Week 16 of 2023

Three nuclear energy innovation news!

💡 Three nuclear energy innovation news this week!

🧂 Terrestrial Energy (Canada) completes pre-licensing review with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission – Commission canadienne de sûreté nucléaire for its Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR). The completes the second phase of the vendor design review, which started in May 2018 while the first phase had started in February 2016. No fundamental barriers were identified - onwards to licensing.

⚛️ Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (US) succesfully apply a new methodology to purify berkelium-249, one of the heavy metal elements that makes up the bulk of long-lived waste. In addition to being quicker and simpler, this method also allowed them to reach historically high radiochemical purity of the finished product - 97.25% instead of 93.9%.

👩‍🎓 Westinghouse Electric Company (US), engineering firm Tecnatom (Spain) and training services provider Accelerant Solutions (US) join forces to form a nuclear training programme for utilities in the USA and Canada. The programme, called the Nuclear Excellence Academy (NEXA), will leverage on cutting-edge tools including VR/AR, adaptive learning, gamification, and AI.

🎓 Paper of the week: "Evidence of Antineutrinos from Distant Reactors Using Pure Water at SNO+", Physical Review Letters (2023), https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.091801