Week 25 of 2023

Three nuclear energy innovation news!

💡 Three nuclear energy innovation news this week!

🌞 The German Ministry for Education and Research announces draft plans to boost domestic research into development of nuclear fusion. The government ambitions to substantally increase its budget for fusion research. Germany hosts several fusion startups, including Marvel Fusion, Proxima Fusion, and Gauss Fusion.

🚀 The Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (France) starts two feasibility studies on nuclear propulsion for the European Space Agency, jointly with ArianeGroup and Framatome. The objective is to inform a roadmap for the possible development of demonstrators by 2035. Project Alumni investigates a nuclear-thermal propulsion engine. Project RocketRoll focuses on electric nuclear propulsion.

🤖 The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and the Defence and Security Accelerator (UK) co-host a demonstration day for the Remote Monitoring of Sensitive Sites competition. Ten projects were showcased, including the muography technique of Lynkeos Technology to monitor complex structures or the versatile aerial robotic platform of Autonomous Devices.

🎓 Paper of the week: "Properties of the new α -decaying isotope At190", Physical Review C (2023). https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.107.064312

👉 These folks at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) have produced a previously unknown atomic nucleus, 190-Astatine, consisting of 85 protons and 105 neutrons.

👇 Did you spot anything else? Let me know!