Fermilab's fusion cable tester, Oklo's Groves 2 Forge, Bluecore's uranium

Three nuclear stories from October 12 and 13, 2026, each one step short of the thing itself: a fusion magnet test stand whose first cable test is expected in 2028, an isotope plant announced without a site or a date, and reactor uranium in a form that still has to become fuel.

Fermilab launches MAGNES to test fusion magnet cables

Fermilab is launching the MAGNet Environment Simulator, or MAGNES, a test platform for the superconducting cables that would carry current in a fusion reactor's magnets, the lab said in a feature dated October 12, 2026. The DOE Office of Fusion and the DOE Offices of High Energy Physics and Nuclear Physics fund it jointly. Fermilab says the test bed will be unique in the United States for giving access to a volume of high magnetic field that can be used for testing the cables that would go into such a reactor.

The numbers are large. Cables will carry up to 100,000 amps in a strong, stable background field, said Stephen Gourlay, who directs Fermilab's Magnet Technology Division. That field comes from a 15-tesla dipole magnet designed and built by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which Fermilab's Gueorgui Velev says will be installed in an 18-foot-deep, nearly 5-foot-diameter pit; the lab puts a typical hospital MRI at 1.5 to 3 tesla. The cryostat, built by a company in Illinois, chills samples to roughly 2 to 4 degrees above absolute zero. One of its seals must be flat to within two-thousandths of an inch across a 14-foot circumference, senior engineer Vlad Nikolic said.

Launched, here, means named and under construction. The cryomodule was installed in 2025, and Nikolic said the next step is an anti-cryostat that lets a test sample change temperature without warming the main magnet: without it, warming the magnet would take about a month, and with it a sample can be changed in one day. Fermilab expects the first cable tests to begin in the summer of 2028. Where the rest of fusion stands is tracked on our fusion energy reference page.

Oklo names its Launch Pad project: Groves 2 Forge

Oklo said on October 13, 2026 that it will advance Groves 2 Forge, an isotope production and processing pilot facility, as part of DOE's Nuclear Energy Launch Pad, run by the National Reactor Innovation Center (NRIC) (Oklo). The plant is planned to pair reactor irradiation with hot-cell processing, including isotope separation, product recovery, packaging and transportation, and to produce lutetium-177 and other therapeutic isotopes for radiopharmaceutical treatments, starting with lutetium-177, an isotope used in targeted cancer treatments. Oklo plans to take it from pilot operations to commercial-scale production with the appropriate NRC licenses for commercial operation.

What the selection buys Oklo is access. Launch Pad gives its selected developers "a prioritized pathway to the DOE authorization process, and access to subject matter experts, facilities, and regulatory support tailored to their needs," NRIC Director Brad Tomer said on August 24, 2026, when NRIC announced a round of 13 new projects from 12 developers. Oklo was on that list with no project named beside it, and NRIC says it will keep making selections on a rolling basis as resources allow. Seven weeks later, Oklo's release names the project, though not its site, cost or start date.

Oklo pitches Groves 2 Forge as the sequel to its Groves Isotope Test Reactor in Texas, which it says went from greenfield to criticality in less than a year under DOE's Reactor Pilot Program, the first project in that program to do so on private land. That reactor reached criticality in Lockhart, Texas on August 5, 2026, as our advanced reactors reference page records; our microreactor survey lists it as the summer's sixth fueled-core criticality, outside the microreactor class.

Bluecore buys 4.95% uranium for a floating reactor

Bluecore Energy, which is developing floating nuclear energy systems at the Port of Long Beach, said on October 13, 2026 that it had bought uranium hexafluoride (UF6) enriched to 4.95% uranium-235 from WMC, a nuclear fuel intermediary (Bluecore). The material is held at a US nuclear fuel facility outside California, which the release headline calls the largest commercial nuclear fuel facility in the US without naming it, while Bluecore advances its plans for fuel fabrication, testing and validation. The release gives no quantity. UF6 is the enrichment-stage form of uranium; it still has to be converted into uranium dioxide, fabricated into fuel pellets and assembled into fuel.

Bluecore's reactor keeps the nuclear part conventional, so that the remaining first-of-a-kind regulatory questions fall on the marine platform: the Nautilus Floating Nuclear Power Plant, a 45 megawatt thermal (MWt) pressurized water reactor designed for deployment on a non-self-propelled barge, using standard 17x17 fuel assembly geometry with 4.95%-enriched uranium dioxide, according to the NRC's pre-application page for Bluecore. Its reference operating location is the Port of Long Beach, California. So the uranium sits outside the state that holds the design's reference site, and Bluecore says it neither operates an active reactor nor stores nuclear fuel at its Long Beach headquarters, where it works on a non-fueled maritime reactor module prototype.

The license application itself is still to come: the NRC describes its work as pre-application activities for a future application. It dates that work with Bluecore to July 2026; Bluecore says it began pre-application engagement in August 2026, presenting a conceptual overview of its design to NRC staff, with the US Coast Guard taking part in the meeting. In June 2026, the American Bureau of Shipping gave the design an Approval in Principle, which Bluecore calls the first ABS approval in principle for a US-designed floating nuclear power plant.

Corrected October 15, 2026: an earlier version described the 13 projects from 12 developers selected on August 24 as the Launch Pad's selections; they were one round of new projects, and NRIC makes further selections on a rolling basis.