The Brief

The Trump administration is accelerating plans to place a nuclear reactor on the moon to power a base for humans.

The reactor would launch to the moon by 2030, according to a directive by acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy that was sent to NASA officials in July and obtained by NPR. It's an ambitious target that has some in the scientific community concerned about high costs and a potentially unrealistic schedule.

The plan follows the United States' goal to return astronauts to the moon and be a leader in space exploration as China and Russia also aim to use nuclear power on the moon by the end of the decade. Duffy said during a press conference on Tuesday that using nuclear energy as a power source on the moon is necessary to sustain life there — and that the U.S. is behind in its efforts.

"There's a certain part of the moon that everyone knows is the best. We have ice there. We have sunlight there. We wanna get there first and claim that for America," Duffy said.

Here is what to know about the administration's plans, and how using a nuclear reactor as a power source on the moon could work.

Why a nuclear reactor on the moon?

Spacecraft orbiting the Earth or stationed on the moon are typically powered by solar panels. But for any long-term human occupation of the moon, solar power alone won't be enough according to Roger Myers, an expert on space-based nuclear power.

"The sun sets on the moon for two weeks," he says. "You have to have another source of energy: The sun and batteries do not work. We're going to have to have nuclear power."

NASA now wants to launch a nuclear reactor of at least 100 kilowatts electric output, according to the directive. This would generate less power than typical nuclear reactors in the U.S. and could power only 70 to 80 homes, scientists say.

How would it work?

Nuclear reactors on the moon work in much the same way as reactors on Earth, according to Bhavya Lal, a former associate administrator for technology, policy and strategy at NASA. A controlled nuclear reaction in uranium fuel is used to generate heat that in turn can be used to make electricity.

That's very similar to how the 94 commercially operated nuclear reactors in the U.S. operate, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. A typical nuclear reactor in the U.S. generates at least 1 gigawatt of power, which is equivalent to 100 million LED light bulbs, according to the department.

The key difference between Earth and the moon is that "on Earth we have an atmosphere, so we can cool these reactors," Lal says. Many nuclear reactors are cooled by water, which in turn discharges the excess heat into the environment.

Without an atmosphere or any bodies of water, nuclear reactors on the moon need to radiate their excess heat directly into space. That means they need large radiators that can help them dissipate the heat load. The reactors' design also requires them to operate at higher temperatures than on Earth.

Transportation Secretary and acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy speaks during a news conference on new drone regulations and plans to use nuclear power on the moon on Tuesday.

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Julia Demaree Nikhinson

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What are the risks and dangers?

Moonquakes and meteorite strikes could damage a reactor, but the chances are slim. Moreover, even if something did happen on the surface, "there's no wind, there's no water that would move the radioactivity around," says Patrick McClure, the chief operating officer of SpaceNukes, a company developing space-based nuclear reactors. That's in contrast to Earth, where radioactive fallout can be spread over long distances by wind and rain.

Kathryn Huff, professor of nuclear, plasma, and radiological engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said a nuclear reactor being on the moon is not the primary safety issue — the main concern is getting the reactor up there and what happens once it reaches the end of its lifespan. It is unclear how long the reactor could operate, but most in the U.S. can last at least 80 years, according to the Department of Energy.

"It cannot blow up the moon," said Huff, who was also assistant secretary for Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy under the Biden administration. "If you're considering bringing that reactor off the moon someday, making sure that its reentry into the Earth's atmosphere is flawless will be pretty important because I think no one really wants to see a repeat of the Kosmos 954 [incident]."

Kosmos 954, a nuclear-powered satellite by Russia, malfunctioned in January 1978 while reentering Earth's atmosphere and exploded over Canada, spreading radioactive debris across the country.

McClure says that there are safety measures in place to ensure uranium fuel used in any lunar reactor would not be radioactive when it is launched. Moreover, he says, the reactor would not be activated until it reached what he described as a "nuclear safe orbit" of at least 621 miles above Earth.

Is this the right time?

The news that NASA will be developing reactors for the moon comes at a particularly challenging time for the agency.

At least 20% of NASA's workforce has opted to leave the agency through the Trump administration's deferred resignation program, and the administration has also proposed decreasing NASA's budget. A fiscal year 2026 budget request released in May would reduce funding for the agency by about 24%, from nearly $25 billion to nearly $19 billion — though the House and Senate are discussing recommendations that would keep funding for the agency around the current budget.

