Week 28 of 2023

Three nuclear energy innovation news!

💡 Three nuclear energy innovation news this week!

☃️ Small modular reactor project developer Kärnfull Next (Sweden) raises a €2m round from Climentum Capital and Sween's Granitor. In March 2022, Kärnfull Next signed a MOU with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy aiming to deploy it's 300MWe water-cooled reactor, the BWRX-300. Both Kind Atom and Fortum have joined the initiative to study the deployment of new nuclear across the nordics.

🏛️ Oklo Inc (US) announces it will go pulic via a merger with Alt Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that was co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The close is expected by early 2024, with a raise of $500m that will be used to ramp up the supply chain and procurement processes and build a pilot scale production facility. The reactor, Aurora, is a 15 MWe to 100 MWe fast reactor.

⛽ A consortium led by Westinghouse Electric Company will develop a secure, fully European nuclear fuel supply for Russian-designed pressurised water reactors (VVERs). The three-year Accelerated Programme for Implementation of Secure VVER Fuel Supply (APIS) is a co-funded by the EU, using €10m from the Euratom Work Programme 2023-2025. There are currently over 30 reactors of VVER-440 and VVER-1000 design operating in the EU and in Ukraine.

🎓 Paper of the week: "Preparation of cellulose@amidoxime by plasma induced grafting technology and its potential application for uranium extraction", Applied Surface Science (2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apsusc.2023.157883

👉 In short: feasibility demonstration of using plasma technology to produce adsorbents that can efficiently extract uranium from seawater.

👇 Did you spot anything else? Let me know!