture the cladding, releasing the rods’ internal pressure. They then capture the radioactive gases that released, which reveal how much pressure built up inside the cladding as the rods’ internal contents underwent fission reactions. All of these data will help Global Nuclear Fuel to further validate the models that estimate how their fuel may perform under various conditions.
“The examination of these rods is the next step in our continuous drive to develop higher efficiency fuels that are safer and more reliable,” said Craig Ranson, Installed Base CEO, GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy. “We are proud to be part of this collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, PNNL and our utility partners to benefit the entire industry.”
It’s exactly the kind of post-irradiation examination that PNNL is poised to do, thanks in part to the uniqueness of the RPL, a hazard category II non-reactor nuclear research facility. Equipped with precision instruments and staffed by researchers and technicians with diverse expertise, it’s rare that a single facility can perform such wide-ranging and specialized analyses for multiple sponsors.
“The RPL provides a unique opportunity where we can actually accept full-length high burnup rods, perform the research in the hot cells and take the material to different labs within the same space—without having to transfer buildings—for testing. It’s very efficient,” said PNNL chemist and project co-lead Susan Asmussen. “We have the ability to do work on materials—from post-irradiation examination to liquid-liquid separation chemistry—that few other facilities have.”
Co-lead Brady Hanson, a nuclear engineer at PNNL, concurs, also citing the research team’s breadth of experience as a key advantage.
“We can perform all the kinds of chemistry you could dream of under this roof, but we can also do mechanical and material testing here and we can quite literally get all the way down to the atomic level. There are few questions we can’t answer,” Hanson said.
“That’s a feature of both our facility and our diverse research team. We’ve got nuclear, mechanical and chemical engineers, materials scientists and a chemist. It takes all of us to look at the scope of the work from different angles and provide different viewpoints, and I think that’s what really makes us a strong team.”
PNNL also benefits from its extensive research scope and varied mission partners, as scientists from several disciplines work onsite and can collaborate on experiments to maximize the use of valuable nuclear materials for mission needs across the U.S. government. For instance, debris generated from the decladding process will be used to train the next generation of scientists tasked with developing technologies to detect and monitor nuclear activities—a key part of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration’s nonproliferation mission.
Through the Nonproliferation Stewardship Program, RPL staff will leverage the debris to understand how to characterize and monitor the movements of special nuclear materials, like uranium and plutonium, through a chemical separation process.
“This delivery represents a rare and valuable opportunity,” said Nutt. “We look forward to realizing the full scientific potential of this material—that’s an area where PNNL is especially capable, given our multidisciplinary strengths. The resulting research could help achieve several important goals in service to the nation and go a long way toward providing abundant and reliable energy to the grid allowing for U.S. energy dominance.”
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Don’t call them hearing aids. They’re hearpieces, intended as a blurring of the lines between hearing aid and earbuds—or “earpieces” in the parlance of Lizn, a Danish operation.
The company was founded in 2015, and it haltingly developed its launch product through the 2010s, only to scrap it in 2020 when, according to Lizn’s history page, the hearing aid/earbud combo idea didn’t work out. But the company is seemingly nothing if not persistent, and four years later, a new Lizn was born. The revamped Hearpieces finally made it to US shores in the last couple of weeks.
Half Domes
Photograph: Chris Null
Lizn Hearpieces are the company’s only product, and their inspiration from the pro audio world is instantly palpable. Out of the box, these look nothing like any other hearing aids on the market, with a bulbous design that, while self-contained within the ear, is far from unobtrusive—particularly if you opt for the graphite or ruby red color scheme. (I received the relatively innocuous sand-hued devices.)
At 4.58 grams per bud, they’re as heavy as they look; within the in-the-ear space, few other models are more weighty, including the Kingwell Melodia and Apple AirPods Pro 3. The units come with four sets of ear tips in different sizes; the default mediums worked well for me.
The bigger issue isn’t how the tip of the device fits into your ear, though; it’s how the rest of the unit does. Lizn Hearpieces need to be delicately twisted into the ear canal so that one edge of the unit fits snugly behind the tragus, filling the concha. My ears may be tighter than others, but I found this no easy feat, as the device is so large that I really had to work at it to wedge it into place. As you might have guessed, over time, this became rather painful, especially because the unit has no hardware controls. All functions are performed by various combinations of taps on the outside of either of the Hearpieces, and the more I smacked the side of my head, the more uncomfortable things got.