However, the agency recently got a boost, reversing earlier proposals to retire some NASA programs, including funding toward upcoming moon missions. Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act allocates nearly $10 billion in additional funding for NASA through 2032, including backing for Mars missions and plans to return to the moon.

The reactor project could consume a lot of that money. Lal and Myers estimated in a recent report that developing such a reactor would cost around $3 billion over five years.

In his directive, Duffy said that if China or Russia were to reach the moon first, either country could "potentially declare a keep-out zone which would significantly inhibit" the U.S. from establishing presence if it's not there first.

But the urgency to return to the moon with a nuclear reactor in a five-year timeline will be extremely difficult to meet, said Huff. She also suggests there should be a multiyear authorization process that includes input from several agencies, including NASA and the Energy Department, on nuclear safeguards before and after launch.

The U.S. should also prioritize the science of the mission and not focus on being first, Huff also said.

"You have to center a lot of this work, especially in space, in the scientific and technological community rather than in a community of the military and defense," she said. "I do hope to see that NASA's leadership in this space will imbue the project with a sense of international collaboration with our friends and allies."
Copyright 2025 NPR

Big Bear’s famous bald eagle nest has taken a turn — both of Jackie and Shadow’s eggs have been attacked by ravens.

In the nest overlooking Big Bear Lake, a raven could be seen poking a large hole into, and potentially eating, one of the eagle eggs. The intrusion was noticed on a popular YouTube livestream run by the nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley.

Jenny Voisard, the organization’s media and website manager, confirmed the crack in Friends of Big Bear Valley’s official Facebook group, which has nearly 400,000 members, after Jackie and Shadow were away from the nest, and eggs, for several hours Friday.

Voisard told LAist one of the eggs may still be partly intact, but both eggs are believed to be breached. Jackie returned to their nest shortly after the raven left to lay on the remaining egg, according to organization records.

“Our hearts are with Jackie and Shadow always and we wrap our arms around them,” Voisard wrote. “Our hearts are also with you eagle fam, we know how you are feeling now."

“Step away from the screen when needed,” she continued in the post. “Try and rest tonight.”

How we got here

Jackie laid the first egg of the season around 4:30 p.m. last Friday and the second egg around 5:10 p.m. Monday as thousands of eager fans watched online.

It was almost exactly a year after the feathered duo welcomed the first egg of the 2025 season.

Bald eagles generally have one clutch per season, according to Friends of Big Bear Valley. A second clutch is possible if the eggs don’t make it through the early incubation process.

For example, Jackie laid a second clutch in February 2021 after the first round of eggs was broken or destroyed by ravens the month before.

Jackie and Shadow may have the left the nest unattended Friday because they knew on some level "that not everything was right," Voisard wrote.

"We are hopeful however, because bald eagles can lay replacement clutches if something happens early enough in the season," she continued. "The fact that the raven came to do its job so quickly may be just what Jackie and Shadow needed."

A raven is believed to have breached both eggs in Big Bear's famous nest.

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Watch the nest

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The Meta researcher’s tone was alarmed.

“oh my gosh yall IG is a drug,” the user experience specialist allegedly wrote to a colleague, referring to the social media platform Instagram. “We’re basically pushers... We are causing Reward Deficit Disorder bc people are binging on IG so much they can’t feel reward anymore.”

The researcher concluded that users’ addiction was “biological and psychological” and that company management was keen to exploit the dynamic. “The top down directives drive it all towards making sure people keep coming back for more,” the researcher added.

The conversation was included recently as part of a long-simmering lawsuit in a California-based federal court. Condensing complaints from hundreds of school districts and state attorneys general, including California’s, the suit alleges that social media companies knew about risks to children and teens but pushed ahead with marketing their products to them, putting profits above kids’ mental health. The suit seeks monetary damages and changes to companies’ business practices.

The suit, and a similar one filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, targets Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap. The cases are exposing embarrassing internal conversations and findings at the companies, particularly Facebook and Instagram owner Meta, further tarnishing their brands in the public eye. They are also testing a particular vector of attack against the platforms, one that targets not so much alarming content as design and marketing decisions that accelerated harms. The upshot, some believe, could be new forms of regulation, including at the federal level.

One document discussed during a hearing this week included a 2016 email from Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s live videos feature. In the email, the Meta chief wrote, “we’ll need to be very good about not notifying parents / teachers” about teens’ videos.

“If we tell teens’ parents about their live videos, that will probably ruin the product from the start,” he wrote, according to the email.

In slides summarizing internal tech company documents, released this week as part of the litigation, an internal YouTube discussion suggested that accounts from minors in violation of YouTube policies were actively on the platform for years, producing content an average of “938 days before detection – giving them plenty of time to create content and continue putting themselves and the platform at risk.”

A spokesperson for Meta didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

A YouTube spokesperson, José Castañeda, described the slide released this week as “a cherry-picked view of a much larger safety framework” and said the company uses more than one tool to detect underage accounts, while taking action every time it finds an underage account.

In court, the companies have argued that they are making editorial decisions permitted by the First Amendment,. That trial is set for June.

The state court litigation moved into jury selection this week, increasing the pressure on social media companies.

While the state and federal cases differ slightly, the core argument is the same: that social media companies deliberately designed their products to hook young people, leading to disastrous but foreseeable consequences.

“It's led to mental health issues, serious anxiety, depression, for many. For some, eating disorders, suicidality,” said Previn Warren, co-lead counsel on the case in federal court. “For the schools, it’s been lost control over the educational environment, inability of teachers to really control their classrooms and teach.”

A federal suit

Meta and other companies have faced backlash for years over their treatment of kids on their platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. Parents, lawmakers and privacy advocates have argued that social media contributed to a mental health crisis among young people and that tech companies failed to act when that fact became clear.

Those allegations gained new scrutiny last month when a brief citing still-sealed documents in the federal suit became public.

While the suit also names TikTok, Snap, and Google as defendants, the filing includes allegations against Meta that are especially detailed.

In the more than 200-page filing, for example, the plaintiffs argue that Meta deliberately misled the public about how damaging their platforms were.

Warren pointed to claims in the brief that Meta researchers found that 55% of Facebook users had “mild” problematic use of the platform, while 3.1 percent had “severe” problems. Zuckerberg, according to the brief, pointed out that 3% of billions would still be millions of people.

But the brief claims the company published research noting only that "we estimate (as an upper bound) that 3.1% of Facebook users in the US experience problematic use.”

“That’s a lie,” Warren said.

In response to recent interest in the suits, Meta published a blog post this month arguing that the litigation “oversimplifies” the issue of youth mental health, and pointed to past instances where it has worked with parents and families with features to protect kids.

The federal case faced a key hearing this week, as the defendants argued that a judge should summarily dismiss the case. A decision on that motion is likely coming in the next few weeks, Warren said.

Social media companies, like other web-based services, receive protection from some legal claims under a part of federal law. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gives legal immunity to website operators for potentially illegal content on their platforms.

Mary Anne Franks, a legal scholar in First Amendment issues at George Washington University who has long studied Section 230, said rather than online content in and of itself, the recent social media cases are focusing on the design of the platforms and their marketing.

“The litigation strategy is saying it's the way that you're providing that space and you're pushing this toward individuals that are vulnerable that is really an issue here,” she said. “It's your own conduct, not somebody else's.”

The companies are making key decisions behind the scenes, she said, and could be held responsible for them.

“You were manipulating things,” she said the plaintiffs are arguing. “You were deliberately making choices about what comes to the top or what is directly accessible or may be tempting to vulnerable users.”

A California state trial begins

Meanwhile, the related state lawsuit went to jury selection this week.

The case, which makes similar claims about personal injury caused by the social media companies, has also drawn nationwide attention, and major industry figures like Zuckerberg are expected to appear on the stand.

The personal injury case focuses on an unnamed plaintiff who claims to have had her mental health damaged by an addiction to social media.

In a last-minute development this week, TikTok and Snap reportedly reached undisclosed settlements in the case. Meta and Google are continuing as defendants.

Franks said these trials could be a tipping point in regulating how tech companies design and market their products. While the companies have faced scrutiny in the past, she said, the glare of examination at trial could be especially bright.

“There's always been talk of it and the members of Congress have kind of said, ‘maybe we'll regulate you,’” she said. “I think now the platforms are really getting nervous about what this is going to mean if they look really bad on the stand.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

On Saturday, Burbank is officially launching a new hiking trail accessibility program for people with disabilities. Two new all-terrain wheelchairs will be available to rent at Stough Canyon Nature Center for use on the fire trail.