Thinking Machines cofounders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz are leaving the fledgling AI lab and rejoining OpenAI, the ChatGPT-maker announced on Thursday. OpenAI’s CEO of applications, Fidji Simo, shared the news in a memo to staff Thursday afternoon.
The news was first reported on X by technology reporter Kylie Robison, who wrote that Zoph was fired for “unethical conduct.”
A source close to Thinking Machines said that Zoph had shared confidential company information with competitors. WIRED was unable to verify this information with Zoph, who did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Zoph told Thinking Machines CEO Mira Murati on Monday he was considering leaving, then was fired today, according to the memo from Simo. She goes on to write that OpenAI doesn’t share the same concerns about Zoph as Murati.
The personnel shake-up is a major win for OpenAI, which recently lost its VP of research, Jerry Tworek.
Another Thinking Machines Lab staffer, Sam Schoenholz, is also rejoining OpenAI, the source said.
Zoph and Metz left OpenAI in late 2024 to start Thinking Machines with Murati, who had been the ChatGPT-maker’s chief technology officer.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Since Donald Trump returned to the White House last January, the biggest names in tech have mostly fallen in line with the new regime, attending dinners with officials, heaping praise upon the administration, presenting the president with lavish gifts, and pleading for Trump’s permission to sell their products to China. It’s been mostly business as usual for Silicon Valley over the past year, even as the administration ignored a wide range of constitutional norms and attempted to slap arbitrary fees on everything from chip exports to worker visas for high-skilled immigrants employed by tech firms.
But after an ICE agent shot and killed an unarmed US citizen, Renee Nicole Good, in broad daylight in Minneapolis last week, a number of tech leaders have begun publicly speaking out about the Trump administration’s tactics. This includes prominent researchers at Google and Anthropic, who have denounced the killing as calloused and immoral. The most wealthy and powerful tech CEOs are still staying silent as ICE floods America’s streets, but now some researchers and engineers working for them have chosen to break rank.
More than 150 tech workers have so far signed a petition asking for their company CEOs to call the White House, demand that ICE leave US cities, and speak out publicly against the agency’s recent violence. Anne Diemer, a human resources consultant and former Stripe employee who organized the petition, says that workers at Meta, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, TikTok, Spotify, Salesforce, Linkedin, and Rippling are among those who have signed. The group plans to make the list public once they reach 200 signatories.
“I think so many tech folks have felt like they can’t speak up,” Diemer told WIRED. “I want tech leaders to call the country’s leaders and condemn ICE’s actions, but even if this helps people find their people and take a small part in fighting fascism, then that’s cool, too.”
Nikhil Thorat, an engineer at Anthropic, said in a lengthy post on X that Good’s killing had “stirred something” in him. “A mother was gunned down in the street by ICE, and the government doesn’t even have the decency to perform a scripted condolence,” he wrote. Thorat added that the moral foundation of modern society is “infected, and is festering,” and the country is living through a “cosplay” of Nazi Germany, a time when people also stayed silent out of fear.
Jonathan Frankle, chief AI scientist at Databricks, added a “+1” to Thorat’s post. Shrisha Radhakrishna, chief technology and chief product officer of real estate platform Opendoor, replied that what happened to Good is “not normal. It’s immoral. The speed at which the administration is moving to dehumanize a mother is terrifying.” Other users who identified themselves as employees at OpenAI and Anthropic also responded in support of Thorat.
Shortly after Good was shot, Jeff Dean, an early Google employee and University of Minnesota graduate who is now the chief scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, began re-sharing posts with his 400,000 X followers criticizing the Trump administration’s immigration tactics, including one outlining circumstances in which deadly force isn’t justified for police officers interacting with moving vehicles.
He then weighed in himself. “This is completely not okay, and we can’t become numb to repeated instances of illegal and unconstitutional action by government agencies,” Dean wrote in an X post on January 10. “The recent days have been horrific.” He linked to a video of a teenager—identified as a US citizen—being violently arrested at a Target in Richfield, Minnesota.
In response to US Vice President JD Vance’s assertion on X that Good was trying to run over the ICE agent with her vehicle, Aaron Levie, the CEO of the cloud storage company Box, replied, “Why is he shooting after he’s fully out of harm’s way (2nd and 3rd shot)? Why doesn’t he just move away from the vehicle instead of standing in front of it?” He added a screenshot of a Justice Department webpage outlining best practices for law enforcement officers interacting with suspects in moving vehicles.
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