The program is the first of its kind in Southern California. Several jurisdictions in the region have beach accessibility programs, but this is the first for mountain trails.

The background

In recent years, Burbank has become a leader in the movement to make sports and the outdoors more accessible to people with disabilities.

Since 2021, the city has launched several adaptive sports programs, including offering wheelchair rugby and fencing, Piper’s Pals youth baseball and basketball, powerchair soccer, boccia and the Burbank Adaptive Sports Expo, which is coming up for its third year running on Feb. 21.

The new equipment

The new all-terrain wheelchairs are the latest in that effort, said Diego Cevallos,  assistant director of the city’s parks and recreation department.

“We are building an ecosystem here in Burbank of robust programming and activities that cater to folks with disabilities,” he said. “Really what we want to do is inspire the community and also our other civic leaders to engage in this movement of making outdoor equity more accessible through programs just like this.”

Burbank is launching its accessibility program with two new all-terrain wheelchairs.

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The city purchased the all-terrain Action Trackchair AXIS 40 wheelchairs — each about $20,000 — exclusively with funds raised by Leadership Burbank. The community-based organization raised about $90,000 for the trail accessibility program. The remaining funds went to the city’s parafencing program and all staff time associated with maintaining these programs comes out of the city’s general fund, Cevallos said.

How the program works

The program is open to anyone with mobility issues in the region, not only Burbank residents.

You can reserve one of the two wheelchairs by going to BurbankParks.com. The process is a bit clunky, but city staff are working to simplify it.

Once reserved, the user will have to bring a non-disabled companion to assist them and a staff member or volunteer with the Nature Center will accompany them on the trail. That docent will provide nature education during the hike and make sure everything is going smoothly and safely.

Right now, the chairs can only be reserved for up to two hours, said recreation services manager Noah Altman, but he said staff welcomes feedback from the public and will consider updating the requirements for the program as needed.

And an important note: Residents with all types of disabilities can use the chairs — it’s not necessary to have mobility in one’s hands. The family member or friend accompanying the user can remotely control the wheelchairs if needed.

Why all-terrain wheelchairs matter

Mobility challenges are the most common type of disability in L.A. County — around half a million Angelenos have some type of ambulatory disability, according to the county’s Aging and Disabilities Department.

But all-terrain wheelchairs cost around $20,000 and weigh around 400 pounds, making them out of reach and impractical for most individuals to own themselves, said Austin Nicassio, a San Dimas resident and founder of Accessible Off-Road, a nonprofit that advocates and is raising funds for more off-road mobility devices.

Nicassio provided consultation early on in the Burbank accessible trail project effort, and is currently working with L.A. County and California State Parks to bring all-terrain wheelchairs to more areas. The nonprofit is raising money to purchase all-terrain wheelchairs for use in those jurisdictions.

“ It's a huge milestone,” Nicassio said of the Burbank program. “It's going to be absolutely life changing for everyone in Southern California.”

For Nicassio, these efforts are deeply personal. Growing up in the eastern San Gabriel Valley, he used to be an avid hiker and mountain biker.

“Five years ago I was completely able-bodied working as an aerospace engineer, mountain biking, hiking, surfing,” Nicassio said. “My body did whatever I wanted it to do, and I always took it for granted.”

Austin Nicassio uses his all-terrain wheelchair at Frank G. Bonelli Regional Park near his home in San Dimas.

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But in 2022, after a mild case of COVID-19, he started experiencing strange symptoms — muscle weakness, severe brain fog. He was later diagnosed with a condition that affects his blood flow and makes it difficult to stand for long periods of time and impossible to do anything too strenuous. He was also diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome.

“I went from being very active to being a wheelchair user,” Nicassio said.

His mental health plummeted — he realized he used to cope with strong emotions by getting out on the trails or in the ocean. When he finally saved up enough to purchase his own off-road wheelchair, it was “life changing.”

“And not just for me, but for my father, for my wife, for my friends, my whole community,” Nicassio said.

He says he wants to see a world where access to such offroad wheelchairs is the norm.

“ No one has told me that their favorite hike or trail's been paved unless you're disabled, and it has to be,” said Nicassio. “Being out on these trails, a couple miles from the noise, from the trash, from the people, it's life changing.”